{"id":12276,"date":"2011-02-24T03:13:10","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T03:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12276"},"modified":"2011-02-24T03:14:21","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T03:14:21","slug":"multiracial-border-crosser-stephen-murphy-shigematsu-navigates-nations-cultures-and-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12276","title":{"rendered":"Multiracial: Border Crosser: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu navigates nations, cultures and academia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nichibei.org\/2010\/05\/multiracial-border-crosser-stephen-murphy-shigematsu-navigates-nations-cultures-and-academia\/\" target=\"_blank\">Multiracial: Border Crosser: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu navigates nations, cultures and academia<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nichibei.org\" target=\"_blank\">Nichi Bei<\/a>: A mixed plate of Japanses American News &amp; Culture<br \/>\n2010-05-20<\/p>\n<p><strong>Akemi Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.multiculturalleadership.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu<\/a> is looking again toward Japan.<\/p>\n<p>A psychotherapist, writer and academic, Murphy-Shigematsu has lived in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Palo_Alto,_California\" target=\"_blank\">Palo Alto, Calif.<\/a> the past eight years, teaching at Stanford University and running an independent multicultural consulting practice. Life in the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/San_Francisco_Bay_Area\" target=\"_blank\">Bay Area<\/a>, he says, is easy for someone like him, the son of an Irish American man and Japanese woman. Conflict\u2014tensions associated with being mixed race\u2014is rare.<\/p>\n<p>This wasn\u2019t always the case. Early in his career, Murphy-Shigematsu, who was born in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tokyo\" target=\"_blank\">Tokyo<\/a> in 1952 and raised in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Massachusetts\" target=\"_blank\">Massachusetts<\/a>, faced questions about his legitimacy working in Asian American studies. In 1984 he began an internship at the National Asian American Psychology Training Center. One of the first people who welcomed him there said, \u201cSo, you\u2019re interested in working with Asian Americans?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat really threw me,\u201d Murphy-Shigematsu said. The other man saw him as an outsider to the workshop, whereas Murphy-Shigematsu viewed himself as an insider, a fellow Asian American.<\/p>\n<p>Or there was the time in the late \u201980s when Murphy-Shigematsu spoke to an Asian American studies class at San Francisco State University.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAre you Asian?\u201d the students asked.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhy do you ask?\u201d Murphy-Shigematsu replied.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBecause you don\u2019t look Asian,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n<p>At academic conferences, Murphy-Shigematsu would stand out physically, and some people would regard him with an attitude of \u201cWhy are you here?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>An influential figure for Murphy-Shigematsu during that time was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aasc.ucla.edu\/people\/lhirabayashi.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Lane Hirabayashi<\/a>. Hirabayashi, a noted mixed-race Japanese American scholar, had advocated using the word \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=329\" target=\"_blank\">hapa<\/a>,\u201d and claiming the right to self-define, instead of being labeled by well-intentioned others. Impressed with this, Murphy-Shigematsu sought out Hirabayashi&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nichibei.org\/2010\/05\/multiracial-border-crosser-stephen-murphy-shigematsu-navigates-nations-cultures-and-academia\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Multiracial: Border Crosser: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu navigates nations, cultures and academia Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanses American News &amp; Culture 2010-05-20 Akemi Johnson Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu is looking again toward Japan. A psychotherapist, writer and academic, Murphy-Shigematsu has lived in Palo Alto, Calif. the past eight years, teaching at Stanford University and running an independent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,1245,125,8,20],"tags":[5519,5516,5517,5518,5515,4286,512],"class_list":["post-12276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-biography","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-akemi-johnson","tag-lane-hirabayashi","tag-lane-r-hirabayashi","tag-lane-ryo-hirabayashi","tag-nichi-bei","tag-stephen-l-murphy-shigematsu","tag-stephen-murphy-shigematsu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}