{"id":58408,"date":"2019-06-25T01:40:39","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T01:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58408"},"modified":"2019-07-11T17:59:11","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T17:59:11","slug":"interracial-marriages-among-asian-americans-in-the-u-s-west-1880-1954","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58408","title":{"rendered":"Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

University of Florida
\n2011
\n257 pages<\/p>\n

Eunhye Kwon<\/strong><\/p>\n

A dissertation presented to the graduate school of the University of Florida in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy<\/em><\/p>\n

My work is about the first two generations of Chinese and Japanese Americans who married whites in the U.S. West<\/a> between 1880 and 1954. It was a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most of the states. From two major archival sources\u2014the Survey of Race Relations, 1924\u20131927<\/a>, and records about Japanese American internees<\/a> during World War II<\/a>\u2014, my work finds that more than two hundred Chinese and Japanese Americans and their white spouses could circumvent miscegenation laws and lived as legally married couples in the U.S. West before the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Existing scholarship on the history of miscegenation laws has revealed the role of the laws in making racial categories and stigmatizing interracial intimacy between non-white men and white women. My work shows that marriages between white women and Chinese and\/or Japanese men were major targets of racist and misogynist assumptions about interracial intimacy in the U.S. West. Such marriages were further marginalized by federal government\u2019s policies on Asian exclusion and on the mixed marriage families during the World War II internment of Japanese Americans<\/a>. Government policies upheld a white male citizen\u2019s ability to assimilate his Asian wife and his patriarchal prerogative to his interracial family. The same government policies persistently denied the claims of white women married to Chinese and\/or Japanese men that they, as wives and mothers, were assimilating agents in their interracial families.<\/p>\n

My work uncovers the history of a small but significant number of interracial couples consisting of Chinese and\/or Japanese husbands and white wives, who argued against the negative construction of their interracial marriages. My work also notes the emergence of a cultural pluralist defense of interracial marriage between non-white men and white women by progressive intellectuals such as Franz Boas<\/a>, W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a>, Sidney Gulick<\/a>, and Robert Park<\/a> in the early twentieth century. White women married to Chinese and\/or Japanese men claimed that their interracial families were legitimate American families decades before postwar American liberals began to openly support interracial marriage.<\/p>\n

Read the entire dissertation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My work is about the first two generations of Chinese and Japanese Americans who married whites in the U.S. West between 1880 and 1954.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,838,459,8,26,20],"tags":[29963,1408,824,1828,29964,5729,122],"class_list":["post-58408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-dissertations","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-eunhye-kwon","tag-franz-boas","tag-robert-e-park","tag-robert-park","tag-sidney-gulick","tag-university-of-florida","tag-w-e-b-du-bois"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58408","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=58408"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58463,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58408\/revisions\/58463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}