Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Why and how race became the key to enslaveability was a question posed and resolved using myriad strategies across the early modern Atlantic as traders and setters constructed paradigms that enabled the exchange of human commodities and the enslaved constructed paradigms that enabled their response to the New World order. Children born to parents who occupied positions increasingly seen as racially distinct posed political, ideological, and economic problems. Their indeterminacy needed to be fixed. Recall the preamble: “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free.” The word doubts names mixed-race children as excess, as both circulating and unregulated, and ultimately as a source of chaos.23 The law imposes order as it both configures those children as property and asserts its right to do so. It also points to a very specific legal case involving Elizabeth Keye (to which I will turn below) that compelled the Virginia legislators to make explicit the implicit logic that regulated the slave markets and the probate courts across Atlantic slave societies. In the context of a nascent colonial setting, then, these reproducing women and their chaotic children were grounds on which claims to sovereign authority rested.
“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski [Miyawaki]. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”
Mitski Miyawaki, who performs with her band under her first name, grew up in a biracial, multicultural household. During her childhood, Mitski lived in Japan, Malaysia, China, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it wasn’t until she returned to the U.S. that she had a racial designation imposed on her.
“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”
In the U.S., Mitski was regularly asked what most biracial people – her being half Japanese and half Caucasian American – are asked at least once in their lives: “What ARE you?” Mitski doesn’t particularly identify with American or Japanese culture, and her parents didn’t encourage her to choose or adopt either.
“I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that’s important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way,” observes Mitski. “Being an outsider at the time nurtured my eye as a writer.”…