7 To Be Hybrid Anticipates the Future: Multiracial and Multiethnic Community and Activism

Abstract

7 To Be Hybrid Anticipates the FutureMultiracial and Multiethnic Community and Activism Lily Anne Welty Tamai (bio) Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) wrote in his application for the Guggenheim Fellowship that he received in 1927, "My father … has long been known as an interpreter of the East to the West, through poetry. I wish to do the same with sculpture."1 Nearly eighty years later, a fourth-generation Japanese American mixed-race writer, Akemi Johnson, reflected upon her family's mixed-race identity: "By my generation, Yonsei, the climate was safe enough for me to examine that learned shame and reclaim some of our lost cultural identity. It's a multigenerational, cyclical story that seems classically American."2 Throughout the twentieth century, but to a greater extent, since the late 1970s and early 1980s, multiracial and multiethnic AAPI scholars, activists, artists, and writers like Noguchi and Johnson carved out a space for themselves inside and outside the academy to research and to legitimize the mixed-race community. Humanities, the social sciences, and fields within ethnic studies, specifically Asian American studies and African American studies, largely became the intellectual home for mixed-race scholars and scholarship. Organizations like the Multiracial Americans of Southern California, founded in 1986, and Hapa Issues Forum, founded in 1992 at UC Berkeley, began in the early days of the multiracial movement, addressing the needs of the community on the West Coast.3 Later, community organizations like Loving Day in New York City, launched in 2004, and MidWest Mixed, founded in Minneapolis in 2014, [End Page 229] helped to reach out to diverse communities in different geographies.4 Even in Vancouver, Canada, Hapa-palooza, founded in 2011, hosted events and raised awareness around diverse and mixed-race issues.5 Scholars of Asian American studies presented countless papers on research pertaining to multiracial and multiethnic AAPIs at the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conferences over the years, and a multiracial caucus group meets regularly at the annual meeting. In 2010, the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association (CMRS) formed, and in 2014, founded the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies to broaden the dialogue to focus on the needs of the growing scholarship about the multiracial and multiethnic community.6 Both AAAS and CMRS provided the space and support for multiracial and multiethnic representation and legitimacy in the academy, yet mixed-race people, their presence in the community, and their activism existed long before the formation of these organizations. At the beginnings of Asian America, the mixed-race AAPI community was a part of Hawai`i and the United States, doing this work all along.7 Even with the social stigma associated with interracial marriage and multiraciality, people like Edith Maude Eaton inserted mixed-race themes into their writing, and Isamu Noguchi made art that reflected their multiplicity. This essay examines how multiracial activists, writers, and artists consistently created work to make a place for themselves and at times demanded inclusion into the AAPI community and the national fabric before and after Asian American became a collective political identity. I argue that mixed-race history is Asian American history. Despite mixed-race people's presence in these spaces, monoracial communities continue to racialize mixed-race members as outsiders, as conditional members of the broader AAPI community, or even as a new hybrid race. I discuss some of the issues of importance for multiracial and multiethnic people within Asian American studies, including the politics of intermarriage, blood quantum, decentering whiteness, health, religion, and adoption. Multiracial AAPIs have been a part of the AAPI community since the first generations of families formed in the United States, and today are a part of each AAPI ethnic subgroup. Multiracial Americans are one of the fastest growing populations within the Asian American Pacific Islander community.8 According to the US Census, between 2000 and 2010, the numbers of White and Black multiracial persons doubled, while the number of multiracial White-Asian Americans increased by 87 percent. If current rates of population growth continue, census data predict that by 2030 the Japanese American subgroup will be a majority multiracial.9 It is projected that by 2040, nearly 55 percent of the subgroup Native Hawaiian...