{"id":38385,"date":"2014-11-17T19:25:30","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T19:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38385"},"modified":"2017-03-05T22:18:34","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T22:18:34","slug":"how-far-have-we-come-in-our-acceptance-of-mixed-race-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38385","title":{"rendered":"How far have we come in our acceptance of mixed race people?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How far have we come in our acceptance of mixed race people?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Special Broadcasting Service<\/a> (SBS)
\nCrows Nest, New South Wales, Australia
\n2014-11-14<\/p>\n

Lin Taylor<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

What was once a shameful taboo with a deep, dark racist history is now the face of the modern world. But how far have we really come in our acceptance of mixed race people?<\/em><\/p>\n

Estelle Griepink is not a celebrity.<\/p>\n

But more often than not, the 22-year-old will get stopped on the streets of Indonesia<\/a> and Malaysia<\/a>, with passers-by eager to take her photo.<\/p>\n

\u201cI lived in Indonesia for a couple of months and I was stopped by people who wanted to take photos of me \u2013 and with me \u2013 quite frequently,\u201d she said. \u201cIt’s happened in Malaysia, where my family lives, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her appeal? The fact that she is half Malaysian and half Dutch.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know this happens to people who are white too – blonde hair, blue eyes – but I felt there was something kind of creepy doing it to me as they would go on about how amazing it was that I was half Asian, half white.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day my ethnicity is completely out of my control, so I hardly think it is something to be congratulated on or celebrated for\u2026 like you’re a collector\u2019s item.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with their mysterious, racially ambiguous \u2018look\u2019 and exotic heritage, it\u2019s not hard to see why mixed race people like Griepink are so in demand…<\/p>\n

…Racial hierarchy, racism and the \u2018one-drop rule\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr Julie Matthews<\/a>, an educator and sociologist at the University of Adelaide, believed the sexualisation and preference for mixed race people is inherently racist.<\/p>\n

“We\u2019ve sexualised or pornographied mixed race. It\u2019s a very narrow line between exoticisation and sexualisation, fetishisms – where you turn all non-white people into people who exist simply into your own pleasure.”<\/p>\n

She said that a person who is half white is more \u201cpalatable\u201d and acceptable in society \u2013 an idea, she believed, is steeped in racism and prevalent since colonisation.<\/p>\n

\u201cColonialism has circulated the idea that white is best. White is at the top of a kind of hierarchy of humanity\u2026 If you believe there is a hierarchy of races, which is what racism is about, a little bit of white is more palatable,\u201d said Dr Matthews, 58, who is half Japanese and half English.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can get rid of the fear, and horror and the anger of race by adding a bit of whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n

A pertinent example of this was the treatment of half-Aboriginal children and the Stolen Generation<\/a>. Between the late 1800s and the 1970s, the Australian government forcibly removed Aboriginal children with a white parent from their community, placing them in non-Indigenous foster homes or state-run institutions. It was hoped that mixed race children would ‘assimiliate’ into white Australian society and cut ties with their black ancestry.<\/p>\n

Sociologist Professor Reginald Daniel<\/a> from the University of California added that across all racial groups, blackness is the one identity that is the most complicated.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to blackness, there is one frontier that is the most complicated,\u201d he told SBS. \u201cThere is no ambiguity about who\u2019s black no matter what you look like, no matter what your ancestry because of the \u2018one drop rule\u2019 way back to, at least informally, in slavery, and then formally in law.\u201d<\/p>\n

A term mainly used in the US, the one-drop rule<\/a> is the idea that even \u2018one drop\u2019 of blackness in your ancestry precludes you from being truly white, and therefore \u2018lower\u2019 on the racial hierarchy (with whiteness being at the top of the scale).<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a time when [an interracial] couple would have been \u2013 in parts of the United States \u2013 lynched by the [Ku Klux] Klan<\/a>. Those kinds of attitudes had very serious consequences in terms of physical harm. And that does still happen. There are numerous hate crimes directed at interracial couples and mixed race people. And that pattern has not gone. It\u2019s a reflection of that deep long racist history,\u201d said Professor Daniel, whose own multiracial identity includes African, European, Asian, Arab, and Native American origins.<\/p>\n