Mixed Race Studies

Hapa Capsulizes Painful Moments from 2016 Asian America in Less than 90 Seconds

AsAmNews
2016-11-27

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

A popular new video out less than a week freezes in time moments in 2016 that highlight the racism and the persistent whitewashing the Asian American community faced throughout the year.

The short A-woke is from multiracial filmmaker Teja Arboleda who grew up in Japan and now lives near Boston.

Arboleda utilizes the trendy mannequin challenge technique of employing actors who pose frozen like mennequins to depict memorable, and in this film, painful scenes from the past…

Read the entire article here.

“…interracial relationships and interracial marriages are anything but color-blind. Yes, there is love, but that love is tinged and affected by the history of colonialism, skin color hierarchy, White racial privilege, unequal economic opportunity and by racist/sexist imageries that define the politics of sexual desire and acceptability.” —Larry Hajime Shinagawa

Karen Ye, “Love Sees No Color? Chinese American Intermarriage,” AsAmNews, July 10, 2014. http://www.asamnews.com/2014/07/10/love-sees-no-color-chinese-american-intermarriage/.

Love Sees No Color? Chinese American Intermarriage

AsAmNews
2014-07-10

Karen Ye

Editor’s Note: The following is a question and answer between reporter Karen Ye and Dr. Larry Hajime Shinagawa, Executive Director of New World Research Institute, a non-profit think tank focusing on research on new immigrants to the United States. Among his research areas are intermarriage, multiracial identity, and Asian American culture and community. He is former director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park and director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and Associate Professor of the Sociology Department of Ithaca College. Shinagawa makes the case that we need to go beyond color-blindness to understand intermarriage among Chinese Americans…

…Q: People say “love sees no color,” how do you feel about it?

A: Not true. When I wrote my dissertation on intermarriage among Asian Americans, I interviewed six dozen interracial couples. When they were with their significant other, they said, “I don’t see color. I just see him/her.” But when I talked to them individually, they discounted the narrative of color blindness and said it indeed played a major role, but one that they tried to overcome.

Q: What do you think that tells us?

A: That interracial relationships and interracial marriages are anything but color-blind. Yes, there is love, but that love is tinged and affected by the history of colonialism, skin color hierarchy, White racial privilege, unequal economic opportunity and by racist/sexist imageries that define the politics of sexual desire and acceptability…

Read the entire interview here.

Hapas Soon to Be the Majority in the Japanese American Community

AsAmNews: Where the conversation about Asian America Begins
2016-04-16

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

The future is now in the Japanese American community.

By 2020, just four years away, demographers says the majority of Japanese Americans will be multiracial/multiethnic.

A new exhibition now at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose in California runs through the end of the year. It is curated by Fred Liang and Cindy Nakashima who also co-curated an earlier version of the exhibition in 2013 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

“My parents married in 1965, when it was still illegal in sixteen states, but they married in Ohio, where there were no anti-miscegenation laws,” Nakashima told AsAmNews. My dad is a Nisei, my mom is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP). They met in graduate school.”

The interracial marriage rate in the Japanese American community is estimated at 66 percent. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967, (Loving v. Virginia) that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional, each state had control over who could and could not get legally married…

Read the entire article here.

“Children of color in general either tend to get left out of school curriculum and societal teachings or hyper-visibilized in negative, harmful ways. Multiracial kids—since mixed race is still not often considered a “legitimate” group (by both whites and people of color alike)—often experience an added layer of invisibility that is so damaging for their self-esteem. Multiracial children don’t fit typical racial constructs and complicate the conversation in a way folks don’t like. When others feel discomfort and disequilibrium, it leads them to dismiss, gloss over, minimize or scoff at mixed race experiences. This often then leads multiracial children to feel they cannot be their whole authentic self on any front unless they’re willing to subscribe to prescribed racial categories.” —Sharon H. Chang

Alice Wong, “Parents (of multiracial kids) Just Don’t Understand,” AsAmNews, December 3, 2015. http://www.asamnews.com/2015/12/03/parents-of-multiracial-kids-just-dont-understand/.

Parents (of multiracial kids) Just Don’t Understand

AsAmNews
2015-12-03

Alice Wong

Talking about race is complicated enough but how do parents of multiracial Asian American children talk to their kids about race and racial identity? What are the experiences of multiracial Asian American children? What’s missing in the media representations of multiracial kids?

Writer, scholar and activist Sharon H. Chang talked with AsAmNews about her multiracial family and the findings from her research on multiracial Asian American children from her new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World. Below are some edited excerpts from their conversation.

You and your husband are both multiracial Asian Americans—describe your family’s cultural mash-up.

Our collective family ancestry is Japanese, Taiwanese/Chinese, Slovakian, German, French Canadian, British, Welsh – American. But culturally we feel multiethnic, mixed, 2nd gen Asian American.

How do you and your husband talk about your child about being multiracial in America?

We talk pretty openly about systemic racial inequities in front of him. We don’t hide those struggles and even encourage him to participate in the conversations when he’s interested. Then regarding his own identity (i.e. relationship to those racial struggles) we don’t tell him he’s white. Because he’s not. He’s certainly asked, “Am I white?” And we’re very clear, “No.” Instead we offer Asian, Asian American, and mixed…

Read the entire interview here.

One-sided Biracial TV Families– Why Are So Many Asian Moms MIA?

AsAmNews
2015-08-05

Laylita Day

I started to notice a disturbing trend among certain TV shows. Each one featured a biracial character, specifically a woman who had an Asian mom and White dad. The disturbing part of this was the fact that none of the Asian moms are actually in the shows with one slight exception. This caught my attention mainly because I too have a White dad and Asian mom. My mother and I are fairly close, so seeing show after show where the biracial daughter has no contact or knowledge of her mother made me feel uneasy. I began to ask myself why there were so many M.I.A. Asian moms in biracial TV families…

Read the entire article here.