Mixed-race Children Research Articles

Melodramatizing racialized Korea: the impasse of Black representation in Itaewon Class

ABSTRACT This article examines how Itaewon Class (Itaewon Keullasseu, JTBC, 2020) employs melodrama as a mode to recognize racial injury in the form of cathartic pathos on the character of Toni. This representational strategy renders Toni’s Blackness less legible to construct the series as quality, diverse, and progressive while failing to tackle the cultural specificity of the Black Korean experience. Despite the growing visibility of Black entertainers and the use of Blackface in Korean popular culture, which have been the subject of controversy and scrutiny, there is a dearth of scholarship that analyses the representation of Blackness in contemporary Korean media. Drawing on industrial and textual analysis, this article explores how the illegibility of Toni’s Blackness is used to obfuscate dominant representations of Blacks in the past with ties to U.S. military occupation. The cultural specificity and legibility of Blackness as a signifier of racial difference is disguised under the exploited melodramatic narrative of mixed-race children’s search for their biological father. The article also argues that Itaewon Class aims to obscure antiblackness embedded firmly in Korea’s racialized past involving Black Korean children, while calling forth racial incidents and Black victimization to envision a new modern Korea.

8 More Than an Outcome of War: Adoptions from Asia to the United States

8 More Than an Outcome of WarAdoptions from Asia to the United States Kimberly D. McKee (bio) When adoptions from Asia to the United States began in earnest in the mid twentieth century, it's doubtful that the primarily white adoptive parents caring for children from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea saw themselves or their children as part of a broader immigration movement or as part of the growing Asian American population in the United States. Transnational adoptions operated outside of restrictive and racist immigration laws, allowing families to bypass immigration quotas as they brought home "their" children. Adoption agencies also instructed adoptive parents to "raise them as their very own" and, in cases of adoptions from Asia, underscored the assimilability of Asian children into white American families. These early adoptions paved the way toward reshaping the category of Asian American in similar yet distinct ways like mixed-race and mixed-ethnic Asian American families, even if adoptive parents of monoracial and mixed-race Asian children did not see themselves as raising Asian American children. To trace the earliest adoptions of Asian children, scholars often point to the first wave of Korean War orphans as laying the groundwork for not only South Korea's more than seven-decade-long participation in international adoption, but also establishing the transnational adoption of Asian children to the United States. Yet, Chinese children from Hong Kong also entered the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and preceding those adoptions were adoptions [End Page 247] of mixed-race Filipino children following the Spanish American War and mixedrace Japanese children following the Second World War.1 The history of Asian adoption thus tells the story of US militarism. It is woven into US empire and expansion, as US servicemen play a seminal role in transnational adoptions of mixed-race children. Adoption cannot, however, be seen only as an artifact of the past, not only because adoptions from Asia persist in the twenty-first century. Rather, the lingering effects of adoption tell a profoundly Asian American story. Catherine Ceniza Choy notes, "In Asian American studies, the word 'adoption' is increasingly significant for elucidating the breadth and depth of Asian American demographics, cultural expression, contemporary issues, and history."2 The interdiscipline must attend to the ways adoption indelibly shapes Asian American communities and histories of belonging, citizenship, and kinship. Korean adoptees were one of the largest immigration streams of Koreans to the United States in the mid twentieth century. In the mid-1990s, adoptions from China surpassed those from South Korea, and the mass movement of Vietnamese children as part of Operation Babylift in 1975 remains one of the more notable transfers of children to the United States in modern history.3 While these three countries are not the only nations sending Asian children for adoption, adoptees from Korea, China, and Vietnam are overrepresented in memoirs, documentaries, and scholarship on Asian adoption due to markedly lower rates of adoption from other Asian nations. When examining Asian adoptions, broadly, in the last two decades (1999–2019), adoptions from Asia represent 49 percent of all US international adoptions, with Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese adoptees representing 80.5 percent of adoptions from Asia.4 The shift from the adoption of mixed-race Asian children to monoracial Asian children in the early and mid twentieth century illustrates the intersections of adoption and capitalism. The markets of adoption injected much needed monies into national economies, while simultaneously alleviating the state from providing social welfare supports to support low-income, working-class families and single mothers. These adoptions also reflected the tiered nature of adoption economies, whereby Asian children were sought-after due to their "honorary white" status and assumptions about assimilability into American society, as well as the way antiblackness shaped adoptive parents' investments in certain children of color over others.5 In creating new family formations, these transracial, transnational families upended notions of family as predicated not only on genetic relatedness, but also race- and religion-matching as seen in previous iterations of domestic adoptions.6 These Asian adoptees thus found themselves negotiating what it meant to be Asian (American) in non-Asian families, as most of these adoptions...

Mothering ‘Outsider’ Children: White Women in Black/White Interracial Families in Ireland

The mixed-race family constellation has emerged as a regular feature of the Irish familial landscape. Such a demographic change invariably leads to the increased presence of white women who are mothering across racialised boundaries. Moreover, in the Irish context, the racial category of whiteness is privileged at a structural level and remains a central organising principle of Irishness as a mode of national belonging. This paper, therefore, sets out to address the specific gap in the literature related to the racialised experiences of the white mother of mixed-race (i.e., black African/white Irish) children in contemporary Ireland as these women are, in effect, mothering ‘outsider’ children in a context of white supremacy. More specifically, how does the positioning of these women’s mixed-race children impact their subjectivities as mothers categorised normatively as white and Irish? Framed by critical whiteness literature, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with twelve white Irish mothers. Data analysis broadly revealed three themes as relates to the women’s negotiations of the racialising discourses and practices which impact their family units. Findings suggest that these women no longer occupy the default position of whiteness as a category of racial privilege and a condition of ‘structured invisibility’. Perhaps, most significantly, the lived reality of these women disturbs the hegemonic conflation of the categories white and Irish. This paper, therefore, extends our theoretical understanding of both whiteness and mixed-race studies.

Gender, Race, and Fortunes in the East India Company's 'Familial Proto-State': The Evidence of Scottish Wills and Testaments, c.1740-c.1820

The family unit has become an important lens for investigating the social, gendered, and racial dimensions of early British imperialism in Asia. Using evidence derived from wills and testaments registered by Scots at the English East India Company’s settlements between 1740 and 1820, this article explores how colonial wealth was redistributed. In doing so it reconsiders how families and kinship acted as both a transhemispheric connection between Europe and the Indian Ocean World and a disruptor of social, gendered, and racial dynamics.
 It queries arguments that family boundaries could be porous enough to incorporate mixed-race children resulting from relationships between Europeans and local women. Analysis of overall patterns of wealth allocation, rather than individual family case studies, reveals a clear tendency to separate or ‘silo’ such children. Offspring born to local women received far less than family back in Scotland and were usually left in the place of their birth. Families in Scotland stressed a political economy of profit remittance and discouraged the creation of new obligations to children and local women. Considerable sums were instead allocated to female relatives. One result of the policing of extended family boundaries was a heightening in pre-1820s Scottish society of colour consciousness and racialised notions of identity. In this way, the Indian Ocean World, just as surely as better-known processes such as the Atlantic slave trade, contributed a practical and immediate set of imperatives driving new concepts of race and racialisation in Enlightenment era Scotland.

Championing Empathy, Kindness, and Justice: A Tribute to Cynthia Leitich Smith

Championing Empathy, Kindness, and JusticeA Tribute to Cynthia Leitich Smith Monica Brown (bio) Monica Brown served on the jury that chose the 2021 NSK Prize winner and successfully championed Cynthia Leitich Smith as her nominee. On the final day of the 2021 Neustadt Lit Fest, she delivered the following tribute. When invited to serve as a judge and nominator for the NSK Neustadt Prize, I was, for a moment, overwhelmed. As a part of the children’s literature world, I knew many wonderfully talented writers deserving of recognition. Then, I paused. This prize celebrates children’s literature that contributes to the quality of children’s lives. Cynthia Leitich Smith immediately came to mind. If you feel, as I do, that literature has an impact on our world, that art has work to do in our hurting world, then you know I wanted to celebrate a writer who had not only written wonderful books but one who had also impacted the entire field of children’s literature, a literary and literacy activist, if you will. A champion of empathy, kindness, and justice. Cynthia Leitich Smith immediately came to mind. Cynthia is a brilliant writer, as anyone who has read her work, especially her most recent, most transcendent novel, Sisters of the Neversea, can attest. Yet she, in that way of great and generous humans, has made it her life’s work to empower others. The late, great Toni Morrison once said, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” Cynthia empowers the diverse children who read her many books, and she empowers new and emerging voices in our vast—yet not so diverse—field of children’s literature and publishing. I was once such a voice. The mestiza daughter of a North American father and a Peruvian immigrant, I was an avid reader as a child, yet there were no books that represented my lived experiences, nor my family’s. I became a journalist, a mother, an educator, a scholar, and again reflected on the fact that there were few books reflecting beautiful, bilingual, bicultural families like my own. In fact, mixed-race children were and are still being described as fractions—half this, a quarter that, a concept I reject, as I believe all children contain multitudes, that they are whole in the multiplicity of their identities, and need not fit—or be forced into—boxes. Once again, I found wisdom in the words of Toni Morrison. She said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” So that’s what I did. I wrote Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match / Marisol McDonald no combina, now celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. I’ve authored many books for young readers, but I mention this early book because Marisol had such difficulty finding a publisher. The book was eventually published by Children’s Book Press, now an imprint of Lee and Low. Click for larger view View full resolution PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER T. ASSAF I wondered, how could I support this little, oft-rejected book? And how might I help it find an audience and launch it out into the world? I turned to community. Luckily, the Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American networks of writers are generous. Mostly, we root for one another with open hearts. Someone suggested that I approach Cynthia Leitich Smith, who, already a visionary, was supporting diverse [End Page 37] writers and collecting resources for her website and blog Cynsations: Reflections and Conversations about the World of Books for Young Readers. She invited me to write a guest post and mentored me through the process. On the way, I learned more about marketing, promotion, and writing about my work. And I am only one of many who feel this way about Cynthia’s mentoring and generosity. I’d like to share Don Tate’s words. He the author/illustrator of William Still and His Freedom Stories...

White Women Mothering Mixed-Race Children in a Black-White Interracial Relationship

It is over five decades since ‘River of Blood,’ the speech about race in Britain, has been acknowledged as the symbol of discrimination towards immigration and minorities like Black British. Meanwhile, America, as another traditional western cultural center, has faced more serious issues during the process of human equality. Loving. V. Virginia, as a legal milestone of Civil Rights in the US, has influenced the public attitude of the majority towards interracial union; however, the discrimination and prejudice have become more invisible via the changing of societal environment. Although the anti-miscegenation movement has been treated as the big step of human rights, the union between black and white faces misunderstanding, even stigmas in their daily lives. Hence, taking black-white interracial relationships as examples, from white women’s perspective, this essay will examine the dilemma between their own cognition of cultural identities and being partially embedded into a different culture when ‘marrying-out’ and raising mixed-race children.

Black-white mixed race young people in Ireland and their lived experiences of racialised exclusion

The multiracial family and the existence of mixed race children have come to be a regular feature of Irish familial life. Yet, nation-building discourses have promulgated notions of ethnic and religious homogeneity with Irish identity being racialised exclusively as white. Moreover, to date, there has been a dearth of academic scholarship related to racial mixedness in the Irish context. Through in-depth interviews, this paper sets out, therefore, to provide empirical insight into the lives of fifteen black (African) – white (Irish) mixed race young people (aged 4 to 18) with a particular focus on their experiences of racialised exclusion. Indeed, findings suggest that, as in other majority white national contexts, the black-white mixed race young people are racialised as black in the Irish public domain and as such, are positioned as ‘racialised outsiders’. In fact, their narrative accounts shed light on everyday encounters saturated by ‘us-them’ racial constructs based on phenotype. Thus, these young people, who are not fully recognised as mixed race Irish citizens, are effectively deprived of a space in which to articulate their belonging within the existing statist (i.e. inside/outside) framework.

Accessibility to education services amongst mixed race children from Taiwanese-Vietnamese and Korean-Vietnamese marriages (Case study in Hau Giang province)

To explain transnational marriage between Vietnamese brides and Taiwanese, Korean grooms. The author will figure out and discuss some issues related to this type of marriage such as divorce and one of concerning issues that Vietnamese-Taiwanese and Korean-Vietnamese children have been existing in Vietnam as ‘being abandoned’ phenomenon of transitional migration in the context of globalization. This research aims to gain an insight into accessibility to education services amongst Taiwanese-Vietnamese and Korean-Vietnamese children living with their mother and maternal family/relatives in Hau Giang by applying sociological approaches, thus to explain a modern social phenomenon emerging in the process of development and integration of Vietnam. Research subject: Accessibility to s amongst Vietnamese-Taiwanese and Vietnamese-Korean children in Hau Giang. Research objects: Mixed race children nursed/ care taken by their mother or maternal parents/relatives.

Identity Negotiation and Segregated Integration of African-Chinese Mixed-race Children in Guangzhou, China

ABSTRACT This article examines the lives of African-Chinese mixed-race children in Guangzhou, China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city, the article explores the negotiation of identity and belonging of these children of mixed African and Chinese heritage. Occupying a third space between two or more ethnicities and cultures, mixed African-Chinese children often develop a sense of double consciousness and hybrid identities in response to the Chinese gaze, which denies their Chineseness. The fluidity and hybridity in their identification may facilitate their integration into Chinese society by assisting them in gaining acceptance in different social spaces, such as churches, neighborhoods, and schools, but the structural marginalization they are subject to as liminal people separates them from the mainstream social groups, producing their segregated integration.

Kalimpong Kids: The New Zealand story, in pictures

Kalimpong Kids is a rare book. Written by historian, Jane McCabe, this book recounts the history of a scheme which managed the emigration of mixed-race children from Kalimpong and North-Eastern India to New Zealand. The scheme, which began in 1908 at the insistence of Dr John Anderson Graham, went on till 1939, the view across this time being that ‘mixed-race people ... were “undesirable”’. The plan, however, did not go on continuously and was halted from 1929-1938 due to numerous governmental and geo-political reasons. The Anglo-Indian children were shifted from St. Andrews Colonial Homes which was later renamed into Dr Graham’s Homes. The first two graduates who found their way to Dunedin were Leonard and Sydney Williams. Although Dr Graham’s initial wish was to settle these children across the British Empire, New Zealand proved to be the only country where the Kalimpong Kids could settle down.

아메라시안(Amerasian)의 존재 양태와 국제입양(1945~1975) - 베트남-미국 혼혈아를 중심으로 -

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between Amerasians and international adoption from World War II to the Vietnam War. The paper focuses on the Vietnam-U.S. mixed-race children while looking at the whole picture of Amerasians who had born in Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. The conclusion of the paper is that no matter what the dictionary, conventional or scholarly definition, Amerasians were socially an orphans to the country of birth and were destined to be the subject of international adoption during the Cold War.<BR> The paper consists of four chapters. Following the introduction, chapter 2 examines the origins, population, and characteristics of Amerasians in the Philippines, Japan, Thailand, and Korea. Chapter 3 focused on the Vietnamese Amerasian and examined its scale and living conditions in detail. Chapter 4 traces the relationship between Japanese and Korean Amerasians and international adoption, focusing on Pearl Buck, the Welcome House/Pearl Buck Foundation, and Holt and Holt International Children’s Services, representing the first and second phases of international adoption. Chapter 5 analyzes the activities of Rosemary Taylor and Friends of Children of Vietnam, which shifted the focus back to Vietnam and brought about the third phase of international adoption. It also reveals that the unprecedented Babylift Operation in 1975, which airlifted 3,000 ‘war orphans’ from Vietnam, corresponded to actually a full-fledged and one-sided international adoption operation.

Racial Pairings and Fertility: Do Interracial Couples Have Fewer Children?

Our overall goal is largely descriptive-to compare recent fertility patterns between racially endogamous and exogamous couples in the United States. Evidence of lower fertility among exogamous or interracial couples arguably provides indirect evidence of social distance and cultural and economic integration. The growth of interracial marriage and cohabitation has fueled the rise in biracial or mixed-race children. Fertility rates are uneven among racial and ethnic groups, seemingly rooted in stigma and cultural differences (e.g., fertility norms). Whether fertility is different among interracial couples is unclear: Fertility rates that largely conform to the population of racially endogamous White couples provide evidence of social integration whereas differential fertility may reveal gender dynamics in fertility decision-making, including power relationships that depend on the race of male and female partners. We pool data from the 2008 to 2017 American Community Survey to compare past-year fertility patterns among endogamously and interracially married and cohabiting couples. Fertility is generally lower among racially exogamous than endogamous unions, especially among Asian American-White couples. Fertility among American Indian-White couples is much closer to patterns of White couples than of American Indian couples. Fertility among other interracial couples nevertheless varies by the race of male partners. That is, fertility of the Black male/White female and the Hispanic male/White female couples is similar to patterns found among endogamous Black and Hispanic couples, respectively. The White male/Black female and the White male/Hispanic female couples follow the fertility patterns of White couples. In general, the fertility levels of interracial couples are intermediate between those of endogamous White couples and their endogamous Black, Hispanic, or American Indian counterparts, but vary significantly by the race-gender mix of partners.

Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century by Libra R. Hilde

Reviewed by: Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century by Libra R. Hilde John Patrick Riley (bio) Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century. By Libra R. Hilde. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 400. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $37.50.) Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty explores the myriad obstacles that faced enslaved Black family men in the U.S. South, with the main goal of countering "the enduring stereotypes of black men's irresponsibility within the family" (3). Libra Hilde draws on primarily Black sources, notably the Federal Writers' Project interviews and autobiographies. She is particularly interested in finding the importance that Black families placed on the fatherly role; despite slavery's denial of Black masculinity, [End Page 568] the constraints on material provisioning, and rejection of parental authority, Black "men, and their children, invested fathers and fatherhood with consequence" (11). In demonstrating this, Hilde succeeds wonderfully. She aptly reveals the tremendous importance and high expectations enslaved children placed on their fathers, even when living separately on other plantations. Hilde's work builds on recent trends in the history of the enslaved family by moving away from the matrifocality so central in post-Moynihan historiography, toward one where Black men belong at the center of the family unit, even if distance and the constraints of slavery kept them on the physical periphery. Crucially, it does this without returning to the nuclear household thesis of Genovese or diminishing the important role played by enslaved mothers. Hilde's analysis expands on Edward Baptiste's characterization of enslaved men in the role of caretaker. Providing for one's children, both spiritually and materially, represented resistance as well as emotional investment. The heart of Hilde's monograph is her first four chapters, which focus on the obstacles slave society placed before Black fathers and how enslaved men overcame them. The distance inherent in cross-plantation marriages, white interference in family discipline, and difficulty providing food or clothing all combined to test Black fatherhood. But as Hilde correctly points out, these men were not passive in response. Interviews with formerly enslaved people revealed that they held fondness for caretakers—for men who provided a sense of stability and enmeshed themselves in larger fictive kin networks. Pride in a father's accomplishments was common, whether celebrating prowess at fishing or hunting, the skill of his trade, or even his ability to evade patrollers and move unnoticed between plantations. Through a host of actions both subtle and obvious, Black men left an indelible impression on their children and grandchildren. Hilde divides direct fatherly support into three categories: material, ideological, and cultural provisioning. Providing children with extra food or homemade clothes, or using earned money to purchase candy and treats, fit the antebellum role of father as provider. Hilde expands her argument by demonstrating the ways fathers prepared children for the harsh realities of enslaved life through important lessons and oral traditions, a role typically reserved for mothers in much of the literature on slave families. Hilde fails to explore the ways in which enslaved men sought to train their children, especially sons, in a skilled trade or to covertly help them acquire literacy skills. A trade such as blacksmithing or the ability to read and write would do much to improve a child's quality of life, enabling opportunities to earn additional money and afterward provide for their own children. [End Page 569] While Hilde does emphasize the importance that freedmen placed on education for children postwar, she misses an opportunity to demonstrate continuity with fatherhood behaviors during slavery. Hilde breaks important ground with her fifth chapter, which moves away from Black men as fathers to examining attitudes and recollections toward white fathers and children of mixed race. Black fathers' treatment of children born of liaisons with and sexual assault of enslaved women ran the gamut from preferential treatment to extra punishment or cold indifference. With its emphasis on white parentage, it is at once an important yet odd chapter in a volume so focused on showcasing Black fatherhood. Similarly, chapter 6 delves into enslaved mothers' expectations of white...

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania by Maile Arvin

Reviewed by: Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania by Maile Arvin Xine Yao (bio) Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania, by Maile Arvin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Xi + 313 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0633-6. Maile Arvin’s Possessing Polynesians was prominently displayed alongside other works by Native Hawaiian scholars at the 2019 American Studies Association conference in Honolulu, Hawai’i. The conference included the celebration of legendary activist-scholar Haunani-Kay Trask, who received the Angela Y. Davis Prize, as well as panels featuring the kia’i (guardians) defending Mauna Kea against the threat of the Thirty Meter Telescope. The American Studies Association is another home to many fields of critical race and ethnic studies, Asian American studies included. I wondered about Asian Americanists and Asian diasporic scholars who might attend but not deign to go to any of the events centering Native Hawaiians. On the one hand, there are Asian settlers, like Candace Fujikane and Dean Saranillio, committed to working in coalition with Kānaka Maoli and Indigenous Pacific Islanders. On the other hand, what of those of us content not to engage settler colonialism and Indigeneity, content to be tourists or interpellated as “locals” (which Fujikane and Trask decry as a settler colonial ruse)—and content to unquestioningly use the category of “Asian American Pacific Islander”? Possessing Polynesians argues powerfully about the ways Polynesia and Polynesian peoples are claimed as contingently white, tracking the unsettled convergences of processes of racialization and imperial and colonial regimes writ large. Native Hawaiian feminist Maile Arvin’s monograph, like David Chang’s acclaimed The World and All the Things Upon It before it, foregrounds Hawai’i to reorient understandings of global modernity in contrast to the islands’ settler colonial image as an exotic, escapist fantasy. Using an Indigenous feminist methodology that engages an archive ranging from over two centuries of science to contemporary art, Arvin interrogates the construction of Polynesia and Polynesian peoples: feminized as the possessions of white [End Page 337] settler colonialism, structured by antiblackness, and with its Indigeneity further dispossessed by a “postracial” multiracialism that privileges Asianness. She writes, “The relation between the logics of possession through whiteness and antiblackness, and between anti-indigeneity and anti-immigration, is not merely one of analogy or comparison, even as they are distinct logics; rather, they are inextricable.” Sometimes these discourses have been leveraged by Native Hawaiians for self-determination—at the expense of other Kānaka Maoli and Pacific Islanders, thus enabling a settler colonial haunting within ostensible projects of decolonization. Nonetheless, as Arvin underlines through discussions of activism and cultural production, possession can be unsettled through “regenerative refusal” as Indigenous feminist analytic. Such Indigenous refusals across past and present point toward resurgent Pacific Islander futures, regenerating kinships between Kānaka Maoli and other Indigenous peoples of Oceania, which include work that Arvin highlights for being in promising coalition with Black Lives Matter. “What is a Polynesian?” is Arvin’s central question. For Arvin, heteropatriarchy functions as the crux of whiteness that claims Polynesians as possessions without ever conceding the power of whiteness to them. She stresses “the logic of possession” over the more familiar framing “logic of elimination” in order to emphasize “the gendered aspects of settler colonialism” dependent upon heteropatriarchy that either implicates Native Hawaiian women as producers of mixed-race children toward a white futurity or requires them to be responsible for “race-saving” by only having children with men of high Native Hawaiian blood quantum. The global workings of antiblackness are central to her theorization: Melanesians were racialized as Black, while Polynesians could also be coded as such despite their conditional whiteness and tactics of Polynesian exceptionalism. Triangulated as non-Black and non-Indigenous, Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese, are co-opted by whiteness as evidence of a utopian multiracialism that erases Native Hawaiians, especially through intermarriage. Undergirding Arvin’s discussions is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of raciality and spirit via Hegel that deliberately departs from the Foucauldian model of biopolitics to account for spiritual investments in the logics of racism that haunt the present beyond...

Dissolution of Racial Boundaries

As the field of mixed-race studies continues to expand, my article adds to this growth by analyzing the representation of mixed-race children in Natasha Trethewey's Thrall in relation to the corresponding Mexican casta paintings she refers to. I explore how Trethewey uses diction and etymology in Thrall by performing close readings of her Mexican casta painting poems. Throughout my analysis, I pay special attention to how aspects of knowledge and colonialism affect the portrayal of these mixed-race offspring. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Trethewey skillfully uses diction and etymology to emphasize the relationship between knowledge and power, particularly with regard to the representation of mixed-race people in society. Trethewey intertwines mixed-race representation and experiences that seem disparate—her poems cross geographical, temporal, and spatial boundaries—in order to illustrate how mixed-race peoples' positioning and representation in society often transcends such boundaries while additionally critically assessing power dynamics controlling said representation. Accordingly, by closely examining the representation of mixed-race people and miscegenation in art and poetry, this article sheds a new light on how meaning can be developed between races and cultures and stresses how colonialism and knowledge can be connected to contextualizing difference across time and space.

Between Legacy and Agency: Italo-Eritreans Raised in Orphanages and Their Access to Italian Citizenship

Abstract In Eritrea, Italian colonialism introduced and regulated the opportunity for mixed-race individuals with Italian ancestry to obtain Italian citizenship. This opportunity was modified over time depending on changes in Italian and Eritrean citizenship laws. Moreover, laws and socialization shaped Italo-Eritreans as a minority and a “different” group that reproduced itself even after colonialism. Over time, the number of Italo-Eritreans varied as did their sense of belonging to a real or imagined community. The case of mixed-race children abandoned during Italian colonialism provides an insight into the importance of social institutions in building legal and social identities through socialization. Using an interdisciplinary, qualitative-quantitative approach, I focus on the convergence between the processes of inclusion within legal (citizenship) and social (identity) categories, as well as on the agency of Italo-Eritreans raised in orphanages in transforming a stigma into a resource to gain the Italian citizenship.

Pearl Buck and Hybrid Superiority: ‘Amerasians’ in The Hidden Flower and The New Year

Pearl S. Buck, born in America but who spent most of her life in China, is considered a spiritual hybrid with an ‘in-between’ identity. Most of her works are included in the category of interracial literature because they deal with the issues of interracial marriage and hybrids. She has a special concern for ‘Amerasians,’ the mixed-race children born between American men and Asian women during the Cold War period. In The Hidden Flower(1952) and The New Year(1968), Buck not only reveals her sympathy towards the plights of ‘Amerasians,’ but also subverts the 19th-century discourses of racial hybridity that claim the superiority of pure blood over mixed-race. Lennie, the mixed-race child of an American man and a Japanese woman in The Hidden Flower and Christopher, a child of an American man and a Korean woman in The New Year are portrayed as genetically superior hybrids in whom the mental and physical strengths of East and West are united. Through these novels, she also criticizes the myth of ‘racial purity’ rampant at that time in the American South with the assertion that “all cultures are hybrids and amalgams because miscegenation is going on constantly between all peoples.”

Taney's Zombie: Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Life in Maryland's Black Belt: Revelations About Dred Scott and the Still Undead Commitment to White Supremacy and Racial Hatred

Roger Taney was born and raised in Maryland’s Black Belt, a region so committed to the institution of slavery that it sought to secede from Maryland and unite with slavery-entrenched Virginia. His first teachers included a well-credentialed, but unhinged man who so fervently believed that he, like Christ, could walk on water that he drowned in the attempt. Taney’s progenitors went from indentured servant to High Sheriff of Calvert County, whose duties included the “disposal” of the colonial Anglican church’s property of women, including free white women, and their mixed race children, and slaveholding landowner married into the illustrious colonial family of Francis Scott Key. This grounding in white supremacy, slavery, and racial hatred followed Taney into his privileged rise through the Maryland legislature, into private practice, and then as Maryland attorney general and subsequently, as reward for his zealous support of Andrew Jackson in his rise to the Presidency, to the offices of U.S. attorney general, Secretary of Treasury, and finally, for almost thirty years, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During his long tenure as Chief Justice, the nation ran toward Civil War, and the Taney Court decided such monumental cases as the challenge of President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus after a Maryland contemporary and acquaintance of Taney was arrested and held without charges for sabotage. No decision of the Taney Court is more reviled than that of Dred Scott v. Sandford, an opinion written by Chief Justice Taney and in which his familial, social, and legal history of white supremacy and racial hatred is unstintingly revealed. The final irony in the life of this infamous Chief Justice is that on his deathbed in Washington, D.C., he urgently condemned the voter suppression taking place on that day in a constitutional vote in Maryland. Today in the Black Belt and elsewhere in the nation, Taney’s zombie of white supremacy, racial hatred, and segregation walks undead, its evil spirit inflamed by hateful politically-motivated rhetoric, the imprimatur of such speakers, and cultural hatred and ignorance, and by failures of many of the avowed religious to condemn and cast out those who abominate the strength of our national values and identity. From voter suppression in North Carolina to horseback sheriff deputies leading a roped black man down to the unexamined use of predictive algorithmic systems disparately impacting the poor and people of color in bail, detention, parole, and sentencing decisions, the spirit that imbued Taney’s Dred Scott opinion and animated his life’s values remains alive within the nation’s culture and legal system. Informed with this history and reflection, perhaps we as a nation can illuminate the evil at large and finally kill off that demon and conclude, at last, the Civil War.

The mixed race Irish family and everyday negotiations of citizenship

In recent years, the mixed race family constellation has emerged as a persistent feature of Irish societal life. An increase in interracial partnering invariably leads to the presence of white women who are parenting children who are ascribed to another race. Yet, nationalist discourses and the incorporation of jus sanguinis principles in constitutional law have constructed a version of Irishness that ‘others’ and excludes the mixed race person. This paper focuses on the white Irish mother and her mixed race (i.e. black African/white Irish) child (ren), as the majority of mixed race families in the State. In fact, this article sets out to provide a novel perspective vis-à-vis the location of the mixed race family in the context of the exclusionary politics of Irish citizenship and how, through their mothering practices, these white women negotiate and challenge dominant ideologies of belonging on behalf of their children. More specifically, this paper examines the mothers’ attempts to establish their children as equal claimants of rights in the Irish public sphere. By drawing on in-depth interviews with twelve white Irish mothers, this paper reveals that the women’s efforts to publicly articulate their mixed race children as legitimate Irish citizens have been largely denied or even, de-politicized. Rather, at the level of citizenship, the racialized insider-outsider dynamic gets reproduced as the political autonomy of such citizens is constrained by notions of phenotype (and bloodline criteria). I further draw attention to the governmental production of these mixed race subjects as ‘failed’ citizens, who must live out their difference silently in the interstitial spaces of the national framework.

Contested everyday cultural citizenship: “Mixed race” children and their ethnicized citizenship in South Korea

ABSTRACT This article examines how the everyday cultural citizenship of “mixed race” children of one Korean parent and one immigrant parent is contested. This study transposes the concept of ethnicized citizenship to mixed race children and their everyday practices of citizenship based on ethnicity and parent(s). Relying primarily on the personal narratives of mixed race children, derived from essay competitions, this research comparatively analyzes the experiences of three categories of mixed race children: co-ethnic (with a Korean father and ethnic Korean mother from China), inter-Asian (Korean father and Asian [non-Korean] mother), and multiracial (one Korean parent and one European or African American parent). This article argues that the ethnicized citizenship of an immigrant mother operates as a mechanism for institutional and socio-cultural exclusion of mixed race children.