University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

"What is black, white and yellow all over?" an analysis of the racial experiences of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage

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"What is black, white and yellow all over?" an analysis of the racial experiences of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage

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Content “WHAT IS BLACK, WHITE AND YELLOW ALL OVER?”

AN ANALYSIS OF THE RACIAL EXPERIENCES OF PEOPLE OF

ASIAN/WHITE AND ASIAN/BLACK HERITAGE

by

Bruce Calvin Hoskins

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Bruce Calvin Hoskins
ii
Dedication

To my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for with Him all things are possible

To my wife, Alice, the love of my life and my constant support

To my mother, Miyoko, who raised three children by herself in a foreign country

And,

To my children, Michael, Riley, and Carter the three people I am trying to make
the world a better place for

iii
Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Abstract v

Chapter 1
Introduction 1
Chapter 2
Literature Review 19
Chapter Endnotes 42

Chapter 3
Methodology 44
Chapter Endnotes 54

Chapter 4
“What Are You?”
How Multiracial People Construct an Internal Racial Identity 55
Chapter Endnotes 86

Chapter 5
“What are you?” Part II
The creation of external and expressed racial identity 87

Chapter 6
“Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
The External Context of Racial Identity Formation 111
Chapter 7
All in the Family:
Learning Racial Hierarchy from the Ones You Love 144
Chapter Endnotes 179

Chapter 8
Conclusions:
From the Beginning to the End then Back to the Beginning 180

Bibliography 183
iv
Appendices
Appendix A: Questions for Multiracial Person 198
Appendix B: Questions for Interracial Parents 201

v
Abstract

It has been argued that the increase of people of multiracial heritage in
our society represents the fulfillment of the assimilation process. People of
Asian/white and Asian/black heritage have been singled out in multiple works as
posing a direct challenge to how race is understood in the United States and that
this group’s assertion of their multiracial identity will ultimately lead to a race-
less society (Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001; Root 1996; Hollinger 1995;
Root 1992). Therefore, this research uses in-depth interviews of thirty-two (32)
people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage and six (6) sets of interracial
Asian and white and Asian and black parents to critically analyze to what degree
their lived experiences are consistent with a society that has assimilated people of
different racial categories.
In order to determine levels of assimilation for these groups, this research
will use a racial formations framework to examine how racial categories are
constructed through “racial logic” and how race is given meaning within the lives
of multiracial people and through parents of multiracial children. This will be
done by showing situations where society will ascribe a race onto a person of
multiracial heritage, how the person of multiracial heritage will use their
“biology” to support or refute these claims, and how that same multiracial person
might develop a racial identity that may or may not be consistent with how they
look or their actual racial heritage.
vi
Demonstrating how race is socially constructed will reveal how being
mixed with white is fundamentally different than being mixed with black. This
will be shown by demonstrating that Asian/white people have more identity
options than Asian/black people, how families socially enforce to their children
which races are considered acceptable marriage partners, and how society uses a
universal anti-black context to discriminate against people of Asian/black
heritage.

1
Chapter 1
Introduction
The Question
I have seen myself as black all of my life; from the friends that I kept, to
the sports that I played, to the music that I listen to and to the way that I talk. I
have never had a reason to doubt my blackness until one day, while working in a
math learning center at a community college; I was helping an older Japanese
woman with her math. As I was helping her, I noticed that she often times made
notes in kanji (Japanese handwriting) by the instructions in her math book.
When she saw that I was observing her writing in her textbook, she immediately
apologized for this behavior and told me that she did this so that she could
understand the directions. I immediately tried to put her at ease by telling her it
was not a problem and that my mother did the same thing all the time. There was
a moment of silence as a question formed in her mind regarding my comment,
and about a minute later she finally asked me the nationality of my mother.
When I told her that my mother was Japanese, she immediately said, “Oh that is
why you are so good at math!”
This woman’s surprise reveals a personal and social understanding that
black people are not supposed to be good at math, while people of Japanese
heritage are good at math. What it also demonstrated was that somewhere in her
mind she questioned how a “black” man could be so good at math. My assumed
2
race did not fit my known abilities, aptitudes and attitudes. Stated simply, I did
not make racial sense to her.
However, once my racial heritage was revealed her common sense
notions of race needed to form a new “racial logic” surrounding people of
multiracial heritage; that people who are black and Japanese are good at math
too! This understanding of race and racial hierarchy made me rethink my entire
past regarding my assumption that I was black and that everyone had treated me
like I was black. Did my black friends think that I was good at school in general,
but math specifically because I was Japanese? Did my white and Asian friends
think the same thing? Did people actively wonder how a black man could be as
good at math as I? How many people came to the same conclusion when they
found out I was of black and Japanese heritage because I was too smart for a
black person? Also, what would have been different if I did not look so “black”?
What would my experiences have been if I were mixed with white? Would
people still have assumed that I was smart because I was Japanese if I were Asian
and white?
People of multiracial heritage have been used throughout history to create
and recreate racial categories, to give race meaning and to maintain racial
hierarchy in the United States and it is still happening today. Therefore, this
dissertation will analyze how the concept of race is given meaning on the macro
and micro levels in order to try and understand how racial categories are
3
constructed and how racial hierarchies are established, maintained and enforced
through the multiracial subject.
This Project
This dissertation uses the personal narratives of thirty-two (32) people of
Asian/white and Asian/black heritage and six (6) sets of interracial Asian and
white and Asian and black parents to critically analyze the social construction of
race and how race is given meaning within the lives of multiracial people and
through parents of multiracial children. Since people of multiracial heritage and
interracially married parents cannot “automatically” assume a singular racial
category, this research focuses on these two groups to explore how race is
constructed in the absence of an assumed racial categorization.
The examination of the lives of multiracial people allows for a deeper
understanding of how race operates in people’s everyday lives, because of the
inability to “biologically” assume their racial classification. Biological notions
of race have been roundly refuted and all but completely abandoned by the
scientific community (Fine et al. 2005; Parker and Song 2001; Omi 2001; Zack
1993); however, social scientists agree that the social consequences of race are
real (Winant 2001; Lipsitz 1998; Lopez 1996; Omi and Winant 1994).
Therefore, what we will see throughout this research are situations where people
will ascribe a race onto a person of multiracial heritage, how the person of
multiracial heritage will use their biology to support or refute these claims, and
4
how that same multiracial person might develop a racial identity that may or may
not be consistent with how they look or their actual racial heritage.
Background
This project is the result of my desire to break down some of the basic
assumptions of my life regarding my racial heritage. I never questioned my own
blackness even though my Japanese mother was my sole provider of love,
affection and support in my life. I never talked to my older brother and sister
regarding the issue of our race, and they never talked to me about it either. I just
assumed that everyone ate white rice with everything, took off their shoes before
they went into their house, and got spankings with bamboo backscratchers. But I
was wrong.
People of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage have lived lives that are
similar to mine and incredibly different at the same time. Some people, like me,
have never been to their foreign parent’s home country, but some were born and
raised there. Some people, like me, always thought of themselves as just one
race, but many identified themselves as either races or no race at all. Some
people, like me, have experienced intense direct individual and institutional
discrimination, while others have not had any directly racist experience in their
whole life.
Yet all people, including myself, have been asked, “What are you?” And
this is the question that unified all of our narratives into a single discourse
5
regarding how race is socially constructed in our lives through us, through our
loved ones and peers and through our interactions with society and social
institutions.
Statement of the Problem
This study is an effort to pull current multiracial discourse away from
treating race in the same manner as ethnicity (Fulbeck 2006; Gaskins 1999; Root
1996). Thinking that one’s race is something that can be discarded by a given
individual or absorbed into mainstream culture, as is assumed with European
ethnicities, allows an understanding of racial identity as an issue of choice and
assumes that increased intermarriage signifies acceptance through marital
assimilation. However, what this paradigm does not acknowledge is that the
assimilation process has been indelibly shaped through the concept of race
because of the social constraints it imposes on these choices in our everyday
lives.
Therefore, people of multiracial heritage and interracially married
families are not the center point of this analysis because they are some exotic
new species that needs to be documented and studied, but because through the
analysis of their personal narratives we can begin to move the context of racial
understanding away from the ethnicity paradigm and move it firmly into the
camp of social construction.
6
The focus on multiracial people and interracially married parents also
moves us away from the temptation to explain the root of race and racism as
physical appearance, because it takes away from the essence of race which is a
complex, and often contradictory, array of social norms (Root 1996; Davis
1991), legal precedents (Johnson 2003; Lopez 1996), and treatment by social
institutions (Lipsitz 1998; Steinberg 1995).
The centrality of race as a social construction has led me to not try and
give physical descriptions of the people that I have interviewed outside of their
own personal descriptions. Although I know and acknowledge that race is read
off of the body (Hall 1997), since I am focusing on how race is socially
constructed, I purposefully do not include my own personal descriptions of my
subjects because I do not want to add to “common sense” notions of racial
differences. If I described each person, or if I included a picture to satisfy the
curiosity of the reader, I would essentially limit my research to being able to
better identify multiracial people rather than examine how each person
experienced race, both internally and externally; how race was given meaning in
their lives; and how being mixed with white or black, regardless of their
phenotype, affects their personal lives.
Race is not real as a viable biological category, but I strongly believe that
the inclusion of my descriptions or pictures would add, not subtract, from that
conception no matter how carefully I crafted the descriptions. However, race is
7
real regarding its social consequences and by letting multiracial people describe
themselves and how others perceive them keeps the focus of this project on how
race is given meaning through the lived experiences of multiracial people.
Therefore, I describe only the person’s racial heritage and age in parentheses
after their name in order to maintain the focus on social rules regarding race
rather than trying to understand their realities as only a function of how they
look.
If we are to understand race we must look at it in a manner that
acknowledges the breath and the depth of these social connections, and I argue
that this can be achieved through an examination of the lived lives of people of
multiracial heritage because personal and social understandings of their race may
visibly, mentally and verbally shift right in front of them on a continual, and even
daily, basis. In other words, race is socially constructed in everyone’s life;
however, people of “mono-racial” heritage may be less apt to see the ways that
race and racial understandings shift because they and society see their race as a
fixed point. But this is generally not the case with people of multiracial heritage
because they do not have a fixed racial category to assume.
Also, although much of the current discourse on race is much more
inclusive of how people of Asian, Latino and Native American heritage are
affected by racial classification, by examining the lived lives of people of
Asian/white and Asian/black heritage we will be able to expose the continued
8
significance of the white/black color line in the United States. And lastly, by
placing the experiences of multiracial people within a socio-historical context
and a white/black paradigm, it gives a deeper understanding of how race is
socially constructed and will give insight into how the conditions of racism may
be ameliorated, if not ended.
Purpose of the Study
This study focuses primarily on how people of Asian/white and
Asian/black heritage experience race in their everyday lives and will undergo the
process of uncovering how the white/black continuum affects how they were
socialized into understanding what race means. By examining the lived lives of
people of multiracial heritage, it allows us to understand the complex nature of
how race is socially constructed, broadens current understanding of theories
concerning race, and sheds light on how the discourse regarding multiracial
people functions as a racial project that promotes, enforces and perpetuates
essentialist notions of race and racial hierarchy.
This dissertation examines, questions, and confronts three of the most
often assumed outcomes of an increasingly multiracial society. First, is the idea
that the increase of people of multiracial heritage will eventually result in the
discontinued use of racial categories (Gilroy 2003; Zack 1993). Although the
number of children of multiracial heritage is increasing (Williams-Leon and
Nakashima 2001), what will be observed is how racial categories are actually
9
further reified through the multiracial subject both by the multiracial person
themselves and through social interaction.
Second, is that people of multiracial heritage will personally challenge
racial categories and use their personal experiences to contradict race and racism
(Root 1996; Zack 1993). This comes from the understanding that the multiracial
movement is largely, if not solely, an issue of identity. However, what this
dissertation will bring to the forefront is how the personal identities of people of
multiracial heritage follow distinctly racial patterns that ultimately privilege
whiteness and devalue blackness. In other words, the development of an identity
is primarily racial in its composition as multiracial subjects continuously assign,
assess, and evaluate their attitudes, aptitudes and abilities in a profoundly racial,
and many times racist, manner.
And lastly, is the notion that people of multiracial heritage will
experience less racism and live lives that are less constrained by race because of
their “ambiguous” phenotypes (Hollinger 1995). Again, what this research will
expose is the lack of hesitation by society to “fit” people of multiracial heritage
into mono-racial categories and therefore discriminate against them according to
their own ideologies and also how Asian and black people often discriminate
against people of multiracial heritage because of their assumed lack of
authenticity.
10
Another emphasis of this paper is to address the assumption that an
increase in interracial families signifies the breakdown of racist ideology in
general and towards the interracially married groups specifically (Williams-Leon
and Nakashima 2001; Patterson 1997). Although this is a common belief, an
examination of Asian and white and Asian and black interracial families reveals
two main findings: one, that people in interracial marriages in general, but
interracially married black couples specifically, get married despite the racial
animosity between the races not because they have lessened, and second, that
race and racism are central ideologies that continue to operate in the lives of
interracially married couples and how they socialize their children regarding
what races are acceptable marriage partners. Interracially married Asian and
white couples impose a “do as I say, not as I do” philosophy regarding their
children’s choice in marriage partners that pressures their children to marry
people from socially acceptable racial groups. Also, it will be demonstrated that
interracially married Asian and white couples teach their children that black
people are the most undesirable marriage partners; therefore, privileging
whiteness and maintaining white supremacy. Interracially married Asian and
black couples also reinforce the color line by teaching their children to be aware
of how people from other races may not think of black people as acceptable
marriage partners.

11
Conceptual Framework
Creating a theoretical framework for understanding the lived experiences
of multiracial people begins with understanding their place within assimilation,
the process of reducing boundaries between people from different social groups
(Hwang, Saenz and Aguirre 1997), the essence of which is the formation of a
unified nation unstratified and undivided by race and ethnicity (Jung 2003).
Counter to the prevalent beliefs of the time that situated non-white people as
unable to assimilate into the American mainstream (Fong 1971), Robert E. Park
proposed a race relations cycle that would ultimately lead to the full
incorporation of people of color: “the race relations cycle which takes the form,
to state abstractly, of contacts, competition, accommodation and eventual
assimilation, is apparently progressive and irreversible.” (Park 1950; p. 150)
Milton Gordon furthered the race relations cycle by developing stages
regarding assimilation, which addressed how to operationalize Park’s theory.
Gordon proposed seven dimensions to assimilation: cultural assimilation
(changing to core cultural values), structural assimilation (inclusion into primary
social institutions), marital assimilation (significant intermarriage), identification
assimilation (development of a sense of identity with mainstream society),
attitude-receptional assimilation (absence of prejudice and stereotypes),
behavior-receptional assimilation (absence of direct and indirect discrimination)
and civic assimilation (absence of power conflict) (Gordon 1964). Although
12
Parks believed assimilation to be a linear process, Gordon’s conceptualization of
assimilation does not necessitate that one stage must follow another and suggests
that some stages may pertain to a particular group while others may not
(Hirschman 1983). Although one stage is not dependent on another, marital
assimilation is widely accepted as the culmination, the proverbial endpoint of the
assimilation process (Hwang, Saenz and Aguirre 1997).
Understanding interracial marriage as the ultimate goal of assimilation
makes multiracial children the living embodiment of the melting pot, where
people of different ethnicities are forged together as one (Xie and Goyette 1997).
However, if people of multiracial heritage are the endpoint of assimilation, then
that should mean that they live lives that are completely integrated into
mainstream America. It is this assumption that I will examine throughout my
research as I analyze the lives of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage
to measure the extent that they are assimilated into America.
How Race Affects Assimilation
To begin the analysis of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage,
it must be recognized how current multiracial discourse is subsumed within an
ethnicity framework. Understanding this compels us to ask the question: is race
the same as ethnicity? If not, what could the consequences of this assumption
reveal in an analysis of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage?
13
Ethnicity is popularly defined as a group of people that are recognized by
others and by themselves as being culturally distinct (Ore 2006). However, what
clearly distinguishes ethnicity and race is how they are understood socially,
which can be clearly demonstrated within the assimilation process and its three
possible endpoints: Anglo conformity, the melting pot and cultural pluralism
(Hirschman 1983; Feagin and Feagin 1999). Anglo conformity suggests that
ethnicity is something that people are willing to give up in order to become part
of the mainstream, but is race something a person can give up? The melting pot
proposes that new ethnicities are absorbed and made a part of a new American
ethnicity, but is race something that can be absorbed? Cultural pluralism implies
that all levels of assimilation are obtained while remaining ethnic distinctions are
considered equal, but can races ever be equal? Ethnicity and race both have a
cultural component, but race is constructed as permanent, un-absorbable and
inherently unequal. But the larger question of my research is to ask, is this true
for all races?
Except Black People
In order to answer these questions, we must examine how racial
categories are derived. It is clear that being black is defined by hypo-descent,
better known as the “one drop rule,” where one drop of black blood makes a
person black no matter what (Davis 1991), but what about the other races?
14
Interestingly enough, the amount of white heritage that a person of Native
American ancestry was counted on the census, because there was a lower
boundary to being Native American partially, if not entirely due to the fact that
the government wanted to limit their legal obligations to this group:
Needless to say, hyperdescent was a convenient device for
limiting the obligations from treaties and other agreements that
had been incurred by the federal government throughout the
preceding century. In the coming decades, the federal government
would establish minimum blood quantum standards for being
judged an authentic American Indian and hence being eligible for
a variety of federal services, including education and health care.
(Snipp 2003)

The construction of hyper-descent around people of Native American heritage
has directly led to people of white/Native American heritage to have the highest
probability of identifying as white in school, as compared to people of
white/black and white/Asian heritage (Harris and Sim 2002).
This type of blood quantum rule is also found within the qualifications of
the Cherry Blossom Beauty Pageants at happen in Japanese American
communities, which state that a person has to be at least half Japanese in order to
participate (King 2001). What this strongly suggests is that a person that is only
one quarter white, with only one Asian grandparent amongst three white parents,
would be considered white by the Japanese American community. This is further
supported by the fact that there is not a single legal case involving the racial
classification of a person of one quarter Asian heritage (Lopez 1996).
15
However, what does black hypo-descent and Native American and Asian
hyper-descent mean within the assimilation process? What it suggests is that
every race, except black people, can eventually shed their race by intermarrying
with white people. It proposes that every race, except black people, can
eventually be absorbed by the surrounding white population. And it implies that
every race, except black people, can eventually become equal to whites with the
right amount of white mixture. Drawing the lines around whiteness and
blackness in such a manner will be a central focus of my dissertation as I
examine whether being mixed with white or black makes a difference for people
of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage experience race and the assimilation
process.
The Multiracial Project
By treating race as the same as ethnicity, we are unable to explain
differential patterns of assimilation amongst people of different racial groups
(Omi and Winant 1994; Hirschman 1983). This revelation necessitates that we
move multiracial discourse out of the ethnicity paradigm and center it within the
racial formations process. Michael Omi and Howard Winant to define the
concept of racial formations as, “the sociohistorical process by which racial
categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi and Winant
1994, p. 55). Acknowledging this transition then locates current multiracial
discourse a racial project:
16
…is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or
explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and
redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial
projects connect what race means in a particular discursive
practice and the ways in which both social structures and
everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that
meaning. (emphasis in the original) (Ibid. p. 56)

In other words, racial formations is the process in which racial projects connect
social meaning to racial categories. By situating multiracial discourse as a racial
project, my research will examine the lived lives of people of Asian/white and
Asian/black heritage and how racial dynamics are being reorganized around the
multiracial subject. What will be demonstrated throughout this dissertation is
how race organizes and structures the experiences of multiracial people and how
essentialist notions of race are constructed, enforced, and perpetuated in their
lives by themselves and society, and how race slows, if not altogether stops the
assimilation process.
Establishing Racial Logic
Although Omi and Winant state that racial projects connect what race
means within a particular socio-historical setting, they do not create a mechanism
to distinguish how racial categories are established. The racial formations
process capriciously assigns unsubstantiated and implausible mental, physical,
emotional, and spiritual attributes to arbitrarily chosen hereditary differences that
may manifest themselves culturally or physically; however, as the number of
multiracial people increases this becomes even harder to do. The differences
17
between the races only gain meaning within the social structure of the United
States during specific historical moments through the development of a racial
“common sense” (Gilroy 2003; Hunt 1999; Lipsitz 1998; Lopez 1996).
However, I will argue throughout my research that racial common sense is
currently being rearticulated by the notion of “racial logic” as it changes our
understanding of racial categories.
In his book, White By Law, Ian F. Haney Lopez clearly demonstrates the
legal transition from understanding race as biology to understanding race as
common sense. However, racial common sense is limited to presupposed
meanings regarding race and is ill equipped to handle new, never encountered
racial combinations presented by today’s multiracial population. These new
combinations require “racial logic” to bring together existing common sense and
develop a new understanding of people of multiracial heritage that will affect
how their attitudes, aptitudes and abilities are interpreted, rationalized and
compartmentalized; which centers on reconstructing their racial categorization.
Therefore, by using “racial logic,” it will be clearly demonstrated how the lived
lives of the multiracial people in my sample are shaped by the institutions and
organizations of society and how their personal identity is formed along
essentialist racial lines.

18
Perception as Reality
Lastly, I want to connect the Thomas theorem, “if men [sic] define
situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas
1928) to my analysis of the lived experiences of people of Asian/white and
Asian/black heritage. I have already argued that race is not a real category of any
biological significance; however, it is a real category based upon its social
consequences. The use of this theorem allows me to focus on how multiracial
people and the parents of multiracial children in my sample experience race
without essentializing the existence of racial categories. In other words, what
they believe race to be is key to understanding how race operates in their lives,
which is central to my analysis.
To think of race in such a way does not privilege micro-level experiences
over macro-level structures; on the contrary, it compliments them. How people
of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage and their parents experience race in their
daily lives, I will argue, form the basis of understanding how the concept of race
operates on a societal level as well. Therefore, the use of this theorem allows me
to develop how race is conceived, how race is socially constructed and how race
is socially reproduced in the lives of multiracial people and their parents without
assuming that races or racial categories exist independent of a racialized state.

19
Chapter 2

Literature Review

What is Race?
Race, gender and class are all socially constructed phenomena, which
mean that categories are defined, given meaning, enforced, changed, destroyed
and recreated through human social interaction (Ore 2006; Lopez 2003).
However, race is inherently different than gender and class because of the lack of
objective, scientifically valid ways to measure racial categories (Lao et al 2006;
Fine et al 2005; Commas 1961), while the social differences that exist between
racial groups are objective, scientifically quantifiable and irreducible to other
social phenomena (Lipsitz 1998; Nash 1997; Lopez 1996; Oliver and Shapiro
1995; Omi and Winant 1994; Spickard 1992; Thornton 1992). Although the
meaning of gender and class is highly subjective, can change dramatically from
location to location and can be spatially located within a place as small as a
household or as broad as a nation; the social construction of gender starts with
the biological distinction between the sexes, while class distinctions are centered
on who has more access to valuable resources (Lorber 2006; Gilbert 1998; Omi
and Winant 1994).
The incongruence between the lack of objective measure for racial
categories and the persistence of the social effect of race have created the belief
20
in many social scientists that race is somehow not real (Loveman 1999; Patterson
1997) and/or must be a manifestation or driven by other social constructs, namely
class (Jung 2003; Wilson 1978). However, the paradox of the prevalence of race
does not call for the abandonment of the concept of race, but a definition that can
adequately explain the seeming paradox. In order to accomplish this task, I will
first develop a socio-historical perspective of the concept of race and then apply
that context to the definition that I will develop as a result of this analysis.
The Beginnings of Race
The word “race” was first used in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
century Europe and was based on kinship relationships and ancestry rather than
physical characteristics, i.e. skin color (Feagin and Feagin 1999). The focus on
heritage most likely occurred because of the lack of concrete and consistent
physical distinctions between European peoples. The British and the Irish are
excellent examples of this as both groups would be considered “white” in the
United States, but in Europe there exists a ridged hierarchy between these two
groups that is believed to be biological in nature (Kennedy 2000; Roediger
1991).
Although physical dissimilarity does not manifest itself in the first usages
of race, it is clear that some type of cultural distinction is necessary in order to
fully actuate the concept of race through an analysis of English clothing laws. In
Channels of Desire, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen clearly demonstrate that clothes
21
not only distinguished classes because of the affordability of lavish outfits, but
that these garments served as symbols of domination because the legal dress
codes that determined social class were publicly and corporally enforced:
No apprentice whatsoever should presume… to wear (1) any
clothing except what he received from his master; (2) a hat, or
anything except a woolen cap… (3) ruffles, cuffs, loose collars …
(4) anything except canvas, fustian [a stout fabric of cotton and
flax], sack cloth, English leather, or woolen doublets, without any
silver or silk trimming. Punishment for violation of the statue was
at the discretion of the master for a first offense; a public
whipping for a second offense; and six months added to the period
of indenture for the third offense (Ewen and Ewen 1992, p. 87).

This punishment is very similar to the punishment carried out against
people who married across the color line in the United States. “Punishments for
violating anti-miscegenation laws included enslavement, exile, whippings, fines,
and imprisonment. Some jurisdictions punished those who performed such
marriages.” (Kennedy 2000, p. 145) This strongly suggests that by connecting
the punishments to the crimes, one can also connect the crimes to the socially
constructed categories. Therefore, a definition of race must address how heredity
forms the basis of the ideology that justifies the social inequality that exists
between groups, but what about physical distinctions?
Race as Biology
Cultural markers were necessary in its first usages as a way to socially
categorize, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that race became
directly connected to distinctive physical characteristics transmitted by descent
22
(Winant 2001; Feagin and Feagin 1999; Omi and Winant 1994). The linkage
between the concept of race and “quantifiable” physical differences became the
centerpiece for the pseudo-science of eugenics and ushered in a slew of research
that supposedly supported the idea that objective physical differences existed
between the races. However, any possibility of creating a neutral, scientific
understanding of racial groups quickly went away as the first “objective”
measures used to determine race was cranial capacity and cerebral structure,
which was a direct assault on the intelligence and the overall fitness of non-white
races to govern themselves (Comas 1961). Even though scientists tried to prove
otherwise, the connection between race and psychological capabilities was found
to be scientifically unsustainable. However the role of race is currently being
revisited as it pertains to medical health.
Race and the Human Genome
The unraveling of the human genome has ushered in a new level of racial
discourse because correlations have been found that link sickle cell anemia and
Tay-Sachs, a neurodegenerative disease, to the African American and Central
and Eastern European Jewish populations respectively (Alexander 2006; Pearce
2006). However, a closer look at these correlations reveals two things. First, the
number of people that contract these diseases is a very small portion of the
population. Therefore, being black does not cause sickle cell anemia and being
Jewish does not cause Tay-Sachs; however, what is more probable is that there
23
are environmental factors at work that cannot be ascertained because of the belief
that race is somehow the most salient factor (Fine et al 2005). The idea that
certain races are more susceptible to specific diseases has already led some
insurance companies to discriminate against people of color who do not even
have sickle cell anemia by raising insurance premiums for people who have the
sickle cell trait (PR Newswire 2006) (1).
Secondly, these articles also state that people of different races have been
diagnosed with supposedly racial diseases, but since they were not tested, this led
to disastrous results (Patterson 1997). The most notable case was where a two
year old child died of Tay-Sachs, but neither parent was tested for the disease
because they were not Jewish (Alexander 2006). As a matter of fact, the
majority of the people in the United States diagnosed with this disease are non-
Jewish and their parent’s did not know that their children could have contracted
the disease because they were never tested (Ibid.). This situation begs the
question as to whether racial understandings of disease were helpful at all and
whether the inclusion, rather than the exclusion, of racial categories in medical
analysis retards the medical process. This understanding allows us to conceive of
race as a biological illusion used to perpetuate social inequality and
discrimination by people in power.

24
Race as Physical Difference
Although the vast majority of social scientists agree that the connection
between race and mental capabilities and to a differing degree race and genetic
diseases does not exist, many of these same social scientists do not question the
belief that actual stand alone racial categories exist. This conceptualization
allows scholars such as Ian F. Haney Lopez to state that, “Despite a natural
component, race is entirely social” (emphasis mine) (Lopez 1996, p.103). And it
allows for Philip Tajitsu Nash to state that, “The problem is not race. It is
racism; the inferior treatment accorded someone based on their perceived race or
ethnicity” (Nash 1997, p.24). However, if the mental, physical, emotional, and
spiritual capabilities of the races are a social construction, then the manner that
racial categories themselves are constructed should also be challenged.
Connecting Race to Hierarchy
The fact that humans are 99.9% similar and that 90-95% of genetic
variation happens within racial groups rather than across them is well
documented and empirically based (Fine et al 2005; Spickard 1992; Comas
1961). Although the construction of racial categories is completely subjective on
both the genetic (Guay 2006; Lao 2006) and anthropological level
(Commas1961), the one thing that has always followed racial classification is the
institution of a racial hierarchy:
If the people dominated could be shown to be physically and
mentally inferior to the ruling group, their control by a “superior
25
race” could be regarded as fitting and logical; hence the rise of
“scientific” racism, devoted to collecting data from anthropology,
biology, and psychology to support theories of “superior” and
“inferior” races. (Ibid. p. 303)

Trying to use race in a scientifically neutral manner is also revealed to be
racist as a deeper analysis of the “Statement on the Nature of Race and Race
Difference,” by physical anthropologist and geneticists is examined. This group
defines race in the following manner:
The concept of race is unanimously regarded by anthropologists
as a classificatory device providing a zoological frame within
which the various groups of mankind may be arranged and by
means of which studies of evolutionary processes can be
facilitated. In its anthropological sense, the word “race” should be
reserved for groups of mankind possessing well-developed and
primarily heritable physical differences from other groups. Many
populations can be so classified but, because of the complexity of
human history, there are also many populations which cannot
easily be fitted into a racial classification (Comas 1961, p. 304)

By their admission, if race does exist at all it is understood to be a completely
subjective, non-continuous process, but it will be used to substantiate the theory
of evolution. If this is the case, my question is how can any arbitrarily defined,
non-continuous concept be useful in determining the path of evolution? And if
we are determining the order of the arrival of particular racial groups, then we
must also be establishing which racial group is more advanced or highly evolved.
This realization underscores the race making process and brings us much further
up the road to understanding that racial categories themselves are racist at their
core and cannot be conceived of or used in any other manner but to establish,
26
maintain and enforce racial hierarchy (Guay 2006; Zack 1993; Comas 1961).
Therefore, by assuming races to exist independent of a racialized state, one
jeopardizes not connecting how hegemonic social forces give meaning to these
categories of oppression and how these categories are created through a complex,
interconnected, and often contradictory system of ideas and practices.
Race is…
According to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “Race is a concept
which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to
different types of human bodies.” (Omi and Winant 1994; p. 55) However, I will
argue that this definition is not adequate enough to fully explaining their test
case; that of Susie Guillory Phipps.
The wife of a white business man and phenotypically “white,” Phipps
went to court in 1982 to have her racial designation changed from “colored” to
“white,” but was unsuccessful due to a 1970 Louisiana law that stated that
anyone with 1/32 black ancestry to be designated as “colored” on birth records
(Feagin and Feagin 1999; Omi and Winant 1994). To go even deeper, the law
only states that the ancestor only has to be classified as “black,” which suggests
that they could have only 1/32 black ancestry also. This understanding allows
for the development of the “one drop rule,” which states that any person of any
known black ancestry is black (Davis 1991). Although this example
demonstrates how race is socially constructed by demonstrating how the legal
27
and medical systems inform her of her race, it fails to make a direct connection to
Phipps’ body. If she looks “white”, then how is her “body” being referred to in
order to categorize her racially when it is her heritage that is actually of most
importance? If we were to allow the body references within the definition of
race, how could this definition explain the concept of “passing,” where people of
black heritage who “looked” white would pass for white (Daniel 1992)?
The breakdown of Omi and Winant’s definition, along with other
definitions like it, suggests that race is established by socially constructing
physical and/or cultural differences between socially unequal groups, but is
maintained through an emphasis on heredity. In other words, clear physical
distinctions are necessary at the outset of creating racial categories, but as
hegemonic social institutions and practices are put into place it is only necessary
to uphold heredity to maintain social inequality.
Defining Race
Therefore, race is a forced socially, historically and geographically-based
concept where differential social statuses are believed to be hereditarily distinct
groupings and are arbitrarily assigned cultural/physical differences to identify
and justify the social inequalities that exist between these groups. Although
modern understandings of race coincide with visible physical characteristics, race
is not as much about physical distinctions as it is determining a person’s social
status through heritage. Physical distinctions are only as important as they are
28
consistent with socially constructed understandings of what is an essential
characteristic of a specific race, i.e. skin color, hair texture. However, if how one
looks to others is not consistent with the heritage of their parents; then their
heritage, not their phenotype, is used in order to determine their social location.
Using this definition to analyze the case of Susie Guillory Phipps allows a
more consistent understanding of how race operates in the lived lives of everyday
people. Taking this definition in parts, race as a forced concept is demonstrated
by the fact that Phipps had to go to court in order to try and change her race and
the fact that she was prohibited from doing so. She did not need to go to court to
change her culture, nor does she have to sue the state to change her ethnicity.
But her race as a social distinction is regulated by the state, not through personal
identification.
Furthering the definition, one cannot even begin to explain what Phipps is
arguing for unless it is placed socially, historically and geographically. Being
“colored” in Louisiana in the 1980’s had serious ramifications regarding social
status. Just a few decades earlier, Phipps’ multiracial heritage may not have
bothered her as people of Creole heritage, a group with mixed African, French
and Spanish ancestry that mainly inhabit the state of Louisiana, had an
intermediate social position between white and black and had some social
privileges (Borders 1988). However, this group, along with other multiracial
“black” communities, where subsumed under black due to the creation of Jim
29
Crow laws which were not conductive to allowing intermediate statuses between
black and white people (Davis 1991).
Differential social status can be ascertained on a national and local-level
regarding race and poverty. Although whites comprise 75% of all those in
poverty, blacks have a higher concentration of people in poverty on a national-
level (Brunn and Wheeler 1971). However, the Hurricane Katrina disaster made
the connection between race and poverty crystal clear on a local-level in
Louisiana. The Orleans parish has a poverty rate of 23.2%, which ranks it
seventh amongst 290 US cities and is disproportionately represented by blacks as
they comprise 67% of the population, but 84% of those in poverty (Katz 2006).
Not only were black people more likely to be poor, but they were also more
likely to live in communities with extreme poverty rates, those communities with
a poverty rate above 40%, which New Orleans has 47 such communities (Katz
2006; Wilson 1996). However, the racial inequality comes into stronger focus as
it was found that 38 of the 47 extreme poverty communities were underwater
after the levies broke (Katz 2006).
The third part of this definition focuses on heredity in order to ascertain
the social status of Phipps, not cultural/physical difference, as is evidenced by the
use and enforcement of the “one drop rule.” This rule states that any person of
any know black ancestry is considered black (Spickard 1992; Davis 1980). So
30
even though Phipps could pass for white (Feagin and Feagin 1999), her heredity
was emphasized in order to place her socially.
The last part of the definition, using race to justify social inequality, is not
necessarily seen within the case itself, but in what happened after it. As evidence
was produced that stated that all white people in Louisiana were most likely 5%
black; this strongly suggested that if the “one drop rule” was vigorously applied
almost everyone in the state of Louisiana would be considered black! However,
rather than except this fate, legislators succeeded in repealing the law rather than
state that people previously understood as “white” should now be considered
“black” (Omi and Winant 1994).). This clearly demonstrates how racial
categories are socially constructed; because once the definition of the social elite
was put into question they simply changed the definition in order to maintain
racial categories and thus the social inequalities that happen as a result of them.
A Global Conceptualization of Race
Mara Loveman, in her article, “Is ‘Race’ Essential?” heavily criticizes the
tautological construction of racial analysis because of the assumption that
“races,” or racial categories, exist independent of a racialized society. Loveman
argues that the belief that races existed before a racialized state is a complete and
total falsehood, which I agree with, but this is not to say that racial groups do not
exist. I would also argue that it is not necessary to abandon the use of racial
31
categories of analysis in order to create a sociology of group making (Bonilla-
Silva 1997), because race is a type of group.
However, I believe what Lovemen is arguing is that if we give “credit”
for the creation of “race” to the Europeans, then that does not explain how other
countries, without European influence, have constructed similar groups; ones that
focus primarily on heritage and its connection to social placement. Although I
have already made an argument to include the enmity between the British and the
Irish as a racial project; in order to place race in a non-European context, I will
briefly examine the Eta people of Japan and demonstrate who this too is a racial
group and not an ethnicity.
The origins of the Eta are unknown, but the two prevailing theories are
that they are an outcast group of people of historically Hindu, Korean or Chinese
descent who worked the dirty jobs of Japanese society, i.e. tanning and butchery,
both of which were looked down upon by the Buddhist religion (Donoghue
1957). Although not physically distinct to the outsider from the rest of the
Japanese population, the Eta people are an egregiously socially, economically,
politically and religiously oppressed group that is constructed to be biologically
distinct and genetically inferior to Japanese people:
In such reports the Eta were generally referred to as being
biologically inferior and inherently criminal, and anti-social acts
in which they were involved were exaggerated, headlined, and
given prominence in news reports. (Smythe and Naitoh 1953, p.
25)
32
So close in likeness are the Eta to the Japanese that laws were passed that
established a dress code and hair style for the Eta people (Smythe and Naitoh
1953).
Although being associated with dirty jobs resulted in negative stereotypes
of this group as innately “dirty”, the evidence of a racial project is clearly
illustrated by their treatment within the social and legal institutions of Japan. In
reading the history of the Eta, one cannot help but to make the connection to
black people in the United States and Jim Crow laws. The Eta were seen as less
than human, or one seventh of one ordinary Japanese:
In one recorded instance in which a non-Eta killed an Eta, the
judge ruled that punishment against the accused could not be
carried out until at least seven Eta had been killed by the
defendant, since the life of one ordinary Japanese was equal to the
lives of seven Eta. (Smythe and Naitoh 1953, p. 22)

The Eta were considered biologically distinct and inferior to the point of creating
anti-miscegenation laws and the creation of an ideology that stated that one
would be unhappy and your children would suffer severe physical and mental
illnesses if one were to intermarry with them (Donoghue 1957).
Although officially freed August 28, 1871, the social construction of the
Eta as an inferior biological group led to discrimination in school, work, politics
and housing; however, this ill treatment paved the way to resistance by the Eta
that is highly reflective of how black people and other Americans fought for
Civil Rights:
33
As a result of this organized effort, violence ensued in several
parts of the country as the Eta attempted to enter public bath
houses and other public places, demanding equal treatment and to
insist on fairness to their children in public schools. (Smythe and
Naitoh 1953, p. 27)

Therefore, to move to a sociology of group making would include global
situations such as the Eta, but also acknowledge that these groupings are racial
constructs in their truest form.
The Social Construction of Race
As it is stated that race is a social construction, it becomes important to
describe how this is accomplished. The prevailing discourse in the social
sciences suggests that race is a social construction devoid of any predetermined
and inherent biological meaning (Lopez 1996, Lipsitz 1998, Nash 1997, Spickard
1992, Thornton 1992). Understanding race in this manner allows us to connect
how macro and micro-level forces give meaning to racial categories by assigning
social consequences to these groupings. But the question that is central to my
thesis is what about the racial categories themselves?
Race on a macro-level
The concept of race begins its official recognition within the United
States Constitution, and is immediately and inseparably linked to racial hierarchy
through the establishment of the Three-Fifths Compromise that states that slaves
should be counted as three-fifths of a person (Mezey 2003; Snipp 2003). Not
only was racial hierarchy established, but racial stratification soon followed as
34
advantages and privileges were given to people who were determined to be
white. In no place is this clearer than in the 1790 Naturalization Act which
stated that only “free, white persons” could become naturalized citizens of the
United States, which allowed whites the advantage of citizenship, the
accumulation of wealth and equality under the law (McGoveny 2003; Lopez
1996; Fong 1971).
These objective, quantifiable advantages that whites have in comparison
to non-whites have created what George Lipsitz calls a “possessive investment in
whiteness” where:
Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come
to individuals though profits made from housing secured in
discriminatory markets, through the unequal educations allocated
to children of different races, through insider networks that
channel employment opportunities to the relatives and friends of
those who have profited most from present and past racial
discrimination, and especially thought intergenerational transfers
of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination so
succeeding generations (Lipsitz 1998, p. vii)

Whiteness gives distinct advantages in the accumulation and transfer of wealth
(Oliver and Shapiro 1995), housing (Lipsitz 1998), jobs (Wilson 1996),
education (Kozol 2006; Steinberg 1995), the justice system (Cole 2006) and
politics (Saito 1998). Linking these discrepancies to the concept of race is where
many social scientists stop in regards to demonstrating how race is socially
constructed. However, what this represents is not what race is, but what the
35
consequences of race are and does not adequately challenge how racial
categories are formed in the first place.
Therefore, the social construction of race does not start with the
differential social rewards assigned to these groups, but in the actual construction
of them. In other words, who is white? Who is black? Who are Native
Americans and Asians? And where do these groups fit on the racial hierarchy?
These are the questions that begin the social construction process and are clearly
evidenced through a socio-historical analysis of the US Census and the legal
system.
The US Census
How we conceive of race creates the context for racism and the US
Census has played a central role in informing society of who is of what race, and
through this construction tells us who deserves what resources. The need for the
census arose out of the creation of distinct subordinate groups in the United State
Constitution, Indians and slaves, and our need to count them (Mezey 2003).
Although racial characteristics were always used as an indicator for one’s legal
and political status, these characteristics were explicitly introduced in 1820 when
the term color was added to the census (Snipp 2003). Even though racial
categories are themselves socially constructed in numerous ways, I will focus on
how multiracial people of black/white heritage were counted in the census to
demonstrate how this concept works.
36
Interestingly enough, it was during and immediately after slavery and
when people of multiracial black/white heritage were counted in the census.
1850 marked the first year mulattos were counted with 1890 adding the
categories of quadroon and octoroon, people of one quarter and one eighth black
heritage respectively (Snipp 2003; Mezey 2003). During this time period, many
people of black/white heritage had an intermediate social position between that
of white and black with the most notable group being the Creoles, a group mixed
with black, French and Spanish heritage where some even owned slaves (Borders
1988).
Unlike Indians and blacks, there was no legal or constitutional reason to
count mulattos besides them being so prolific on the American landscape, which
was also the main reason the Chinese were counted in California (Menzy 2003).
The counting of mulattos brings how racial categories are socially constructed to
the forefront as enumerators were instructed to use social status as a key to
interpreting a person’s racial category if they were physically ambiguous (Snipp
2003). What this means is that a person could be white, if and only if, they
were of the status of whites, in other words free. While if you looked white, but
were a slave then you were obviously black! Understanding the connection
between color and status ushered in the concept of passing, where a person that
would be socially considered black passes as white (Daniel 1992).
37
The social construction of race goes to a new level as one considers how
racial categories are affected by location. This is demonstrated by the fact that
the counts of Native Americans was reasonably accurate in areas where people
from this group were concentrated, but Native Americans were dramatically
undercounted in city environments because of the inability of enumerators to
identify them where concentrations were low (Snipp 2003). The association
between location and race was also taken advantage of by brown skinned
mulattos who gave themselves Spanish surnames and then moved to areas that
had a lot of Mexican Americans (Davis 1991). Understanding the relationship
between race and location allows Ian F. Haney Lopez to state, “While housing
patterns and citizenship have depended on race, the converse is true as well: race
often follows from neighborhoods and nationality.” (Lopez 1996, p. 120)
Race and the Legal System
Although a lot of history happened within these seventy years, two
significant events led to the subsuming of people of black/white heritage within a
black racial classification: Jim Crow laws and the establishment of race as
common sense. Immediately after the end of the Reconstruction period, a time
where people of African heritage experienced unprecedented social, economic
and political gains; white people created Jim Crow laws that were designed to re-
subjugate black people (Davis 1991). The creation of these laws demanded a
38
definition for who was considered black, which led to the legal institution of the
“one drop rule”.
No where was the creation of this rule more necessary than in the
enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws as many states tried to enforce fractional
amounts of black heritage, but ultimately accepted the “one drop rule” to enforce
the boundaries between the races (Hickman 2003). By instituting this rule,
counting people of black/white heritage as anything other than black became
superfluous, thus leading to the dropping of all multiracial categories from the
US Census by the year 1920 (Snipp 2003).
Although Jim Crow laws forced the legal system to reify racial categories
through the “one drop rule,” when pseudo-scientific means to discern between
the races began to breakdown the court played another key role by establishing
what is now the primary criteria for which the races will be based on: common
sense. In his book, White By Law, Ian F. Haney Lopez clearly demonstrates the
legal transition from understanding race as biology to understanding race as
common sense. In Ozawa v. United States, the US Supreme Court established
that Japanese were not white because the term “white persons” only pertained to
people who were commonly understood as being of the Caucasian race (Lopez
1996, p. 79). However, just three months later in the case of United States v.
Thind involving Asian Indians who are scientifically classified as Caucasian, the
Court completely backed off of a scientific understanding of race and made
39
common sense the sole criteria for judging whiteness (Ibid.). However, as will
be argued later, racial common sense is also breaking down as people are
becoming increasingly multiracial thus ushering in the need for “racial logic” to
determine the race of a person.
Race on a micro-level
Interestingly enough, the same instrument (the US Census) that is largely
responsible for creating a macro-level understanding of race is also responsible,
to what degree is debatable, in creating the battleground regarding how race
would be experienced on a micro-level. This occurred in 1960, when the Census
Bureau switched from enumerators to self-identification to obtain racial statistics
(Mezey 2003).
On the surface this does not seem all that significant, but in order to make
this shift two things had to occur. First, is that race was not as much about
physical difference as it was about cultural affinity (Snipp 2003). But second,
and most important, the common sense of race had to be socially, politically,
legally and economically established well enough in our society so that race
would now become a part of personal identity regardless of physical appearance.
Understanding the shift from enumerators to self-identification allows us to
connect how the US Census became the focus of people of multiracial heritage
and the parents of multiracial children regarding their political platform.
40
In 1977 the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Directive
15, which gave the US Census its primary racial categories; and advocacy for a
multiracial category started as early as 1988 (Snipp 2003; Spencer 1999). Two
groups, the Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans (AMEA) and Project RACE
(Reclassify All Children Equally) took the lead regarding the creation of a
multiracial category, and in 1997 partially succeeded by having the US Census
allow people to select more than one racial category to define their heritage
(Mezey 2003).
The reason for considering this a partial victory was that neither group
had originally advocated for a “mark all that apply” option as AMEA advocated
for a separate multiracial category with racial designations, while Project RACE
only advocated for a stand alone multiracial category (Spencer 1999). Although
the implications for each designation diverged on numerous levels, the unifying
idea behind creating a multiracial category is that people of multiracial heritage
all share a common racial experience. This assumption will be tested throughout
my research as I compare and contrast the lived lives of people of Asian/white
heritage to those of Asian/black heritage to see what experiences they have in
common and those they do not.
Another key assumption of these advocacy groups that will be challenged
is the eventual outcome of including people of multiracial heritage on the census.
Although AMEA is an advocacy group comprised of multiracial people and
41
Project RACE is a group comprised mainly of parents of multiracial children,
both groups believe, “…that a federal multiracial category will facilitate the
dismantling of the American racial construct.” (Ibid. p. 125) This belief is also
endorsed by David Hollinger who argues that multiracial people, especially those
of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage will eventually invalidate how we think
of race in the United States because of our lack of history in dealing with these
two groups (Hollinger 1995). However, this belief forms the foundation of
another driving question of this research; does the assertion of a multiracial
identity amongst people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage actually
challenge the concept of race?
It was these questions that facilitated the creation and ordering of the
chapters of my research. Chapter 2: “What Are You?” The Social Construction
of Multiracial People will speak directly to the social process that people are
taught and use on an everyday basis in order to interpret and understand the
concept of race. This chapter will focus on the seemingly ubiquitous “what are
you?” question and examine its context against the actual physical appearance,
social location and personal abilities of people of multiracial heritage. Chapter 3:
Race and Identity: Using Racial Logic to Construct the Self will consider the
arguments of Mary Waters in her book, Ethnic Options, to try and ascertain
whether race can be symbolic. This chapter will also discuss what factors
facilitate acceptance into particular racial/ethnic/social groups and whether this
42
acceptance is affected by racial heritage. Chapter 4: All in the Family: Learning
Racial Hierarchy from the Ones You Love will seek to connect the lived lives of
the parents with how their children experienced race and racism. Chapter 5:
“Can’t We All Just Get Along?” The External Context of Racial Identity
Formation looks into how people of Asian/white and Asian Black heritage
experience racism in our society and will compare the similarities and differences
of being mixed with being either white or black.

43
Chapter 2 Endnotes
1. Although I am sure that many would argue that this is not racist, I will only consider this
possibility when I read a medical article that states that white people’s insurance rates
have gone up because of their preponderance of getting skin cancer.

44
Chapter 3

Methodology

Why Asian/white and Asian/black people?

Interracial marriages and the multiracial people that follow from such
unions have been heralded as the ending of race and racism in our nation
(Spencer 1999; Hollinger 1995; Zack 1993), yet little has been made of the
enormous discrepancy regarding which groups Asians/Asian Americans are more
likely to intermarry. An examination of interracial marriage statistics strongly
suggest that these marriages follow our current racial hierarchy with black people
being grossly underrepresented in the statistics of who intermarries. Of the six
major Asian ethnicities in the United States, interracial marriage amongst black
people was about 1.5% of total marriages of foreign born Asians, while whites
represented approximately 27% (Le 2006). This suggests that foreign born
Asians are approximately eighteen (18) times more likely to interracially marry
someone who is white versus someone who is black. Of Asian Americans this
number increases even further with black people representing approximately
2.3% of interracial marriages with Asian Americans, while whites are
approximately 52% (Ibid.). This suggests that Asian Americans are about 22
times more likely to marry someone white rather than black. Since black people
represent about 13% and non-Hispanic white people represent about 67% of the
45
US population, the probability of an Asian person marrying a white person over a
black person should only be five (5) times greater (US Census 2000). Therefore,
what this strongly suggests is that the color line is being re-established within the
context of who marries interracially, and who does not.
In this dissertation I have interviewed a total of 32 respondents of
Asian/White and Asian/Black parentage with one parent identifying as Asian (1),
and the other parent identifying as either White or Black (2). This study focused
on people of Asian/White and Asian/Black heritage because of several factors.
First, the relative size of the mixed race Asian population cannot be numerically
understated. In the 1990 US Census, the reported number of children from
interracial households was 1,037,420, and nearly half of those children, 466, 590,
were in families that marked one parent as Asian and the other parent as White
(Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001). This number was even more astounding
when I considered the fact that Asian Americans only make up three percent of
the US population and that multiracial Asian/Black people were not considered
in the final number. The relative size of this population suggested that any
theoretical model that regarded how people of diverse racial heritage experience
race, necessitated additional research that situates multiracial Asians at the center
of analysis.
Acknowledging this reality ignited a series of articles that focused on the
factors that may influence how people of diverse Asian heritage developed a
46
racial identity in order to try and assess what the dramatic increase of multiracial
Asian children would mean to Asian communities. This body of research
identified many factors that influence, but do not determine, racial identity
development such as: family and peer influences (Bradshaw 1992, Hall 1992,
Jacobs 1992, Johnson 1992, Kich 1992, Mass 1992, Root 2001, Thornton and
Gates 2001, Williams 1992), racial and ethnic composition of neighborhood
(Fields 1996, Guevarra 2003, Hall 1992, Mass 1992, Root 2001), age of
respondent (Hall 1992, Root 2001), cultural knowledge (Bradshaw 1992,
Guevarra 2003, Hall 1992, Hall and Turner 2001, Root 2001, Standen 1996),
gender (Comas-Diaz 1996, Hall 1992, Hall and Turner 2001, Root 1992, Root
2001, Streeter 1996, Valverde 2001, Williams 1992), sexuality (Allman 1996,
Kich 1996, Twine 1996), names (Nakashima 2001), race of partner/spouse
(Gibbs and Hines 1992, Hall 1992, Twine 1996, Williams 1992) and phenotype
(Hall 1992, Hall and Turner 2001, Root 2001, Standen 1996, Williams 1992).
However, I argued throughout this dissertation that one of the fundamental
factors why a stronger relationship cannot be found in determining the racial
identity of a person of diverse Asian heritage lies in how current literature
conflates the concept of race and identity by suggesting that a person’s race is
something that one can choose.
Second, many multiracial activists, authors and scholars suggested that
the experiences of minority/minority mixed race individuals may be substantially
47
different that those of white/minority heritage, and that much research was
needed in this area (Hall 1996, Hall 2001, Thornton and Gates 2001, Hollinger
1993; 42, Kich 1992, Omi 2001, Omi and Winant 1996, Root 1992; 184, Root
2001, Waters 1990, Williams 1992). Although some research was done directly
regarding people of minority/minority heritage (Comas-Diaz 1996, Hall 1992,
Thornton 1992, Thornton and Gates 2001), these studies primarily focus upon
mental health and identity issues rather than racial experiences. The little
research that was done that used people of Asian/White and Asian/Black heritage
within their studies also focused on ethnic identification (Hall 2001, Williams
1992), rather than exploring how these two groups experience race in their
everyday lives and how those experiences may privilege whiteness.
And lastly, I focused on people of Asian/White and Asian/Black heritage
because it allowed the creation of a theoretical framework for understanding how
of people of multiracial heritage experience race that recognized issues of power,
especially as it pertained to white supremacy (Omi 2001; Winant 2001).
Although studies mentioned how being of Asian/White or Asian/Black heritage
could make a difference in how one choose an ethnic identity (Hall 2001,
Williams 1992), it was important to note that these projects do not recognize how
those choices were restricted at best, and forced at worst, because of the
privileging of white racial mixture over black. Therefore, I proposed a model for
research that put the experiences of multiracial Asians at the center of a
48
White/Black framework in order to led to a deeper understanding of how race is
socially constructed.
How the Sample was Generated?
Respondents were recruited through snowball sampling. I first used
personal networks of multiracial people and interracial families with adult aged
children to generate the first round of interviews. I then asked these respondents
for additional references including, but not limited to, siblings and personal
associates. This technique eliminated the possibility of a random sample;
therefore, this study will only be used to draw information that would allow for
the creation of a meaningful theoretical model that may later lead to more
positivistic results.
Snowball sampling was necessary because of several difficulties that
complicate finding people of multiracial heritage without the use of personal
networks. First, the number of people of diverse racial heritage was relatively
small (2.4% percent of the US population according to 2000 Census); therefore,
efforts to conduct research regarding this group required a more direct recruiting
approach (Williams 1996).
Second, personal knowledge of a person’s diverse racial heritage was
necessary, because many mixed race people do not “look” different, and/or do
not have any physically distinguishing characteristics that differentiated them
from any particular mono-racial group (4). This observation was important,
49
because any theoretical model that attempted to understand how people of
multiracial heritage experience race must include those persons who were
multiracial, but may have been racially ambiguous or completely like one
particular race. Therefore, this project did not randomly approach people who
looked multiracial in public spaces; even though it was possible to generate a
sample in this manner because this method would have eliminated the people of
diverse racial heritage who had a phenotype that would not differentiate them
from other racial groups.
Third, many people of multiracial heritage may have responded to ads in
newspapers or newsletters requesting multiracial subjects, because they did not
personally identify as multiracial (Hall 1992, William 1996, Thornton and Gates
2001). This reasoning was further supported, and complicated, by research that
convincingly demonstrated that people of diverse racial heritage have answered
ads that request mono-racial participants (Cauce, et al. 1992).
And fourth, but related to ad placement, was the question of which
newspapers should a researcher place ads asking for multiracial participants?
The researchers who have used ads to recruit multiracial Asian/Black subjects
have placed them in the local newspaper, but also in the local Asian American
newspaper (Hall 1992), and websites specializing in multiracial identity (Hall
and Turner 2001). This approach, however, may have over sampled people of
50
diverse racial heritage that identified as multiracial, and again, may not have
adequately represented those that categorize themselves mono-racially.
This study will not seek to exclude any person of diverse racial heritage
of a particular Asian ethnicity, i.e. a person cannot be of Japanese heritage,
however, this research may over sample and/or under sample certain Asian
ethnicities, because of the primary recruiting location of this project: San Diego
County, CA. Military personnel are known to interracially marry (Thornton
1992, Williams 1992, Root 2001), and San Diego County contains two military
bases, one of which is Camp Pendleton, the largest military base on the west
coast. The existence of these bases, along with the military bases in South
Korea, Japan, and Okinawa may generate a sample that could contain more
people of Korean and Japanese decent rather than people of Chinese, Filipino, or
South East Asian heritage. People of diverse Filipino heritage may be an
exception to this general rule, because of two major factors: first, the history of
the Philippines as a territory of the US facilitated the immigration of this group to
California and their use in the agricultural industry; and second, Filipinos are
currently allowed to join the military in order to become US citizens leading to a
relatively high number of Filipinos in the US Navy. These two factors combine
to generate a Filipino population in San Diego County that is the second largest
in the United States (Guevarra 2003), and may result in an over sample of this
group within this project. Finally, the relatively high frequency of marriage
51
between military men to Asian “war brides” may bias this sample towards people
of multiracial heritage with first generation, rather than second generation and
beyond, Asian mothers (Thornton 1992). However, rather than trying to reduce
the possibility of such unevenness; this study acknowledges these complications
and will attempt to incorporate these complexities into the proposed theoretical
model.
Social Demographics of Sample
Of the thirty-two (32) participants, sixteen (16) people of Asian/White
and sixteen (16) people of Asian/Black heritage were represented in this study.
The even recruitment of people of Asian/White and Asian/Black heritage was not
meant to be understood as a representative sample, for people who are
Asian/White by far exceeded the number of Asian/Black people (Hall and Turner
2001, Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001). However, since this study
attempted to analyze the differences of how a multiracial Asian person of White
or Black heritage experiences race, it was necessary to over sample people of
Asian/Black heritage in order to make meaningful comparisons between these
two populations.
Giving the demographic information of my group is not an effort to make
general statements as it is an effort to give the reader a ready context to help
understand the various social situations that the people in my sample may have
experienced. The average age of my sample was twenty-nine (29) years old, but
52
my Asian/white group was considerably younger on average (24.6 years old)
than the Asian/black group (33.8 years old). Of my sample twenty-three (23)
respondents where born in the United States, while seventeen (17) visited and
twelve (12) lived their foreign parent’s homeland. Twenty-six (26) people had
foreign born mothers, with a racial breakdown of: three (3) white, one (1) black,
fifteen (15) Japanese, two (2) Chinese and nine (9) Filipino.
Twenty-four (24) people had a father in the military, with twenty-seven
(27) of them being born in the United States. This was expected given the area I
drew my sample. I did ask which parent was in the military, but all the responses
were that the father was the one in the military. The most frequently identified
branch for fathers was as follows: fifteen (15) Marine Corps, six (6) Navy, one
(1) Army and one (1) Air Force. This breakdown makes more sense given that
the largest Marine Corp bases, Camp Pendleton, is located in Northern San
Diego County. The racial breakdown for fathers was: eleven (11) white, fifteen
(15) black, two (2) Japanese, one (1) Chinese and one (1) other Asian.
Participants were also recruited evenly in accordance to gender so that
there would be eight (8) men and eight (8) women in each group. The even
gender distribution was in response to current literature that strongly suggested
that being male or female may effect how a person of diverse racial heritage
experiences race (Allman 1996, Comas-Diaz 1996, Hall 1992, Hall and Turner
2001, Root 1992, Root 2001, Streeter 1996, Valverde 2001, Williams 1992).
53
Lastly, all respondents were at least 18 years old in order to try and eliminate the
trials of adolescence from this project (Hall 1992, Thornton and Gates 2001).
How Data was Gathered
In depth interviews with basic demographic, open ended, and Likert-scale
questions were used in order to develop a theoretical framework that gave greater
understanding of how people of Asian/White and Asian/Black heritage
experienced race in their everyday lives. Basic demographic questions included
variables such as age, parent’s birth country, and whether they ever lived in their
foreign parent’s birth country. Open ended questions asked how the respondent
identified themselves racially and what their basic social relationships were with
other racial and social groups. The Likert-scale questions pertained to how the
respondent felt they and others perceived their race, what racial groups did they
feel accepted by, and how much did they identified with their parents racial
groups (See Appendix A). Questions for the parents were similar to those asked
of people of multiracial heritage (See Appendix B). These questions sought to
gain a deeper understanding of the influences that institutions, social location,
family, perceived acceptance/rejection, and social understandings of race have
upon people of multiracial heritage.

54
Chapter 3 Endnotes
1) I use Asian, and not Asian American, because of this study’s focus upon how people of
diverse racial heritage experience race; not how they negotiate their cultural identity,
which is the immediate connotation of Asian American.

2) Black is admittedly acknowledged as an inherently multiracial classification, while
White is considered pure and unmixed (Davis 1991, Zack 1993). Therefore, this study
will include participants with multiracial Black parents who are not immediately
multiracial and do not have a multiracial consciousness.

3) I use the phrase “any particular mono-racial group” to not limit the scope of multiracial
people’s phenotypes. The reason for this is because people of diverse Asian/White
heritage are often physically identified as Latino (Hall and Turner 2001, Williams 1992,
Williams 1996), while people of Asian/Black heritage are often identified as Polynesian
and Middle Eastern (Williams 1992). Therefore, it is possible that people of diverse
racial heritage experience race in a manner that does not reflect their immediate racial
heritage.

55
Chapter 4
“What Are You?”
How Multiracial People Construct an Internal Racial Identity

What is a Racial Identity?
Rogers Brubaker and Fredrick Cooper (2000) speak to the seeming
contradiction of developing an operational definition of identity that allows for
fluidity, but can still address “essentialist” movements:
We argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity – the
attempt to “soften” the term, to acquit it of the charge of
“essentialism” by stipulating that identities are constructed, fluid,
and multiple – leaves us without a rationale for talking about
“identities” at all and ill-equipped to examine the “hard” dynamics
and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics.
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 1)

Although the authors suggest that the manner to bypass this paradox is by
conceptualizing identity as simultaneously a category of practice (soft) and a
category of analysis (hard), I argue that the inability to separate “soft” and “hard”
identities is the result of the conflation of a cultural identity with a racial identity.
Walter Benn Michaels (1994) addresses the difference between cultural
identity and racial identity by examining the ubiquitous case of Susie Guillory
Phipps. The author states that Phipps’ cultural identity should be white because
she had always thought of herself as white and had married twice as white, but
that her racial identity was determined by the court as “colored:”
“Individual racial designations are purely social and cultural
perceptions”, the court said; the relevant question, then, was not
56
whether those perceptions correctly registered some scientific fact
(since the court denied there was any relevant scientific fact) but
whether they had been “correctly recorded” at the time the birth
certificate was issued. Since in the court’s judgment they had
been, Phipps and her fellow appellants remained “colored.”
(Michaels 1994, p. 764)

With this understanding, Michaels strongly criticizes the desire of constructivists
to replace racial identity with cultural identity because of the fundamental
difference in how they are used in our society:
I criticize the idea of antiessentialist accounts of identity, which is
to say that I criticize in particular the idea of cultural identity as a
replacement for racial identity. My central point is that for the
idea of cultural identity to do any work beyond describing the
beliefs people actually hold and the things they actually do, it
must resort to some version of the essentialism it begins by
repudiating…. For insofar as your culture no longer consists in the
things you actually do and believe, it requires some link between
you and your culture that transcends practice. That link, I argue,
has, in the United States, characteristically been provided by race.
(Michaels 1994, p. 758)

In other words, cultural identity is tied to the things that people do and can be
fluid, but racial identity is a constrained, if not altogether forced, identification
that implies an essence that a person has or does not have. Michaels’
conceptualization strongly implies that racial identities are fixed along a
white/black continuum, but does this also apply to Asian/white and Asian/black
people?
Understanding how cultural identity and racial identity are assumed to be
the same thing is the key that connects current multiracial literature to identity
politics. Pearl Fuyo Gaskins, in her book, What are you? Voices of Mixed-Race
57
Young People, used her book to explore the meaning of race and how racial
identities were constructed. Her work used poetry, photographs, essays and
interviews with people of multiracial heritage to give voice to a movement that
had been long in the making. Gaskins focused her attention on the lived
experiences of people of multiracial heritage by addressing the ubiquitous
question that all multiracial people seemed to have faced at one time or another,
and in one form or another; “What are you?” The encountering of this question
was also true with all thirty-two of the people that I interviewed.
While powerful and thought provoking in the manner in which it was
handled, equating cultural identity to racial identity limits understanding of the
lived lives of multiracial people because of its inability to connect the “what are
you” question to racialized social structures. Because of this, the multiracial
project only addresses why multiracial people are asked this question on an
individualistic basis rather than linking it to how we understand race on a societal
level. In other words, rather than solely focusing on a multiracial person’s
response to this question, my research will place the responses within a racial
formations framework.
The Fluidity of Identity
The fluidity of identity can be seen in Mary C. Waters book, Ethnic
Options, which examines the effects of assimilation on the ethnic identity of
whites of European heritage that were of the Roman Catholic faith. Although
58
assimilation theories suggest that the decrease of structural forces, i.e. residential
segregation and interethnic marriage, would result in the casting away of one’s
ethnic identity in favor of a more universal “American” identity, what Waters
uncovers in her research is that a majority of later-generation white people still
identify with an ethnic group. Although some would argue that the claiming of
an Irish ethnicity is non-problematic (Greenberg 1999; Mulderink 1996), Waters
maintains that white ethnicity is highly symbolic in nature suggesting that white
ethnic identification is largely a leisure or recreational activity with no real social
consequences, i.e. wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day. “In other words, for later-
generation white ethnics, ethnicity is not something that influences their lives
unless they want it to (emphasis in the original).” (Waters, 1990, p.7)
Waters’ focus on white ethnics begs the question as to whether
multiracial people would somehow use their heritage in a symbolic manner. This
is a question that she suggests herself in her concluding remarks and states that
what is flexible, symbolic or voluntary for middle-class whites may not be so for
people of color:
For the ways in which ethnicity is flexible and symbolic and
voluntary for white middle-class Americans are the very ways in
which it is not so for non-white and Hispanic Americans. Thus
the discussions of the influence of looks and surname on ethnic
choice would look very different if one were describing a person
who was one-quarter Italian and three quarters African American
or a woman whose married name changed from O’Connell to
Martinez. The social and political consequences of being Asian or
Hispanic or black are not symbolic for the most part, or voluntary.
They are real and often hurtful (156).
59
Although considerate of racial dynamics, Waters does not adequately explain
why she should expect multiracial people to act any differently than multiethnic
whites if people of multiracial heritage are experiencing much of the same de-
structualization that interethnic whites have experienced. So the driving question
of this chapter becomes; is the racial identity of people of Asian/white and
Asian/black heritage something that they can treat in a symbolic manner?
Assimilation and Racial Identity
Building upon the work of David Harris and Jeremiah Sim regarding
racial identities amongst multiracial people, I will use their framework of
internal, external and expressed racial identities to analyze the experiences of
people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage. Internal racial identities are
what an individual believes about their own race, external racial identity are what
other’s think of the multiracial person’s race, and expressed racial identity, which
I will used interchangeably with cultural identity, are the words and actions that
convey beliefs about a multiracial person’s race (Harris and Sim 2002). In this
chapter I will focus on internal racial identities and then develop external and
expressed racial identities in the next chapter.
Although presented as separate analytical spaces, the authors
acknowledge how these identities may influence each other in a convoluted,
complicated and even a contradictory manner. Adding to the racial identity
literature, I will argue throughout this chapter that the development of a racial
60
identity, one that is biologically understood and socially enforced, is at best
inconsistent, and at worst contradictory to an assimilationist framework because
of the inherit hierarchy between the races. It will also be argued through the next
three chapters that if the assimilation process is applicable to racial categories,
then as “Americanization” process unfolds then there should be evidence of a
converging racial identity towards Anglo-conformity or a melting pot identity
(Hirschman 1983).
Re-creating Racial Categories and the Establishment of Racial Logic
Although the essence of the “what are you” question is to figure out a
person’s race, understanding this concept within a racial formations framework
uncovers the deeper meaning behind this question; the desire of the person
asking the question to apply “racial logic” to the person of multiracial heritage in
order to figure out where they fit within the racial hierarchy. Racial logic builds
upon what is currently understood as racial common sense, which gives meaning
to racial categories (Hunt 1999; Lipsitz 1998; Lopez 1996; Omi and Winant
1994); however racial logic is the mechanism by which we construct the
categories themselves. Racial logic is necessary in order to bring together
existing common sense and develop a new understanding of people of multiracial
heritage; how they should be seen, how they should be interpreted, how should
they be categorized and most importantly how they should be treated. Therefore
this chapter will explore the hidden, or not so hidden, meaning behind why the
61
people in my sample are asked the “what are you” question, and how this
question is rooted in how race is reified, (re)interpreted, and (re)enforced through
the everyday interactions of people of the Asian/white and Asian/black heritage
in my study.
The “What are You” Question and the Application of Racial Logic
Every person that I interviewed was asked a variation of what they were
at differing times in a given relationship and with varying levels of frequency.
Race is primarily, if not solely understood as a public display (Hunt 1999; S. Hall
1997); however, if a person is in anyway ambiguous in their phenotype, there are
multiple ways to try and identify a person’s race. The most direct manner to find
out someone’s race is to just ask them, which is what Margaret has to deal with
on a daily level as people struggle with her external racial identity. This struggle
becomes evident as she is asked by complete strangers without a proper
introduction what she is:
Margaret (abf 46 [1]) - Yes, they stop me in the street. People I
don't even know asked me… I'll be in a store and people ask me
all the time what my nationality is constantly. People ask me all
the time and it's a little disturbing. It's really strange; if other
people walk down the street do people asked them if they're Irish
Italian (laugh)? But when I walk down the street I warrant
everyone asking me what nationality I am.

This statement clearly situates Margaret’s understanding of race as equivalent to
ethnicity as she equates being asked about her race to a person being asked if
they are “Irish Italian.” Perhaps understanding race as ethnicity makes her
62
believe that being asked about her race is “strange,” because a person’s ethnicity
is not always on display, nor is it of any major concern when one is regarded as
white (Waters 1990). However, understanding that the roots of this question are
rooted in how racial categories are socially constructed allows the frequent “what
are you” questions to be connected to her racial ambiguity. This connection is
strongly supported by Gaskins (1999) work as the people in her sample
continuously faced people who were not sure of what race the multiracial person
in question was, to the point were this question became the foundation for a
multiracial identity.
Thinking of race as ethnicity is made easy because people are asking
Margaret what her nationality is rather than asking directly about her race.
However, it becomes clear that people want to know her race when I asked her
why she believes people question her so often:
Margaret (abf 46) – It’s because no one can figure out what I am
(laugh). I don't look black. If anything Asian people tend to think
I'm some type of Asian, like Filipinos think I'm Filipino. Now
that I'm thinking about it Hispanics might think I'm Hispanic. No
one can figure me out, and my mom is laughing in the background
when I said that (laughs).

The statement that “no one can figure out what I am,” begs the question as to
why people need to figure out what she is in the first place? This is another
recurrent theme in the work of Gaskins, as people of multiracial heritage in her
sample are quoted as wondering why their racial designation is the business of
other people in the first place. Part of the solution may lie in the idea that racial
63
minorities try to find/identify people of their own racial category, which would
help in explaining why Filipinos think that Margaret is Filipino and Hispanics
think that she is Hispanic. It could also be that people of these particular racial
groups have a far broader range regarding how people of their particular race
look.
However, I argue that this quote actually describes how racial categories
are socially constructed as her “what are you” experiences announce how other
people are using racial logic in order to figure out her race rather than her
nationality or ethnicity. Since race is read off of the body, what Margaret is
experiencing is people’s angst over her racial ambiguity not her expressed
identity, which in her case is American.
For Sabrina the context of the “what are you” question usually happens
while she works at a hair salon:
Sabrina (awf 49 [2]) - It’s mainly in my business; I work at a hair
salon and we see people all the time. When I do their hair, we talk
and ask where are you from? And I would say guess (laughs). I
usually tell them to guess, and they say Hawaiian but never
Okinawan or American… I’m okay with it. I’ve pretty much
been asked that my whole life.

Although Sabrina has come to accept this question as a part of her life, I was left
wondering, why? Why would people ask her this question in her workspace? Is
there a racial connection to be made? Perhaps it is because of the common
practice for people to have their hair cut by people of the same race or ethnicity
that prompts this question in this space? I wonder if her customers were
64
uncomfortable with having someone that they could not racially identify cutting
their hair, and if there was an answer that they would have considered
unacceptable?
Something else that deserves more attention regarding how racial
categories are socially constructed by people guessing Sabrina’s race is the fact
that they never guessed her as American. Maybe this was assumed within the
framework of her being guessed as Hawaiian; however, I find it much more
likely that her customers more readily identify being American with being white.
Therefore, since Sabrina does not look “white” then she must be “foreign.”
Connecting Racial Identity to Biology
Partially because of the multiracial project’s ability to develop multiracial
role models for today’s multiracial people, i.e. Tiger Woods, Derrick Jeter,
Mariah Carey, Prince and Jay-Z to name a few, when asked the question, “How
do you identify yourself racially?” twenty-two of thirty-two respondents reported
an internal multiracial identity. Biological considerations were clearly
demonstrated as multiracial respondents explained why they stated their heritage
on the second most intrusive manner of soliciting racial information to their
internal racial identity: government forms.
For Patty and John notions of their internal racial identity are rooted so
deeply in biology that they are offended when government forms state to only
choose one of their races for identification purposes:
65
Patty (awf 35) - I’m Japanese and American. I am part of my
mom and part of my dad. Putting it down on that paper makes me
have to choose between them. I’d rather just leave it blank
because I’m part of both of them.

John (abm 33 [3]) - When I identify myself racially sometimes I
get offended because they tell me I can only pick one, but then I
tell them that I'm black and Filipino. If I were to only say one I
would feel discriminated, so I tell them I'm black and Filipino.

The socialization to biological claims to both heritages even leads to a certain
level of civil disobedience by Theo who puts black and Filipino as his racial
identity no matter what the form he is filling out instructs:
Theo (abm 33) - I don’t really think about it I just go ahead and
mark Black and Asian even though it says mark one. Every
application I fill out, I just mark Black and Asian and don’t think
about it I just did it. Even if it says choose one, I choose two
because that is what I am.

The claiming of both parents racial heritage is one of the main
components of the multiracial project, because for the large majority of United
States history we have used hypo-descent, also known as the “one drop rule,” to
determine a multiracial black person’s racial identity (Davis 1991, Nakashima
1992). This historical understanding of racial categories puts extreme social,
political, and legal pressure on a person to claim one racial heritage, most notably
the non-white racial category (Mezey 2003; Snipp 2003). Therefore, for twenty-
two people to claim a multiracial identity suggests how strong the multiracial
project has become in recent years. However, the reliance on biology to tell a
person “what they are” is problematic to the process of assimilation, which tries
66
to equalize and blend social differences (Hwang, Saenz and Aguirre 1997),
because if biology is what we “are” is it possible to “blend” that away?
The Essentials of Race
The keys to using racial logic to figure out a person’s race are grounded
in essentialist notions of what specific races are supposed to look like and what
would should be carried over when people of multiracial heritage are created.
The most common identifying characteristics are skin color, eye shape, height,
hair, noses, lips and overall body shape (Hall and Turner 2001; Root 2001).
These essentialist notions of race would explain the recognizable pattern of
people frequently guessing multiracial people as mono-racial categories.
Although the person asking the question may have picked up on certain physical
or mental characteristics, most of the essentialist ideas of race were emphasized
and (re)enforced as the multiracial person constructed an internal racial identity.
On looking Asian
When socially constructing the physical appearance of Asians having
almond-shaped eyes, yellow skin tones, straight black hair and being petite were
universally understood as Asian characteristics. Mandy states that her body type
is the primary reason why people ask her about her heritage:
Mandy (awf 19) - When I meet people, most people, the first time
meeting someone they say, what are you? Or are you part Asian?
A lot of times people know and they will say, you are half
Chinese, because they are half Chinese. I think it’s my hair and
my body type because I am petite. It is just the way I look. My
eyes and skin tone.
67
Mary uncovers that, although she believes that most people see her as white,
when she dyed her hair black that allowed more people to see her Japanese
heritage more clearly:
Mary (awf 23) - Like when I tan, my skin is more yellow and my
eyes are more Japanese to me, my mom, but it’s not very
prominent. I have some features, my hair isn’t one of them but
when I dyed my hair black people can see it.

Jane drives home the point that straight hair is an Asian characteristic, because
people will identify her as different races based on whether she straightened her
hair that day:
Jane (abf 24) - It depends on how I do my hair (laugh)…
However, there is this is wonderful invention called the flat iron
(laugh) and so if I have an hour of time then I will flat iron my
hair. It actually comes out really nice. I have really long hair; it
comes down to the middle of my back. If I flat iron my hair I will
have people coming up to me speaking Filipino, Spanish, or other
languages depending on whether they can see the fuzz or not.

After eyes, skin color, straight black hair and being petite some
interesting ethnic variations manifest themselves. Esssentialist notions of Asian
people as petite become crystal clear if a person of multiracial heritage is not
“petite.” Although I did not interview people who where of Pacific Islander
heritage, Josh and John found that people most often guessed that they were of
this particular heritage because of their large size:
Josh (awm 18 [4]) - People mostly categorized as Pacific
Islanders because I am large, when you are large people naturally
say he is Pacific Islander like Samoan or anything like that
because they have the same color skin and they are just bigger.
68
John (abm 33) - Like let's say a fine young lady comes up to me
and asked me my nationality I will go ahead and tell them that I'm
black and Filipino, because I do have features that a lot of people
will mistake as Samoan (laugh). So I have to let them know what
I am.

While an essential characteristic for Filipinos is a flat nose:
Theo (abm 33) - I got the Filipino flat nose. My mom used to tell
me I have the Filipino nose.

Lenny (awm 22) - Well my dad, he is a big White dude and has a
big nose, so I have his nose. Not a Filipino mashed nose.

However, the question that I pose in this space is whether any racial
characteristics are uniquely of a specific race? Do other groups have almond-
shaped eyes? Do other groups of people have petite bodies or straight black
hair? If so, then what does it mean for us to insist that one group of people has a
monopoly on such body characteristics?
Although most of the people that I interviewed would agree to these
essentialist traits, James begins to question the idea that Asians have a particular
skin tone when he notices that many Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics and
whites have similar complexions:
James (awm 22) - My skin color should be perceived as Asian
but there are Hispanics the same color, African Americans that are
the same color they are real light. There are white people that
have the same color…

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This observation supports why biology, anthropology and sociology have
disposed of biological classifications of race and situated this concept within the
realm of social construction (Parker and Song 2001; Root 1996; Spickard 1992).
On looking white
Interestingly enough, after lighter skin color, whiteness was usually
described in comparison to being Asian, rather than as a stand alone essentialized
racial category. Mary does this by comparing her hair color and height to what
would be considered Asian:
Mary (awf 23) - Here I don’t think they really see me as Japanese
at all. They say oh you have a Japanese mom but with the culture
it is very much appearance. In America, they say all Asians look
the same but I'm 5'8" and don't have black hair, and so I don't
think I'm identified as Japanese… I look much more like my dad.
I just have darker hair and he isn’t that much taller than I am like
5'11". I have a shorter torso and Asians have a longer torso and
longer legs. I think I look more white.

However, what Mary does not seem to mention is that there are white people that
have black hair and that not all white people are as tall as her. By not stating
white within clear physical terms suggests that she understands and
acknowledges the diversity within whiteness, but not within being Asian.
On looking black
Skin color and hair texture were the most prominent physical features
used to identify black people (Hall and Turner 2001; Root 2001). Although Theo
thought that he looked like his mother and his father, he acknowledges how his
skin tone and afro definitely locate his race as black for himself and other people:
70
Theo (abm 33) - The afro is from being Black. I've got the tone I
have a little bit of my mom’s eyes. I have my dad's tone, I have
exactly my dad's tone. I have both of their characteristics. My
dad is the Black may would tell me the Afro and my dad's tone
from my mom I had her eyes and nose. Pretty much when I look
in the mirror I see black, I see black and Filipino, I see both my
mom and dad. My skin tone was just like my dad's, my dad was
black, but he has my tone.

A characteristic that was used to categorize being black for women were
their figures, namely the size and shape of their hips. Sumi suggests that her hips
are bigger than usual because of her black heritage.
Sumi (abf 20) - My hips are bigger than usual and so is my butt.
And my thighs are. My facial features aren’t so Asian. I look at
my brother’s picture, and he is darker-skinned than I am, but he
has more Asian facial features. That’s how I can tell I look Black.

But what does “bigger than usual” mean? Who is she comparing herself to,
Japanese women or just women in general? So does this mean that any woman
with big hips is of black heritage?
Although Reiko gives “credit” for her hips to her black heritage, she
makes a connection between her mother’s figure and her figure that deserves
deeper analysis:
Reiko (abf 20) - When I tell people I'm half black they say I don't
look it, but they comment on my figure (laugh). So I have to give
my credit to something… Well, I don't want to say black, but most
women who are minorities are curvy people and if you look at
Japanese women they are very thin. Well, they can be curvy, but
not as curvy as African-American people and my mom is a very
curvy woman and I have her curves (laugh).

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What if Reiko’s mother was white and had big hips, would someone like Reiko
suggests that her hips come from being black or that they come from her mother?
Upon closer examination, the pattern that comes to the surface is that when
multiracial people look like one parent or the other, they assume that those
particular characteristics are essential to their parent’s race, rather than just
regular genetic variability. Although Fine et al. (2006) state that race is not an
adequate means to address human variation, Reiko’s comments reveal how much
she depends on the concept of race to explain her individual variations.
The Influences of Phenotype on Internal Racial Identity
Regarding the development of an internal racial identity, Harris and Sim
(2002) state that, “Although these identities need not be identical, they are not
independent of each other.” (Harris and Sim 2002, p. 615) The interdependence
of internal and external racial identities became evident in the racial
identification of Mandy who identified herself as multiracial because she
believes she looks multiracial to herself and to others, even though she identified
culturally with being white:
Mandy (awf 19) – I always say I am half Chinese. I really do
characterize myself as being more White… But I tell people
Asian because they can tell I’m mixed with something, but I think
of myself as pretty much white.

This strongly suggests that Mandy would not identify as multiracial at all if her
phenotype did not “give her away.” This statement is further substantiated by
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Ron who believes that he looks white to other people and therefore chooses to
state that he is white in order to keep things simple:
Ron (awm 33) - I usually don’t, but more often I go with White.
When I have the chance, I might say, I don't usually say Asian-
American because I take that for Asians who were born in the
United States. I don’t have a good classification for myself unless
they give me mixed, White and Asian. Then I'll go with that. It
always seemed to be more complicated so usually pick White.

When asked why he did this, Ron believed it stemmed from his desire to not be
different than the other white children he was growing up with at the time:
Ron (awm 33) - I think when I was younger; I didn’t want to so
be different. Especially where I grew up there weren’t many
Asians, and I think it was just generally easier to fit in and say
White to make a lot of things less complicated. That would be my
main motivation. Growing up here, I felt more White so it was
easier, and I had less explaining to do.

Mary is viewed as just white and yet has a strong Japanese cultural
identity because she spent the first ten years of her life in Japan:
Mary (awf 23) - I define myself more Japanese just because I
spent the first 10 years of my life there. My mom pretty much
raised me; my dad was on deployment most of the time we were
with my mom’s side of the family. So from everything I know
from right and wrong to how I do the dishes I learned in Japan.
Therefore, I consider myself very Japanese… I look much more
like my dad… I think I look more white.

Mary suggests that how white she looks is so over powering that she only checks
off white as her race because she does not look Japanese:
Mary (awf 23) - That comes a lot from I just don’t look it, if I had
any or more Asian traits I probably could identify myself with
being more Asian, but it is very specifically Japanese in the way I
identify myself. I don’t feel comfortable putting Asian on there. It
73
is easily for me to put Caucasian or white whatever they put on
there one of the two.
The experiences of Mandy, Ron and Mary show how their internal racial
identity was influenced by how they look to themselves and how they perceive
they look to others. This data does not support Waters’ (1990) assumption that
racial differences would limit their internal racial identity to the non-white racial
group. Interestingly enough, the experiences of Mandy and Ron suggest that for
them being of Chinese or Japanese heritage operated essentially the same as a
symbolic ethnicity. Lived experiences such as these heavily support the idea
that the Americanization process allows people of Asian/white heritage to
construct an internal and/or external racial identity that converges on Anglo
conformity.
Convergence for Asian/black people?
Although the people of Asian/black heritage in my sample simplified
their racial heritage, they were much less likely to simplify themselves down to a
single racial category. Tyrone talked about simplifying his racial heritage from
black, Native American, Filipino and Chinese to just black and Filipino:
Tyrone (abm 28) - Usually when people ask what I am, I say
Black and Filipino. My mom is actually Filipino and Chinese; her
mom was Filipino and her dad was Chinese. My dad is Black and
Cherokee Indian. I don’t throw all that extra stuff in there though.
So when people ask, I say Black and Filipino.

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While, Aiko also simplified her racial heritage to just black and Japanese after
asking her relatives and receiving a complicated web of possible races with no
apparent certainty:
Aiko (abf 35) - But we talk to relatives and found that my
grandmother was part white and how that got there was my great,
grandmother was raped by a master. And that was like, oh my
God, because where the product of slave masters right in our
bloodline. Then we asked who our grandfather was, and my
grandmother is pretty out there, and she said he was Puerto Rican
from New York, but everyone else said he was Negro. So
Grandma is black, but then I find that she is black, white and
Cherokee Indian. So I thought am I ever going to get a straight
answer, but there really wasn't a demand on me knowing because
race isn't a big deal to me. But as I've gotten older I have
wondered what it is.

Although people of Asian/black heritage seemed to be just as willing to
simplify their racial identity as people of Asian/white heritage, Lamont was the
only person of Asian/black heritage that stated his racial identity as black, but he
did so because he believed that other people largely viewed him as black:
Lamont (abm 29) - Socially, I ‘m black, I'm African-American.
But to be honest sometimes I feel like we are a people all of our
own. But yeah, I'm black… Just outwardly, if anyone here
looked at me I'm technically black… Most Caucasian people look
at me as a black guy.

However, Lamont makes a very interesting observation regarding how he
perceives others see him. He states that in his personal experiences that black
people, unlike all other racial groups, normally can identify that he is not full
black:
75
Lamont (abm 29) - Black people wouldn’t see me as just Black,
they know something else is there… Black people look at my hair
and bone structure. They know who is full Black and who is not
for the most part. That's what I've experienced.

These two quotes together deserve more analysis as to the reason why he is
stating that he is “technically black.” Lamont is connecting his internal racial
identity to how he looks, but is also connecting it to what Caucasian people think
rather than black people. Therefore, Lamont is acknowledging that his personal
experiences have led him to understand that it is the opinion of what white
people think his race is that is a driving force in his internal racial identity.
How Margaret identified herself racially presents a possibility of a
melting pot identity. When asked what her race is, Margaret stated:
Margaret (abf 46) – Just a person, a human being, I do not
identify myself as anything but human. If someone asked me my
nationality I will tell them but I just see myself as the human. I
don't split myself off into any other category…. Because I'm just
like everyone else, I just happen to have a unique makeup but I'm
just like everybody else. I'm not different than anybody else no
matter if they are Hispanic, white, black, or Japanese. I do not
consider myself a race, I'm just a person.

Margaret takes what Hollinger (1995) calls a post-ethnic approach to her racial
identity. Hollinger states that a post-ethnic perspective remains alert to
differences in ethnicities, but does not use the rigidity that is found with racial
constructs. Margaret demonstrates this perspective by acknowledging her race
when others ask her directly, but makes an effort to move internal identity from
any racial constraints.
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These experiences substantiate the claim that Davis (1991) makes that
approximately 70% of African Americans are multiracial and gives further
evidence of how the one drop rule works. Tyrone’s father is black and Native
American, but he simplifies it to black. Aiko’s father could be any combination
of black, Hispanic, white and Native American, but simplifies her father’s
heritage as black. Lamont’s heritage is black, Native American and Filipino, but
he simplifies it to just black. This clearly demonstrates the continued social
importance of identifying and being identified as black in our society. Therefore,
unlike people of Asian/white heritage, the people of Asian/black heritage in my
sample did not move towards a racial identity consistent with Anglo conformity,
but in the case of Margaret, there is some evidence that their could be a
movement towards a melting pot model of racial identity.
Strategic Race: Seeing Internal Racial Identity as Strategic
The use of strategic race contradicts the notion that multiracial people are
drawing closer to an Anglo or melting pot type of racial identity. Although
Waters (1990) suggests that race would have more of an effect on the lives of
people of multiracial heritage, there were distinct cases where a person’s Asian
heritage specifically took on a symbolic quality, but with precise strategic
purposes. Strategic race differs from symbolic ethnicity in two significant ways.
First, symbolic ethnicity uses ethnic heritage to justify certain symbolic acts of
ethnic heritage, while strategic race uses biology to make claims into specific
77
spaces, but does not necessarily carry with it any cultural behaviors of that race.
Second, people that use their ethnicity in a symbolic manner do so without a
presumed fear of social consequences, while the people who assert their race
strategically do so because of the social consequences that they expect to happen
as a result of their assertions.
The strategic use of race and racial identity becomes even clearer in the
cases of Jane, Richard, Josh, and Mary who identified their race in openly
calculated and premeditated ways. Although Jane identifies herself as
multiracial, she has claimed a Japanese identity in order to apply for a
scholarship:
Jane (abf 24) - In a specific instance, I put down my Japanese
heritage because I was applying for a scholarship and you had to
be at least 1/8 Japanese in order to receive it. So I knew I was half
Japanese, and I actually did get the scholarship which was nice. It
was for a Japanese woman's club.

Richard remembers discussing which race he should identify as with the
people around him and they suggested that he claim his Filipino heritage so that
he would be considered a minority on his college applications:
Richard (awm 31) - My mother is Filipino. If I was to go
percentage wise, I am Filipino. My dad is American Indian. As I
was growing up in Ramona, people would tell me to check the
Filipino box on applications because that would make me a
minority.

However further discussion with his college counselor, suggested that he should
select Native American even though he is only one fourth Native American:
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Richard (awm 31) - Going to college being Filipino is not really
a minority, especially in this area, when I saw the check box for
American Indian I would talk to counselors and they would say
select that. Now when they ask what I am, I put down those
two… I was talking to a counselor, and from my understanding,
at UCSD there are more Filipinos in the area and not so many
Native Americans. I asked which one would be a better chance
for me to get in, and he said Native American would be better.

Although Richard is not lying about his racial heritage, it seems that he asserts
his racial identity for purely strategic purposes because he states himself that he
has no cultural connection to his Filipino and Native American heritages:
Richard (awm 31) - I don’t understand their culture; I wasn’t
raised in that environment. I don’t have any Filipino friends who
aren’t’ what I call “Americanized”. I don’t go to the parties, don’t
speak the language. The one thing that I would agree that I am
Filipino is when I put the check marks in the boxes for
applications because that is what I call myself… If I chose what
category to be into, I would say I am more Filipino than American
Indian. I only put American Indian down so I could get into
college.

Josh had a similar conversation with his mother regarding his racial
identity and the topic of college:
Josh (awm 18) – The only time it’s come up was when I started
college; she said that I would need to use Filipino in order to get
grants and things like that. And I understood that, especially
going to a four-year college. It’s going to help, at least hopefully.

This is another example of stating one’s racial heritage for strategical purposes
because of a lack of personal identification with being Filipino, but coupled with
the realization that white people do not receive grants:
Josh (awm 18) - I see myself as White. I still consider myself
Asian so I can always have that leeway, that I will always have
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mark …try to get a grant. Lets face it White people do not get
grants.

Interestingly enough, Josh also states that he uses his Asian heritage purposefully
so that he can tell off-color jokes:
Josh (awm 18) - I always find the politically correct forms of
racial jokes not funny at all. Being Asian is a little easier; because
if a white person is making a joke you can take it a little more
severely. But if it’s an Asian it’s fine.

With further inquiry, Josh makes it clear that his claiming of an Asian identity is
based on the notion that people of color cannot be racist. This understanding was
uncovered as Josh was describing how a black person called him racist while
conversing on the internet. Rather than say that his comments were
misunderstood as racist, Josh immediately states that this was a funny situation
because the black guy did not know he was calling an Asian racist:
Josh (awm 18) - Actually online when I play video games all my
different usernames are like honky-tonk, because I am a big fan of
honky-tonk. I play video games all the time. It is much funnier as
honky-tonk, because most people get a kick out of it. Some
people think it is funny because one time I got yelled at and called
a bigot online because when you are playing you can talk to
people I got called a bigot online from a black dude. He said he
was black and his name was like black attack I kind of assumed he
was black, too. He called me a bigot online not knowing I am a
large Asian man, so that was kind of funny.

Mary also used her racial identification in a strategic manner when applying for a
job. When asked if she has ever revealed her racial heritage on purpose, Mary
stated that she has done so when she applied for jobs as a translator:
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Mary (awf 23) - I have a lot of the times to get jobs, but I don’t
know if it is on purpose. It helps because I work for the Vista
School district to translate. It's whenever they need me to
translate for a kid or for any parent teacher conferences.

Mary was also encouraged by her mother to use her race in a strategic manner
when applying for scholarships, and she states that she would consider this if the
financial incentives become big enough:
Mary (awf 23) - My mom has told me repeatedly you can get
scholarships for being Japanese American and we have
scholarships at the center, so if I had more of an incentive I would
go after them. When I go to a university I go to real school I
probably will because it is so much money, but as far as
community college goes you can pay for that. My parents have
been very supportive with me and school they help me out a lot.

All of these examples demonstrate how racial difference can be
capitalized on in situations were the risk is minimal and yet the benefits are
potentially great. Therefore, another component of the multiracial project is that
a person’s strategic use of their race can give certain advantages, but Aiko
represents a situation were the strategic use of her name to situate herself racially
backfired. When applying for a job at a Japanese restaurant, she felt that she
received an interview because of her Japanese name, but things changed when
they saw her:
Aiko (abf 35) - I didn't get hired at a Japanese restaurant. The
name was good but he didn't match the face. The name got me an
interview but once I showed up they were stunned. So that didn't
work out.

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When asked how she knew that her race was an issue, Aiko explained that it was
a combination of body language and what they said that helped her determine
that:
Aiko (abf 35) - It was the look they gave me when I walked
through the door. Then they asked me if my name was Hawaiian
and I said no it's Japanese. My mom is Japanese and my father is
black. Then their whole body language changed and they said
that they were only interviewing people, but they weren't hiring.
So it was obviously racial.

This suggests that strategically stating, or not stating, one’s race does not work
when the racial identity they are suggesting runs contrary to their actual
phenotype in face-to-face situations. This option does not seem to work as well
for people of Asian/black heritage as it does for people of Asian/white heritage.
Reflecting back on Jane, although she is of Asian/black heritage, when asked
how the Japanese Women’s Club confirmed her racial heritage she simply stated
that, “They knew my mom.” This is an important distinction to make, because at
the scholarship ceremony Jane made the social observation that all the award
recipients were multiracial, but that they were all of Japanese and white heritage:
Jane (abf 24) - It was kind of interesting, because there weren't
any full Japanese children there. There were other recipients of
different scholarships there and most of them were Japanese and
white. I don't even remember another black and Japanese student
there; they were all white and Japanese.

This begs the question as to whether Jane would have applied for the scholarship
at all if the club did not know her mother in advance to her applying. Would she
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have felt comfortable claiming her racial heritage in an environment where they
did not know her mother in advance?
Therefore, strategic race is a tool that is used to highlight racial difference
for a conferred advantage. This is contradictory to the ultimate goal of
assimilation which is to blend racial groupings or to equalize their social
positions.
Establishing Racial Hierarchy: Revisiting the “What are You” Question
Separating ethnicity from race is an important distinction to make
regarding race as a social construction because ethnicity is changeable, while
your race is not (Omi and Winant 1994). To tie such things as attitudes,
aptitudes and abilities to a person’s ethnicity is to suggest with time they will
eventually become assimilated, while to connect this things to race is to suggest
that they are fixed biological characteristics (Root 2001; Omi and Winant 1994).
Believing that race is a biological fact, rather than a social construction, is the
essence to understanding how race is used to determine how people should be
treated as a result of their classification within a racial hierarchy.
Understanding the “what are you” question within the context of racial
hierarchy allows for greater understanding as to why some people of multiracial
heritage believe that the people who are asking these questions are not genuinely
interested in them as a person, but only their race. In other words, people of
multiracial heritage begin to feel like they are an “alien” or some type of zoo
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exhibit for people to observe, classify and categorize, but not have any sustained
interaction with. This was how Reggie, a 22 year-old Asian/black male, felt after
being asked about his race from a woman that did not even know his name:
Reggie (abm 22) - Just randomly when meeting someone. I just
met a girl the other day, and she's like what's your nationality?
She's like, what are you? And I was like, dang, don't you wanna
know my name first? It’s funny how people want to know because
sometimes they can’t tell.

Does that bother you?

Reggie (abm 22) - If I don’t know the person sometimes I think,
who are you? Usually it doesn’t bother me; I’m a laid back guy.

When people ask you, is it before they know your name or after?

Reggie (abm 22) - It depends on the person. Usually girls ask me
first thing, and guys ask me after getting to know me.

And you've noticed this pattern?

Reggie (abm 22) - Definitely.

Although curiosity could be the main factor, the fact that Reggie made a
gendered connection may reveal that the women are trying to determine if it is
socially acceptable to date him or not. Could he have “passed” for something
else other than black, and these women were just making sure? What if they
found out he was Puerto Rican or Cuban, would that have been more acceptable
than being black?
Understanding the question within the socio-historical context of passing,
the idea that someone of minority heritage could pass for white (Daniel 1992;
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Davis 1980), allows for a broader understanding of why people are so surprised
to learn that Margaret’s daughter has a Japanese and black mother:
Margaret (abf 46) - They can't figure me out. At my daughter's
school the subject comes up during class discussions and things
like that, and my daughter is as white as can be. Everyone think
she looks like Catherine Zeta Jones. She has her own unique
exotic look. And when the subject of race comes up my daughter
tells everyone that her mother is half black and half Japanese and
they are amazed. And they will say what! Oh my God, you're
kidding me!

To be surprised is one thing, but to be surprised to the level implied by this quote
is to suggest something else altogether. Although her daughter does not look
black, by her own admission, now she will be regarded as black regardless of
how she looks to her classmates.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the experiences of the multiracial people in my sample
suggest that people of Asian/white heritage are experiencing a quantifiable level
of assimilation as they seem to be moving towards an Anglo conformity identity.
The evidence also suggests that the people of Asian/black heritage continue to
use the “one drop rule” as a guide to constructing an internal racial identity,
which I have argued is inconsistent with the assimilation process, because to
maintain a racial identity is to maintain racial hierarchy (Zack 1993).
Also through an analysis of the multiracial people in my sample, it was
uncovered that the “what are you” question is an effort by people to use racial
logic to figure out the race of the people in my sample in order to figure out they
85
fit on the racial hierarchy. Both the Asian/white and Asian/black people in my
sample expressed how others used essentialist racial notions to determine their
race which was a key in placing them within society’s racial hierarchy. In other
words, to not know someone’s race means that you do not know how to treat that
person, because you do not know their social position.
Something else that was uncovered was that the multiracial project is
responsible for broadening racial identity from the previous hypo-descent model
to a model that encourages multiracial identification. Although this model
allows people to “choose” their racial identity, it is clear that it does not
challenge biological notions of race, rather it relies on it.
Also, the multiracial project has created what I call strategic race; the
stating, or not stating, of one’s racial heritage for specifically beneficial gains.
This space goes against common understandings of how people of multiracial
heritage are supposed to be moving towards a homogenous racial identification.
The strategic use of one’s racial heritage is most commonly used when applying
for scholarships, college and even for jobs. But strategic race can also be used to
allow for a person of multiracial heritage to make off-color jokes and not appear
racist. All of this however, is tied to biological notions of race and deepens our
connection to it, rather than shifting to a socially constructed understanding of
race.

86
Chapter 4 Endnotes
1. abf = Asian/black female

2. awf = Asian/white female

3. abm = Asian/black male

4. awm = Asian/white male

87
Chapter 5
What are you? Part II
The creation of external and expressed racial identities

On Being Asian, White, Black, or Multiracial
The use of racial logic to construct racial categories is apparent when
people of multiracial heritage quantify their assumed racial attributes, especially
as it pertains to being Asian, while at times selecting a completely different
identity than what might be expected from such a detailed list of specific
attributes. This quantifying process began when the question was asked, “On a
scale of one to five, with one being none and five being completely, how much
do you identify with being Asian/white/black?” Asian racial attributes were
quantified most often, but an interesting paradox emerged regarding how “Asian”
someone identified themselves and how culturally Asian that person thought of
themselves as being.
When I imagined the possible responses to the identification question, I
thought that someone who spoke the language, knew the customs, and practiced
the culture would say that they were a five on this scale question, but this was not
the case. Often times, people who were born in their parent’s foreign country
came away with an Asian identity that was far less than I expected. This had
much to do with the experiences and how that person was perceived racially in
their foreign parent’s native country.
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Establishing a Japanese Context
How people in Japan treated people of Japanese/white and Japanese/black
heritage is largely due to two main factors: the belief that the Japanese represent
a pure race and the linking of multiracial children to their defeat by the US. The
notion of racial purity ideologically started after the Yamato clan defeated all
other contenders and forced them into slavery and servitude, thus making this
bloodline dominant in the creation of a Japanese race (Smythe and Naitoh 1953).
Although modern historians acknowledge the multiple ethnic groups that
originated Japanese people, this did not deter the Japanese from creating a racial
ideology that was based upon its presumed purity:
Many studies of Japanese society suggest the existence of a long-
standing and almost unquestioned Japanese belief in myths of
racial homogeneity and purity: “ideas about the racial purity of the
Japanese have little scientific or historical credibility, but two
centuries of self-imposed isolation from the seventeenth century
fomented myths about common bloodlines.” These myths are
seen as having been reinforced by prewar and wartime
nationalism. (Morris-Suzuki 1998)

Immediately before and during WWII, this racial purity was imbued with a racial
essence which stated that the Japanese were:
In general these consisted of a strong sense of loyalty and super-
patriotism, tremendous assimilative power which enable Japanese
to adopt the best of a foreign culture and yet remain distinctly
Japanese. Further, they were told they are especially endowed
with superior powers of organization and unmatched ability for
expansion and achievement…. All of these were supplemented by
frankness, kind heartedness, optimism, an affinity for purity and
cleanliness, propriety and order, and a soft and patient disposition.
(Smythe 1953)
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These twin constructions led to a boom in scientific racism and allowed many
researchers to develop anti-miscegenation stances that made their way into public
discourse:
Although he recognized that the Japanese people themselves were
the product of earlier phases of racial intermixture, Koyama took a
negative view of colonial intermarriage. In strictly biological
terms, he believed that intermarriage could produce either benign
or malign results, depending both on social circumstances and on
the nature of the “blood lines” that were mixed in the process.
(Morris-Suzuki 1998)

The relationship that the United States has with Japan did not create the
negative attitudes towards interracial relationships and multiracial children, but it
did facilitate making children of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage symbolic
of their defeat in WWII. People of multiracial heritage faced huge problems in
post-war Japan for a number of reasons:
Their problems of being racially different in a race-conscious
society are compounded by other modal features of their lives:
illegitimacy and father-absence, culturally presumed immorality
of part of mother, and the lower social class status of mother.
(Burkhardt 1983)

The precarious social position of their mothers led to many multiracial people
experiencing rejection by their mothers and humiliation by childhood peers
(Ibid.). Although many multiracial children were a product of illegitimate means,
many children would have been spared some of these experiences if the United
States had not actively refused to allow interracial families to go with the father
back to America, which had to do largely with the fact that anti-miscegenation
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laws were not deemed unconstitutional until 1967 (Wadlington 2003; Burkhardt
1983).
Therefore, establishing a pre-war WWII anti-miscegenation ideology is
important to understanding how the lived lives of people of Japanese/white and
Japanese/black heritage are affected by their interactions with Japanese people;
however, this situation was exacerbated by Japan’s defeat by the United States
and the creation of multiracial children that ensued afterwards. It is with this
context in mind that we examine the lives of two women who were born and
raised in Japan.
Mary and Ai
Mary and Ai were born and raised for a large portion of their lives in
Japan, yet their identity was moderated by how people treated them based upon
their external racial identity. After living in Japan for the first ten years of her
life, Mary stated that she had only a moderately Japanese identity, or a three on a
one to five scale. I felt this was an interesting response because of how Japanese
she believes she acts:
Mary (awf 23) - My mannerisms and the way I think are
Japanese… I still to this day don’t use the dishwasher my entire
life cause even to this day my grandmother does not have a
dishwasher most people in Japan don’t… Anything from that
small to, I go over to my friends house the first thing I do is take
off my shoes, when I get home the first thing I do is take off my
shoes. It’s just the way I do things, everything I do is related in
the way I was raised and I was very much raised Japanese.

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Although Mary has a strong internal Japanese racial identity, she states that
Japanese culture does not do well when someone is different, which is consistent
with previously stated literature (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Burkhardt 1983; Smythe
and Naitoh 1953). To illustrate this point, she speaks about the time she was
going to a Japanese private school and had to get her hair cut because it was not
as straight as the rest of the Japanese girls:
Mary (awf 23) - The school that I went to we all had to have the
same hair cut and Japanese hair is much more course, heavier and
very straight and mine had little flips here and there, so I had
really long hair when I first started and they told me I had to cut it.
They had 5 people to hold me down to cut my hair and my nuns
were serious because I had a little flip in the back and you had to
have straight hair and I had a little accent of hair. They never had
to encounter something different like that I think I kind of threw
them into shock.

This difference in how she looked was even noted and affirmed by her mother
who stated that Mary is different on the outside, but is Japanese on the inside:
Mary (awf 23) - Yes, I knew I was different I don’t know how
much it affected me because my mom always told me you don’t
look anything like these girls but inside you are just the same. I
really was, I grew up the same as they did.

Mary’s phenotype not only affects how people view her, but also affects how
people treat the actual abilities she possesses. This difference was noted
regarding her ability to speak fluent Japanese. Mary states that Japanese people
have a very stand-offish attitude with her language abilities because she does not
look like she should be able to speak Japanese as well as she does:
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Mary (awf 23) - Yes, it is like they have their boundaries broken.
It is different if they first meet me I never seen them before and
they learn that I speak Japanese they are still uncomfortable with
it. I think the idea of talking the way they do with other Japanese
people and with someone who doesn’t look Japanese is kind of
uncomfortable.

Mary goes even deeper and states that she lived in a paradoxical state for the first
half of her life because in Japan she looked different, but acted the same, while in
the United States she looked the same, but acted different:
Mary (awf 23) - Over there I was different because I looked
different and it was very superficial. Here I was different because
I looked the same and acted different it was something much
deeper and that I think was harder to get over than just being
perceived as different because I looked different.

The affects of an external racial identity can overwhelm someone’s
internal racial identity, which was the case with Ai. Born and raised in Japan for
the first nineteen years of her life, when asked the question of how much she
identified with being Japanese Ai stated, “Not at all.” When asked to explain
why she felt this way she states that it is because people saw her as different and
therefore did not accept her, even though she was a girl who acted just like them:
Ai (abf 57) - I was just a girl. I wore kimono just like everyone
else, but I just couldn't go a lot of places. They didn't accept me.
They would call me names, and I would feel uncomfortable. They
would look at me because I'm different and point their finger at
me. So I think my mother believe that I should just stay home.

It is obvious that after living in Japan for nineteen years that one would have the
cultural qualities of being Japanese, however, Ai makes it clear that being
Japanese is more important than acting Japanese (King 2001). “You have to be
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straight Japanese. So no matter what you did, sports or anything, I was not good
enough for them.” In other words, it was more important to look Japanese than it
was to act Japanese.
Establishing a Filipino Context
People of Filipino/white and Filipino/black heritage have a decidedly
different experience in being multiracial, due in part to centuries of colonialism
which led to the creation of a mestizo class in the Philippines (Hernandez-Chung
1975). Little to no research has been done on a pre-existing racial state for the
Philippines, however, race relations in this region were heavily influenced by 381
years of Spanish, United States and Japanese colonialism (Larkin 1982).
The Spanish, centered in Manila, intermarried with Filipinos creating a
mestizo class that was wealthy and heavily identified with European ways
(Hernandez-Chung 1975). Also during Spanish rule, many people of Chinese
heritage, which served as a middle man minority, also established a base of
mercantile operations in the Philippines and intermarried with the native
population (Larkin 1982). The population of Chinese mestizos became a large
and discernable population by the 1740’s and still dominates retail, wholesale
and import trade and many of the cottage industries:
The mestizos, blending the economic skills of their Chinese
fathers and the native culture of their Filipina mothers, penetrated
farthest into the interior, often serving as agents for merchants of
the larger settlements. (Larkin 1982)

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Although Filipinos have more history regarding people of multiracial
heritage, this by no means suggests that all multiracial people were treated
equally. Although Spanish colonial rule may have indirectly set up white
privilege, the United States colonial period directly established white supremacy
regarding how Filipinos were thought of and how they were treated. Initially
Filipinos were equated to black a person, which was used as justification for the
United States to colonize them because of the prevailing ideology that people of
color could not govern themselves (Ngozi-Brown 1997). However, Filipinos
were given an intermediate status within the racial hierarchy when justification
was sought to give the Philippines its independence (Tyner 1999).
The establishment of white privilege allows us to make some sense of
how Tyrone developed his internal racial identity. Born and raised for the first
five years of his life in the Philippines, Tyrone stated that he identified as only
moderately Asian, or a three on the one to five scale. This was interesting,
because of how strongly he identified with Filipino culture and his ability to live
in the Philippines with no problem:
Tyrone (abm 28) - I would say about a three. I was mostly raised
with the Filipino way. I understand and can speak Tagalong and I
cook Filipino food. My mom taught me how to cook Filipino
food. I was raised on the Filipino side… I speak the language. I
know how to cook Filipino food. Pretty much I could live in the
Philippines and not have any problems.

However, Tyrone’s internal racial identity is moderated by how he looks
and how people treat him because of it. Tyrone makes it clear that, “I think of
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myself half Filipino and half Black. I don’t consider myself more one race verses
another” and when asked how closely he identified with being black, he stated
that he was moderately black, a three on the one to five scale. However, when
describing why he identifies as being black, it immediately becomes an issue of
how he looks rather than his cultural upbringing:
Tyrone (abm 28) - The way I talk and there is no way around my
skin color (laugh). I can't fake that… People judge me based on
the color of my skin. Like I said, a lot of people can tell I’m
mixed, but some people are ignorant and bigots and want to judge
me based on skin.

Therefore, as we can see in the experiences of Tyrone it seems that in order to be
Filipino you have to look Filipino, not necessarily act Filipino. Therefore, as was
the case with Mary and Ai, Tyrone’s experience in the Philippines and in the
United States was dominated by racial essentialism.
Constructing race through physical location
Research conducted by Landale and Oropesa (2002) on the Puerto Rican
population has produced results that strongly connect the physical location of a
person to the racial identity that they develop. The authors demonstrate how
Puerto Ricans on the mainland are much more likely to identify as Hispanic or
Latina, while on the island they are far more likely to identify as white, black or
triguena (a mulatto classification). Many multiracial people observed that
people used racial logic to identify their race by connecting it to their actual
physical location (Hall and Turner 2001; Mass 1992; Williams 1992). James
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suggests that his external racial identification can be affected by which basketball
court he decides to go to or what area he decides to shop in:
James (awm 22) - I would play at Washington Park in Escondido;
I haven’t played over there in about a year or a year and a half.
But when I was going there, that predominately Hispanic and
African American, white boys don't go down there. Spanish
people would come up and start talking to me in Spanish and they
look surprise when I say I don’t speak Spanish. If I ask if they
speak English they will look very surprise and say they don’t
know. I don’t know but they just assume. Maybe because it is
where I am because that could have something to do with it.

People at the basketball court are using racial logic to connect James to the area,
and since the areas he plays basketball have a predominately Hispanic population
people readily interpret him as being Hispanic.
Some people, like Lamont suggest that their racial identification is
affected by whether they are on the East or the West Coast. They state that they
have been considered Hispanic on the East Coast, but not on the West Coast:
Lamont (abm 29) - I found on the coasts like the east and west
coast because there is so much diversity in California and New
York. Most of the stuff in between is what are you. I spend most
of my time in California when I go to New York or Florida; they
guess me as Puerto Rican.

Location also affected whether people spoke Spanish to Cornelius who states that
he has never had anyone speak Spanish to him on the West Coast, but has had
people regularly speak Spanish to him on the East Coast:
Cornelius (abm 35) - People mistake me for everything. They
know I’m mixed with Black, but out here they think I’m Samoan
or Islander. When I was in New York, I lived in New York for
four years; everybody thought I was Puerto Rican or Dominican.
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Everywhere I went people started talking to me in Spanish, and I
said man I don't know Spanish (laughs). And they would say like,
what happened, did your mother not teach you? And I would say,
I ain't Spanish period (laughs).

Therefore, to be interpreted as Hispanic on the East Coast allows darker-skinned
people to be considered Hispanic because of the wider variety of looks within
this racial grouping in that part of the country. However, on the West Coast, the
Hispanic population is generally assumed to not be as dark; therefore directly
affecting the lived lives of multiracial people.
The country that you are in can also affect how people racial identify a
person of multiracial heritage. For Ai her racial identification dramatically
changed in every country that she visited:
Ai (abf 57) - Other times when I went to the commissary some
Marines would speak to me in Spanish… When I went to Brazil
they spoke to me in Brazilian, but I didn't understand that (laugh).
Also when I went to Mexico they spoke to me in Spanish there.

Although it is possible that people spoke to Ai in Spanish when she was in
Mexico because that is all she spoke; it is also possible that in Mexico the locals
understand and accept the fact that there is a wide variety regarding who could be
Mexican when one is in Mexico.
The experiences of James, Lamont, Cornelius and Ai suggest that the
concept of race itself is spatially located and suggests that racial logic is being
used in this space to connect a person’s race to their physical location and might
be applied on a local, national and global level. However, this conclusion seems
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contrary to Landale and Oropesa (2002) statement that Puerto Ricans who lived
in Puerto Rico resisted using the racial definitions of the United States. My
sample suggests that racial categories are specific to specific areas, so Puerto
Ricans are not resisting racial categorization, but rather they are just using the
available racial categories of the place they find themselves.
Cultural Attributes versus Racial Stereotypes
Although cultural attributes of a particular ethnic group are often
construed as racial stereotypes, the need to distinguish between these two
concepts is necessary for this project because the multiracial people in my
sample use both cultural attributes and racial stereotypes to construct their
internal, external and expressed racial identities. Culture is, “an organized body
of conventional understandings, manifest in act and artifact, which, persisting
through tradition, characterizes a human group,” (Ogburn 1937, p. 161) which
suggests that cultural attributes are specific quantifiable conditions that would
arise from such a context. While racial stereotypes, unlike cultural attributes, are
“Attitudes composed bodily and uncritically without any basis in experience or
knowledge.” (LaViolette and Silvert 1951)
Simply put cultural attributes benefit from a specific cultural context,
while racial stereotypes are inherently fallible because of the assumed biological
basis for such attitudes, abilities and aptitudes and are designed to fix that racial
group’s social position in our racial hierarchy (Virtanen and Huddy 1998).
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Putting this difference in action it could be said at a cultural attribute of Japanese
people is respect for their elders due to the emphasis of the Buddhist religion in
their culture, while a racial stereotype would be to say that all Asians are
submissive. The first is an attribute that can be directly linked to Japanese
culture emphasis and can change over time, while the second is a stereotype that
is linked to essentialized notions of race which makes the connection seemingly
permanent and biologically driven. It is between these two spaces, that the
people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage of my sample constructor racial
identities.
Fitting the Stereotype
The convoluted nature of racial identity is displayed in this section as the
multiracial people in my sample struggle with their internal and expressed racial
identities as they use racial logic to navigate through racial stereotypes and
cultural attributes. Social understandings of race, I argue, serve to “push” or
“pull” people of multiracial heritage towards a particular racial identity. “Push”
and “pull” factors are usually associated with reasons why people migrate from
country to country (Takaki 1989; Reimers 1985), but actually serve as a useful
framework for understanding the internal racial identity development of
multiracial people. Not fitting socially constructed appearances, attitudes,
aptitudes and abilities serve to “push” a multiracial person away from a particular
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identity, while fitting into these understandings “pulls” them towards a particular
identity.
On fitting Asian stereotypes
Most, if not all, Asian stereotypes fit into a model minority framework of
Asians being thrifty, smart and hardworking (Kim and Lee 2001; Smythe 1953).
Being smart in general, but mathematical ability specifically, pulled people to at
least partially identify with being Asian, because it was always described as
deriving from that person’s Asian heritage. This was not only true for the
multiracial person, but Ai noticed that other people’s racial logic brought these
stereotypes together also:
Ai (abf 57) - A Japanese girl that I used to work with said that I
was smart because I was Japanese. But they don't know who I am
so I try to tell them so that they don't have to guess. I want them
to know who I am, because it's taken a long time for me to accept
myself.

However, not being mathematically inclined served to push Mandy away from
identifying as Asian:
Mandy (awf 19) - People would assume that I'm really smart In
class people would say “ask Mandy, for help” and I would say I
don't know how I do it (laughter). Or people will say that I did
really well on my SATs. They would just assume it… Chinese
have a stereotype of being really smart. But my mom says this is
not true; they just work harder (laughs).

Another attribute of Asians was their work ethic. Although Patty
acknowledged that her both of her parents are hard working, she still relies on
race to explain her work ethic:
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Patty (awf 35) - I have said that because I’m Japanese. I think it is
because my mom said I was a hard worker. I mean look at me;
I’m a single mom with two children, and I have two jobs. I’m just
a hard worker. I don’t know if it is because I’m Japanese. I just
have two hard working parents who don’t want to see me fail. My
mom is Japanese, and Japanese are very hard working people.

Patty even takes a distinctly cultural activity, origami and using chopsticks, and
equates it to her racial heritage:
Patty (awf 35) - My creativity, arts and crafts and working with
my hands I would say that it on my Japanese side. I like to do
origami which you have to have hand and eye coordination.
Working with the chopsticks is very well for hand eye
coordination.

James represents a person who has an internal Asian identity partially
because his father is of Korean and Japanese heritage. However, James mostly
associates his internal Asian identity with his lack of desire of being associated
with the stereotypes of being white on the basketball court. By understanding
how people use race as social placement, James understands that being identified
as white on a basketball court will suggest a plethora of various negative
stereotypes:
James (awm 22) - I don't like been associated with white because
of all the negative connotations of being a white boy, because I
play basketball… You are not as skilled or gifted physically can’t
jump high can’t run faster can’t dribble the ball so you know
Asians tend to be a little more athletic not that they tend to be they
are a little more coordinated because they are not all tall and
gangly or the common misconceptions that white people can’t
jump high they are not fast.

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When asked, what about being Asian would make someone think that he was
good in basketball; James stated that Asians represent an unknown quantity and
therefore are thought of as better than white because whites are a known
quantity:
James (awm 22) – You can’t be labeled as a white boy playing
basketball, you know otherwise you will be like my brother slow
can’t play defense, just a shooter good free throw shooter can’t
play a lick of dee, no quicks, definitely no ups. For me it was like
even on our own basketball team good friends going to school for
6-7 years ask how come I can jump and my brother can’t? And
they'll say, because I am Asian. See for Asians is not like African
Americans or European players. Asians are the unknown.

Therefore, because the concept of race is supposed to give people insight and
knowledge of a person’s abilities, being good at basketball when you are of
Asian/white heritage must come from being Asian because it is known that white
people are not all that good.
Being tight with money is another Asian stereotype and it the only thing
that Mandy associates with being Asian:
Mandy (awf 19) - Also, I think that Asians are a lot more frugal
or cheap, and I wouldn't say I'm cheap, because I go shopping and
spend a lot of money. But at the same time, I do actually to think
about the better deal. I do consider those things, but that may
actually be because of my dad who is pretty frugal too. But a big
part of my mom's family is that they are all really cheap
(laughter). They all have this mentality like we're living in the
Depression. I don't know of this comes from them living in China
are they feel like they have to hoard everything, but I feel that
way. Not to their extent, but I do consider it.

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Although stereotypical in nature, Mandy may have developed this context as a
result of her parents meeting in New York. Research suggests that the Chinese in
New York tend to have an overall lower socio-economic status than their
California counterparts that tend to be more educated and their Hawaiian
counterparts that tend to be more economically successful (Boyd 1971).
Therefore, because of their lower status in New York, this may have caused
Chinese people to be a little bit tighter with their money.
Therefore, people of Asian heritage are socially constructed as smart,
mathematically inclined, hard working and cheap. And since these attributes are
tied to biology it suggests that they are permanent and unchangeable.
On fitting white stereotypes
Although Asian was interpreted as giving people of multiracial heritage
intelligence, a strong work ethic and the ability to tightly manage money;
whiteness was constructed as multifaceted. James suggested that being white
contributing to a laid back, social demeanor:
James (awm 22) - That can be another thing I can identify with I
being white. I'm more laid back; I don’t have that drive to be the
most intelligent. I might act that way in life but not with studies.

While Mandy also associates being social and well-balanced with being white,
which pull her towards a more white identity:
Mandy (awf 19) - … I wasn't like the other Chinese girls who
were focused on their studies, and that wasn't me, I had a balance.
I was really social. I just felt like since I'm not full Asian, I'm not
going to bubble in Asian. So I just bubbled in white.
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Patty believed that her musical talent was derived from her white side:
Patty (awf 35) - My being a musician. I played the clarinet and
the French horn. I would say it comes from the White side
because my dad was a musician. I think I would say I associate it
with the White side.

And Gerald, interestingly enough, felt that he was more masculine than his
Filipino cousins because of his white heritage:
Gerald (awm 23) - Because physically I am a lot taller. I have a
lot of facial features from my father who is Italian. Filipinos
noses are flatter and I don’t have those features. I have more
masculinity. For example, some of my cousins are homosexual.
They seem not to be strong physically.

So whiteness cannot be adequately generalized because in essence it is only what
other races are not. Asians are driven, while whites are laid back; Asians are
nerdy, while whites are social; Asians lack imagination, while whites are
creative; Asians are feminine, while Whites are masculine. In other words, Asian
and black people are a particular way, while white people do not act or think in a
particular way.
On fitting black stereotypes
Being athletic and being able to dance where normally interpreted as a
result of a person’s black heritage. Although Ai never thought of her running
ability as coming from her black heritage, she makes it clear that other people
used racial logic to make this connection:
Ai (abf 57) - No, I never thought that because I'm black I do
better. It's because I try hard. No one gave me anything and so I
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had to try hard to get things. But my Japanese classmates would
say it's because I'm “kurumbo”, because I'm black and so I'm good
at sports. I don't know where they heard that from, but that's what
they said.

In the case of Sumi, a 20 year-old Asian/black female, her friends and
other acquaintances would sum up her abilities along racial lines, especially her
dancing:
Sumi (abf 20) - They mostly say it because if I were to do
something that they thought was Black, they would say “oh that’s
the Black side of you”. Like the way I dance, they always say that
it’s my Black side. If I was at my friend’s house and we had
dinner, I would usually help with the washing of the dishes. My
friend would say that I didn’t have to, and that what I was doing
was my Japanese side. I think well do Black people not do this
stuff?

This last statement is powerful because of how far it reaches into how racial logic
constructs multiracial people. To say that intelligence comes from being Asian is
to suggest that white and black people are not intelligent. To say that athleticism
comes from being black is to suggest that white and Asian people are not athletic.
Therefore Sumi demonstrates a high level of critical thinking by challenging
essentialist racial notions. Unfortunately this is not the rule, but the exception.
In instances where a person of multiracial heritage fits key stereotypes,
racial logic is used to bring these disparate stereotypes together in one racialized
body. This is illustrated by Cornelius who identifies his mathematical abilities as
coming from his Japanese heritage and his athleticism to his black heritage:
Cornelius (abm 35) - Growing up I was fairly smart, I had the
mathematical mind and a mechanical mind, because I'm a
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machinist, I program machines all day long. I could do it in my
sleep, because it is all math and math always came easy to me and
I always said that was the Japanese side of me and the sports were
my Black side (laughs). I always looked at it that way.

Separating race from culture is an important distinction to make regarding race as
a social construction, because to tie such things as attitudes, aptitudes and
abilities to race is to suggest that they can never be adjusted, shifted, or changed
because they are biological in nature, not social. Believing this construct is the
essence to understanding how race is used to justify how people are treated as a
result of these racial classifications.
What about the food?
Another factor that played a role in racial identity formation was food.
Liking the food of a particular race normally pulled a person closer to that race,
while not liking the food served to push them away. Tyrone described his ability
to make Filipino food as an advantage over other Filipino Americans:
Tyrone (abm 28) - I know how to cook Filipino food. Pretty
much I could live in the Philippines and not have any problems.
A lot of American Filipinos here, if they were to move to the
Philippines they would have problems. To me it seems I have an
advantage over most Filipino-Americans growing up here now.

James, who has an internal Asian identity, describes how there was always rice
when he would go to his Japanese grandparent’s house and that if he or his Asian
father wanted any rice that they would have to make it themselves:
James (awm 22) - I can identify because I love the food… When
I use to stay at my grandparents some of the times or me and my
girlfriend and her mom is Asian and she is Asian and whatever
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and we stay over there like there was always rice, there was
always chicken like adobo. Or teriyaki chicken and seaweed
always that stuff was there, and my grandma's house the same
thing. There was rice always cooking walk in the door there is
always rice. And when I go home even my dad will sit there and
go if we ever want rice me and my dad would have to cook it.

James takes his expressed racial identification even further by stating that the
“white people food” that his mother cooks is not appealing to him at all:
James (awm 22) - …I don’t care for the food my mom cooks.
She cooks stuff like special k loaf, green bean, and mashed
potatoes like white people food (laughter). I am just keeping it
real this is how it works in my house. We eat broccoli, we eat
carrots. My mom thought seaweed was something you put in a
plant to make it grow. Anything that is oriental in our refrigerator
was my grandparents or I would buy it from the Japanese market.

James even adds that his mother is a vegetarian, but does not separate this fact
from this mother’s whiteness regarding her choices in food preparation:
James (awm 22) - She is vegetarian, but all the good stuff that's
oriental is fish, beef, and chicken. She eats like fried rice or
oriental noodles and but she would much rather have her special k
vegetarian loaves… I can bring some for you because it is pretty
special (laughter). That you have to put ketchup, soy sauce, sour
cream anything to help it not taste like special k loaf. Is that bad,
to classify white people food? She will make a veggie burgers
and french fries, and spaghetti, and we have pancakes for dinner
and I will say whatever mom.

Francine and Josh, who both have an internal white identity, do admit to eating
some of the main stream Filipino dishes. However Francine equated eating most
Filipino food with an episode of Fear Factor, a TV show that regularly has
contestants eat bugs and worms in order to win money, while Josh states that
Filipino food is just nasty:
108
Francine (awf 21) - They see me as Filipino, and think I would
eat that fish with vinegar. They ask me to eat with them and I’m
thinking hell no. And as soon as I walk in I know my mom’s
friends are there because I can smell it. You have no idea, it's like
fear factor (laugh).

Josh (awm 18) - They say how could you not like fish? I would
say I never really had the taste for it and the same thing for other
Filipino foods. Sometimes it grosses me out you just have to stay
maintained because you don’t want to be insulting. Because
whenever I would go to my other Filipino friend’s for dinner some
of their food looks nasty ok.

Theo describes his food preferences from both sides of his heritage as an
expression of his racial identity:
Theo (abm 33) - Most of the time if race is brought up, it is just
by asking what nationality I am. They would say they are Filipino,
and I would say my mom is Filipino too. We start talking foods
and everything that’s how it always is… Adobo, pansit, sinagong,
and lumpia; things like that. On the Black side its greens,
jambalaya, gumbo, crayfish which is from my dad (laughter).

He continues this discussion by stating that he even eats Filipino food that most
other Filipino/black people don’t like:
Theo (abm 33) - Since you bring that up, there was a guy I
worked with who was Filipino. One day he brought dinigowan
which is pig meat. They cut it up and boil it in water and vinegar.
After that they take pig’s blood and pour it in there and boil it
until it is a thick brown. A lot of Filipino/black people don't like
that… I opened it up, and Kareem said oh, you like dinigowan?
And I said yeah do you? And he said no. I don't know if that has
anything to do with it. A lot of people don't like certain foods, but
I was brought up on everything. The only Filipino food that I
don't like is leu gow, that's the soupy rice with chicken in it.
That's like kryptonite to me, man (laughter).

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When asked by this uncle which food Theo prefers to eat, he states that there is
always room for both:
Theo (abm 33) - Then my father's brother who lives in Bristol
he's like, do you eat jambalaya? He says, are you going to eat the
soul food, or are you going to go over there and eat the Filipino
food? And I go, there's always room for both (laughter).

This effect seemed to be a little bit stronger for people of Filipino heritage,
probably because Japanese and Chinese food has become main stream in
American culture in general, but especially in Southern California. By liking
both foods, this allows Theo a justification for having such a strong internal
multiracial identity.
Conclusion
Building on the theoretical framework of the last chapter, I have focused
this chapter on how people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage in my
sample develop external and expressed racial identities. What was uncovered
was that the respondent’s race was spatially located on a local, regional and
national-level as they when from place-to-place, coast-to-coast and nation-to-
nation. Concerns for the assimilation process arise when the experiences of the
multiracial people in my sample seem to suggest that racial understandings are
something that people learn through the assimilation process, which strongly
suggests that race is not something that can be ignored, negated or unlearned.
The how well one fit the cultural attributes and the racial stereotypes of a
particular racial group played a central role in how the multiracial people in my
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sample choose to identify themselves. Fitting a particular attribute or stereotype
served to pull a person towards that particular racial identity, while not fitting
served to push them away. Again, these findings question the inevitable
endpoint of the assimilation process, because stereotypes are used to place
someone racially and are a product of our culture. Therefore, the assimilation
process teaches people what race they are and where they are placed on our racial
hierarchy which strongly suggests that race is not something that a person can
simply leave behind.

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Chapter 6

“Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
The External Context of Racial Identity Formation
A Challenge to Racial Categories
It is a common understanding within discourse surrounding people of
multiracial heritage that the multiracial subject will challenge racial
categorization and will eventually bring the end to the usage of racial categories
(Williams-Leon and Nagashima 2001; Root 1996; Zack 1993). However, three
main assumptions must be drawn out to analyze the implied validity of these
challenges: First, that the existence of people of multiracial heritage actually do
challenge our current racial construction (Thornton 1996; Spickard 1992);
second, that multiracial people do not internalize essentialist notions of racial
categorization (Daniel 1992; Nash 1992); and lastly, that people of multiracial
heritage somehow experience less racism than other people because of their
ambiguous phenotypes (Guevarra 2003; Streeter 1996).
Although these three assumptions exist in many separate spaces, all three
of these assumptions are clearly illustrated by David A. Hollinger in his book,
Postethnic America, where he states that people of multiracial heritage,
especially those of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage challenge how race is
socially constructed in the United States. Hollinger argues that these two groups
of people challenge present day racial classifications because they are without a
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distinct history of being relegated to any specific racial category, and because of
the assumed inability of our current racial construction to absorb them.
Therefore, Hollinger suggests that multiracial people will eventually invalidate
the concept of the ethno-racial pentagon by continued assertions of their multiple
ethnic identities.
Racial Affects on Attitude and Behavior Receptional Assimilation
Although compelling, by equating race to ethnicity, Hollinger does not
recognize how the concept of race affects the assimilation process. Therefore,
this chapter will focus how people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage
experience race in their everyday lives and to what level are they attitudinally
(the absence of prejudice and stereotypes) and behaviorally (the absence of
discrimination) assimilated.
In order to do this, I will analyze whether the racial identities that people
of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage are the result of a “rational” or
“constraining” dynamic:
Relative to Asian-white children, the racial identity of Asian-black
and Asian-Hispanic children may be more constrained because of
the overriding emphasis that society places on their being half-
black or Hispanic. (Xie and Goyette 1997, p. 555)

This suggests that a “rational” racial identity would led a person of Asian/black
heritage to have more of an Asian identity because of the presumed advantages
of not being identified as black, while a “contrained” identity would result in an
identity that is less Asian because of the social pressures to identify as black.
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Although this is supposed to be used within an Asian/black framework, I will
also apply the rational/constraining hypothesis to people of Asian/white people to
see if their racial identity is affected by such a dynamic. However, for this group
the rational racial identity would be considered white, while the constrained
racial identity would be Asian.
A Pro-White Context
One of the main tenants of racial formations is that racial categories
change with time, and many people would argue that multiracial people are the
impetus for our current reconstruction of racial categories (Lipsitz 1998; Omi and
Winant 1994; Davis 1991). However, what racial hegemony would also dictate
is that as things seem to change that the basic fundamental building blocks of
race would stay the same and centered on white supremacy (Winant 2001; Omi
and Winant 1994). Although people of Asian/white heritage do not have a
history in the United States that extends as far as people of Native
American/white and black/white heritage, we will see in this chapter that the
multiracial project is currently in the process of reconstructing, reinstituting and
reinforcing white supremacy within the experiences of people of Asian/white
heritage.
Anti-Asian Racism
White supremacy was expressed in direct anti-Asian racism with Sabrina
who spoke of the numerous times she had been referred to as “Jap” by both
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whites and blacks. However, Sabrina gave a detailed story regarding a big, white
boy who continuously called her “chink:”
Sabrina (awf 49) - I think I was about in the ninth grade, and the
boy was in the eighth grade. Everyday he would call me “Chink”
and make me cry and feel bad. One day I got tired of crying, and I
told him that we should settle this. We did, and I beat the crap out
of him. After that he never bothered me again. This was a White
boy who was big. I just got tired of it, and I took care of him.

Putting this story in its proper context suggests that this happened when she was
about fourteen, which would have made the year about 1971. This timeline puts
the US in the middle of the Vietnam War, which represents a time of high anti-
Asian racism. However, what one must take special note of was the usage of
“chink” by this white child to describe someone of multiracial Japanese and
white heritage. The broad manner by which anti-Asian actions, as illustrated in
the case of Vincent Chin, have been used to describe all Asians and Asian
Americans was the major impetus of what Yen Le Espiritu called pan-Asian
ethnicity, where Asians of all ethnicities came together under socio-political
distress and helped form our current conceptualization of Asians and Asian
Americans today (Espiritu 1992).
Josh also experienced rejection, but this came from his grandfather who
lived in Alabama:
Josh (awm 18) – Yes, I’ve been rejected once because of that
from my father’s dad. I never met him in my entire life. I talked
to him once on the phone at about 4 and he said he didn’t want to
talk to me because I was a mixed blood. My dad grew up in
Alabama. He never really accepted any of my dad’s choices my
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dad had a really a bad childhood. So he doesn’t really accept my
dad that much especially marrying a Filipino wife and having a
different child.

Sabrina and Josh’s experience represents the lack of attitudinal and behavioral
assimilation. However, I would argue that this was more the result of the
historical time frame and the age of the grandfather because no one else of
Asian/white heritage in my sample reported experiencing any overt racism in
their lives. This strongly suggests that people of Asian/white heritage are being
assimilated into the American mainstream.
Pushing Whiteness as a Parent
White privilege was asserted by both Asian and white parents as was
demonstrated in the last chapter with the ritual of dating, and continues as white
parents demonstrate a constraining effect on their children’s racial identity as
they try to force whiteness upon their children. Rudy spoke of how his white
father continuously tried to instill an external white racial identity for his
children:
Rudy (awm 21) - Throughout my life I would go to either side,
either White or Filipino. My dad would always try to make it
White because we are living in a White world and your life is
pretty much White. Then I got tired of going back and forth
trying to be White. People would give me a hard time for trying
to assume the White role even though there are obvious things
about me that are not totally White. So I decided that I am neither
of them. I am both; I am in my own category.

His father’s assertion that this was a white world confirmed the fact that people
who identified themselves as white have a distinct social advantage to the point
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were he is encouraging his son to “pass” for white rather than assert his
multiracial heritage (Daniel 1992; Davis 1991). Although not stated explicitly,
many have argued that white parents who have tried to assert their white
privilege through their multiracial children were the main reason for the
beginning of the multiracial project in the first place (Spencer, J.M. 1997;
Spencer, R. 1999; Parker and Song 2001).
Even though Rudy came to understand himself as his own category, this
was not always the case, because he made it clear that he wrote in on most forms
that he was white:
Rudy (awm 21) - It kind of stopped after high school when I told
him. But ever since the beginning, whenever he would say, like
when we would have to fill things out for paperwork, or like
whatever, I would put White. My mom never told us to have
Filipino pride… Here is a good example, my mom wanted to
teach us the Filipino language and now we know that every kid’s
brains can absorb more when they are younger so it is best to
teach them when they're young. My mom wanted to teach us and
Filipino and my dad said no because that would confuse us.

This quote represents the struggle that Rudy has with his father and the creation
of his own racial identity. Although he does check-off white as his race, it is
obvious that Rudy and his Filipina mother wanted him to at least identify as
being multiracial. However, it is equally as clear that Rudy and his other siblings
speaking a foreign language in the US would challenge the identity his father was
trying to construct for them.
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The assertion that children who learned two languages in the home
seemed plausible and even reasonable for a concerned parent; however, white
supremacy clearly raised its head within the school system, which placed Rudy in
a class with speech impaired children when he stated that his household spoke
two languages:
Rudy (awm 21) - I actually had to go to speech class when I first
went to elementary school because when they ask what language I
speak, my mom spoke Filipino so when they asked me I said both.
So they actually put me in speech class for people who had a
speech impediment and they were trying to get me not to practice
Filipino… They were telling us not to practice that, I felt very
stupid in my class because people with speech impediments are
people with speech problems.
When his father found out, he demonstrated his knowledge and
understanding that this was a white world because he was upset at his son’s
admittance to speaking two languages in the household, rather than be upset that
the school system treated his son in such a derogatory and demeaning manner:
Rudy (awm 21) - I don’t think I told anybody, and my dad was
pissed that I was in there because he got mad and said, "Why did
you tell them Filipino?" He said, "We all don’t communicate that
way. Your mom speaks it and you guys just overhear it
sometimes when she is speaking it or talking to my aunt." I can
imagine how that made him look.

What is intriguing regarding the quotes from Rudy is that although he identified
himself as white on government forms, he struggled with his father’s demands by
asserting his multiracial heritage at key moments. So what does it mean when a
child willfully goes against his father’s wishes regarding his identity? Perhaps it
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means that Rudy’s racial identity was important enough to him to disobey his
father over it. Or perhaps, he is testing the grounds of what it will mean for him
to assert his racial identity later in his life.
The relationship that Rudy has with his father presents an interesting
dynamic in regards to rational and constrained racial identities, because it seems
like Rudy is fighting off what would be considered a rational identity choice in
being identified as white and advocating for the constrained racial identification
of being multiracial. Whatever the case may be, it is obvious that Rudy’s racial
identity is important to him and he is willing to fight for it.
A Constrained White Racial Identity?
The rational versus constrained racial identity framework seems to take
another hit as people of Asian/white heritage who look very white, according to
themselves and others developed a constrained internal white racial identity. The
person that best exemplified this construct was Mary who had spent the first ten
years of her life in Japan and had at first had a strong internal Japanese identity:
Mary (awf 23) - I define myself more Japanese just because I
spent the first 10 years of my life there. My mom pretty much
raised me; my dad was on deployment most of the time we were
with my mom’s side of the family. So from everything I know
from right and wrong to how I do the dishes I learned in Japan.
Therefore, I consider myself very Japanese.

Although she internally identified as being Japanese and her immediate family
accepted her, she always knew that others thought of her as “gaijin”, an outsider:
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Mary (awf 23) - I think it helped going to the store daily and stuff
because they knew they could approach me, it hurt when we
outside of the bubble to see if we could go on vacations. We
would go to Tokyo or to my grandfather home town which is
smaller than my town and they never seen a “gaijin” an outside
person. I would get different reactions it would be a little
confusing but I don’t think I knew the extent to it.

The feeling of being an outsider is consistent with Japanese attitudes towards
people of multiracial heritage (Williams 1992), and eventually affected Mary to
the point where she no longer asserted her Japanese cultural traits to Japanese
people because she knew they felt uncomfortable around her:
Mary (awf 23) - I get a vibe that they are uncomfortable with
speaking to me in Japanese… I have taken Japanese classes and
there are Japanese people in the class and even then it takes them
awhile to warm up to me to speak in Japanese then half way
through the semester they realize I can hold a conversation. The
fact that I would put it forward and try to speak Japanese with
them, but they will always come back to me in English and it is
like the mannerism they give me… They just become much more
timid like they know they can’t talk shit around me (laughs). And
they're like, oh, did she hear anything we said? They can be
sitting at the next table talking about someone; it doesn’t have to
be me, necessarily.

Ultimately this negative treatment led Mary to develop a constrained
white racial identity because she felt like she was not treated like she was
Japanese by Japanese people and by others. In other words it was “easier” to just
be white:
Mary (awf 23) - Not in Japan, here you always have the
standardized test I put Caucasian just because it is easier… I
don’t know who looks at them and if they make that much of a
difference because it has Asian on there I think, but I don’t find
myself being Asian I find myself very much specifically being
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Japanese. That comes a lot from I just don’t look it, if I had
any or more Asian traits I probably could identify myself with
being more Asian, but it is very specifically Japanese in the way I
identify myself. I don’t feel comfortable putting Asian on there. It
is easily for me to put Caucasian or white whatever they put on
there one of the two.

Although it was not a privilege to be treated in such a degrading manner by
people of Japanese heritage, when the social context is changed from Japan to the
US the privilege that Mary and other people of Asian/white heritage experience
lies within the ability to create racial identity that is constrained, but that suffers
few ill affects within an American context because of white privilege.
An Anti-Black Context
Although there was an overall distain for all multiracial people, it is clear
that people of Asian/black heritage were more often singled out and intentionally
discriminated against in Japan (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Burkhardt 1983). Although
Japanese understanding of themselves as racially pure (Smythe 1953) played a
role in how they conceptualized black people, the important concept to set up in
this section must be the fact that an anti-black context is established through a
world-wide perpetuation of white supremacy (King 2001; Valverde 2001;
Winant 2001). To not understand or accept this notion would severely limit the
scope of this analysis and its ability to explain how the people of Asian/black
heritage in my sample experience racism from people of Asian and white
heritage, but also people of black heritage.

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Anti-Black Racism from Asians
The establishment of racial hierarchy through the media played itself out
in the lives of people of Asian/black heritage through racist encounters with other
Asian people. Ai was born and raised in Japan and spent the first nineteen years
of her life as a “kurombo,” which is “nigger” in Japanese:
Ai (abf 57) - Because when I was small no one accepted me for
who I am. If I did well in school I was cheating. So when I had a
friend I told them an idea and they would steal it. I'm about to cry
now. They would steal my idea, and then tell me they wouldn't
want to play with me anymore because I'm “kurombo”, which
means nigger. My whole life was like that.

This anti-black sentiment was persistent throughout her life and was also present
in her own family as Ai remembers not being able to develop a close relationship
with her aunt because of her external black identity:
Ai (abf 57) - My mother couldn't take me to a lot of places
because of how people looked at me because I was different. My
mother's cousin is well-off, but I can only visit them once a year
because they don't except me and they don't except my mother.
My mother's twin sister doesn't accept me either and so she
doesn't accept my mother. When I got older and got married my
mother's sister accepted me a little bit, but not much, because her
son works a government job and it's embarrassing. So I never got
to know my mother's sister.

One must also take into consideration that Ai is 57 years old which places her
birth only five years after WWII ended, which I am sure intensified her racial
experiences. However, anti-black attitudes were also present with Tyrone, with
his Filipino family members as he remembered how his aunt always sat his
mother’s family outside of her restaurant and always talked down to them:
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Tyrone (abm 28) - My mom’s sister doesn’t like that we are half
Black. She has a problem with that… She just doesn’t like
Blacks… She owned a Filipino restaurant, we used to have to eat
outside, and she’d bring us the food. When we ate inside, my aunt
would talk down on us, and my mom didn’t want us to hear it.

When asked if the negative attitudes towards black people were shared by
all Asians and not just his aunt, Tyrone quickly claimed that, “No, it’s just her.”
However, this did not seem to be the case as Lamont explained the color
hierarchy in the Philippines:
Lamont (abm 29) - In the Filipino heritage in general, the lighter
you are the more respected and the wealthier you are. The darker
Filipinos tend to live up the mountains and are poorer. I had a
hard time when I got married because my wife is Filipino. Her
father didn’t even come to our wedding. Now that we have
children, he is my best friend now. It was difficult for her family
to accept me because I wasn’t Filipino enough.

This quote strongly suggested that there was a pre-existing color line in the
Philippines that was constructed during Spanish colonialism and reinforced
through the US colonial period (Ngozi-Brown 1997; Larkin 1982). However, the
idea that a pre-existing color line was also suggested by Aiko because in
Japanese culture dark skin was seen as dirty:
Aiko (abf 35) - My sister asked my mom what that was all about,
and my mom said they're not used to seeing our color because
they don't like it. They think it's dirty, and that's how it is over
there and that's how they are. That's when I understood why we
couldn't be backstage, or we couldn't watch any of her shows
because we were black and no one knew my mom's husband was
black.

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The association of people of Asian/black heritage to dirty strongly suggests that
the experiences that the Japanese had with the Eta and associating them to being
“dirty” was a useful, if not necessary, precursor to categorizing black people in
general, but Asian/black people specifically, as inferior (Donoghue 1957; Smythe
and Naitoh 1953).
Aiko’s experiences with anti-black racism by Japanese people also
happened within the context of the United States. Aiko recalled an incident of
how badly she and her sister were treated when they tried to hang out with their
mother while she was trying to give dance lessons to Japanese people:
Aiko (abf 35) - Because being Japanese, Japanese people are very
racist. My mother was a Japanese cultural dance teacher and it
was at this time that I experienced racism from the other side. My
mother traveled everywhere with this dance group, and one time
my sister and I went with her. We usually never go with her
because we were clingy, and she would push us away so she could
do her stuff. As soon as she would see us, she was not what she
was doing and tells us to get out. When we were young I just
thought I couldn't be in there, but now that I'm older I think her
pushing us out had to do with them looking at her kids and seeing
we were dark. So one time she was teaching in Gardenia, and we
walk in with my mom and the record stops (laugh). She told us to
wait over in the corner and I was oblivious, but my sister figured
it out quickly and told my mom that we were not going to wait
there and that we will go driving around for a little bit. So we
come back a few hours later and when we knock on the door the
person inside cracked the door open and we said were looking for
our mom and they said that we had the wrong place and slammed
the door shut. We knock again and tell them our mother's name
and they say oh, but then slammed the door shut again. Then my
mom comes to door and tells them were her children. By this
time, the whole house is at the front door. My mother goes to get
her stuff in the little girl comes up to us with the stereotypical
bowl cut and pan face and says why are you so dark don't you
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wish your skin was peach like us? And my sister said no because
if we did then we'd look like you. I thought I was a little harsh to
say to a six-year-old, but my sister was pissed (laugh)!

Even though many could argue that the Japanese people in the house where just
skeptical of strangers, as many people are; the depth of this incident only
revealed itself to me when I considered if I would even treat a stranger in such a
manner. This treatment strongly suggested that being black magnified being a
stranger to the household residents.
Although Aiko’s experience with anti-black racism could be partially
ameliorated by the idea that she was perceived as a stranger; Jane experienced
direct anti-black racism with her Vietnamese friend’s parents as she was told to
wait outside because the parents did not want a “black” person in the house:
Jane (abf 24) - I never had a problem with Filipinos, but it's kind
of funny, growing up with Vietnamese friends I've actually been
kicked out of some homes because I'm black. I don't speak
Vietnamese, but I've heard parents yelling at their kids, who is
that? And then my friend would say could you please wait
outside my mom doesn't like black people in the house. Another
friend's house who was also Vietnamese they were hanging out
when the parents were gone and when they came home I asked, do
I have to leave? Because I was conditioned that Vietnamese
people don't like black people, and he said no it's okay you don't
look black today. So you can stay. And a year later I had
lightened up, and I was allowed into the first person's house the
one I got kicked out of, and I thought to myself maybe I don't look
so black.

Such negative behavior from Asians of all ethnicities toward blackness
did not create a constrained black identity as it did for some people of
Asian/white heritage to create a constrained white identity. As a matter of fact,
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such open hostility toward people of Asian/black heritage from Asian people
actually created a resolve in Cornelius and many others to claim a rational
internal Asian and black identity no matter what Asian people thought or how
they may treat them:
Cornelius (abm 35) - I'm half black and half Japanese. I embrace
both sides. My mom raised us with all the traditions and culture.
My dad raised us; he was always there for us. In the big picture, I
know Japanese have a negative opinion towards Americans
period, and Blacks. Everybody has a negative opinion toward
blacks, but I identify with both.

However, I will argue in the next section that one of the main reasons why
people of Asian/black heritage did not create and continuously fought against a
constrained black identity was because of the anti-black racism of white people.
Anti-Black Racism from Whites
It has been clearly documented that racism in the United States was based
upon a white/black paradigm (Lipsitz 1998; Steinberg 1995; Marable 1995), and
if you did not fit into either category then you were placed somewhere in
between (Davis 1991) as was noticed by Sabrina in her school environment:
Sabrina (awf 49) - I will never forget this one time in second
grade in South Carolina, I noticed that all the White children sat in
the front of the class, and all the Black children sat in the back. I
was brown so they didn’t know where to put me. There weren’t
any brown people at the time in the South. It was either black or
white. Most of the time I was in the middle.

126
However, the strongest manifestation of this system of thought was to place you
as either white or nonwhite, which occurred in the life of Margaret who grew up
in a segregated neighborhood:
Margaret (abf 46) - Well, I grew up in an all-white neighborhood
back in the 60s and although people had rights people did not treat
you very nicely. Since I didn't fit in at the school and I didn't have
blonde hair I stuck out like a sore thumb and I would be spit on,
laughed at, you name it and it has happened to me. People beat
me up, because I looked different… They called me the n-word
and stuff like that. People were chasing me and spitting on me,
just the kids from school whose parents were obviously prejudiced
and it rolled onto the children.

Even though Margaret had made it clear that she looked racially ambiguous
enough to be placed in such disparate racial categories such as Filipino,
Hawaiian, Samoan, and Mexican; in the social context of the 1960’s she was
interpreted as nonwhite, which made her black by default.
Though people of Asian/black heritage fought against a constrained black
identity, this did not stop white people from treating Asian/black people as if
they were just black. Tyrone stated this notion clearest with his observation that
when tensions run high that white people were quick to call him a nigger:
Tyrone (abm 28) - People who have racial tensions are quick to
call me nigger because of my skin color. One time we played San
Pasqual, I played with his white guy, we are actually really good
friends now, and him and I got into a fight on the football field
because he called me a nigger. I don't know, somehow, we
became friends, and he still apologizes to me to this day
(laughter). People who are bigots are quick to call me nigger.

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Being called a nigger by white people in the heat of the moment was a
common theme with almost every person of Asian/black heritage that I
interviewed. Theo explained that angry customers would call him nigger even
when he was the main person trying to help them:
Theo (abm 33) - A customer, my friend who was Mexican was
helping him out. And sometimes it gets really busy, and
sometimes you have to wait a while. But regardless of being fast
or slow, we make sure the job is done right. For some reason he
must have waited over an hour and a half but he was told it would
be thirty to forty-five minutes of a wait. He leaves then he comes
back and it has been an hour and a half and we still haven’t gotten
to his car yet, and he left his cell and nobody had called him to let
him know that it would be a little bit longer. So went he had
talked to the sales person that had helped him originally, he
started getting wild. And I said, “Now sir, we can help you out,”
and the first thing he said was, “get away from me you fucking
nigger!” And I was like whoa, shit. And I go, “Sorry, but he will
be right with you.” I don’t know what that word means, I just
always knew from what my parents taught me and the movies and
stuff that it was always a bad thing. So I was like alright. So I
went into the office and said he’s ignorant. It went in one ear and
out the other.

On the football field, in a store and even within the home as Aiko spoke about
getting into an argument with her white boyfriend when they lived together in the
Midwest:
Aiko (abf 35) - Once I had a white fiancé who was in the military,
and when he got out we moved to Indiana. And I didn't realize he
drank a lot, and one day he got mad at me and call me a fucking
nigger. He said you are a fucking black bitch, a fucking nigger,
and we were at my grandmother's house and he pushed me across
the room and that was the last time I saw him. We were engaged
for three years, live together, and had two kids together and it
seems like he was OK when we were in California because there's
so many different races and I looked exotic when I was younger.
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But when we went to the Midwest, I think my dark skin just made
me black. His family was OK, but his friends made comments
like you got some of that brown stuff and that was too much
pressure for him. He became more abusive, call me a fucking
nigger and push me across the room and that was that.

Although being called nigger in a highly emotional setting was how most
racist incidents were experienced by people of Asian/black heritage, we must
remember that racism can be cold and calculated when necessary. This
deliberate assault on blackness was carried to the radio waves as Lamont recalled
having the former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan talk to him when he was on
a radio show:
Lamont (abm 29) - In a concert we did, after the show there was
a burning cross. This was out in Fallbrook. We did a radio
interview, and Tom Metzger, a leader in the KKK, called in. We
tried to witness to him and asked him to come to one of our
concerts. He said yeah, but only if we came out to one of mine.
And I thought to myself, oh no because they do the skinhead
thing. I don’t remember the radio show, but the topic was about
how multiracial things could come together. It was pretty unique,
because he used to live in Fallbrook and he's like the grand dragon
wizard or something of the KKK… He thought it was cute what
we were going. He wasn’t ignorant, he sounded intellectual. He
didn't say you guys are going to hell. He just was saying how we
need to be segregated, and Blacks need to be with Blacks,
Mexicans need to be with Mexicans, and whites need to be with
whites. I told him that is not how the world works, and he said
well that's how I'm trying to make it. Then I said that all I can do
is pray for you, he said that he's had a lot of people say that to
him. Some conversations you just need to drop, because they're
too jaded and corrupted.

Also, in understanding racism one must acknowledge it as a system of power
(Lipsitz 1998; Omi and Winant 1994) that has the ability to affect the lives of
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people of Asian/black heritage as was noted by Tyrone when he noticed that he
was passed up on a job because of his race:
Tyrone (abm 28) - After high school and a little bit of junior
college, I started my first job. I went with my cousin, who is
White and Samoan with straight hair and lighter skinned, but he
had no experience being fresh out of high school. They called him
first before me even though I put in the application before him.
They put him in an office, and they gave me some mail job. I
thought I was more qualified than he was, but I ended up passing
out mail. I think society does still run based on race. The place I
work now, I’ve worked there for eight years, and I see it so much.
I see people getting more bonuses than me, and I know I’m more
qualified than most of them. I am looking for another job, but I
haven’t explained that to the owner yet. I don’t think it will
change even if I talk to him.

Therefore, it seems clear that many people of Asian/black heritage did not accept
and actively fought against a constrained black identity because of the anti-black
racism of society in general, but because of white people in particular.
Therefore, this allows an Asian/black racial identity to be viewed as rational
racial identity. The only question left to answer in regard to a possible safe space
for people of Asian/black heritage would be black people. In the next section I
will analyze how blackness is now socially enforced by black people and how
this process can marginalize people of Asian/black heritage in general, but
Asian/black women specifically.
“You’re not black enough:” Asian/black people who do not act black
In the past, anti-black racism from society allowed multiracial black
people who were mostly of black, white and Native American heritage to solidify
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a positive understanding of blackness, which was a key to the development of the
Harlem Renaissance and ultimately created the consciousness necessary to form
the Civil Rights Movement (Davis 1991). However, when white supremacy gave
ground to the racial equality paradigm, which eventually took the form of the
Black Power movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, race and racial identification
became almost synonymous with each other (Winant 2001; Omi and Winant
1994). As Omi and Winant stated, this transformation in our socio-political
sphere redefined race and added the necessary component of racial identity into
the discourse:
This expansion of “normal” politics to include racial issues – this
“common sense” recognition of the political elements at the heart
of racial identities and meanings – made possible the movement’s
greatest triumphs, its most permanent successes. These did not lie
in its legislative accomplishments, but rather in its ability to create
new racial “subjects.” The black movement redefined the
meaning of racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in
American society. Social movements create collective identity by
offering their adherents a different view of themselves and their
world; different, that is, from the worldview and self-concepts
offered by the established social order (emphasis in the original)
(Omi and Winant 99).

However, when racial discourse shifted to include identity this allowed the
boundaries between races to be enforced by the racial groups themselves, rather
than by the established order (Mezey 2003; Snipp 2003). Although this did not
seem problematic in the beginning, as blackness became increasingly defined by
black people the social context was created as to what was considered “black
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enough,” which had a marginalizing effect on many people of Asian/black
descent in my sample (Kennedy 2003; Sollors 2000; Davis 1991).
Current perceptions of black identity used both cultural and physical
attributes to determine who was “black enough” (Hall and Turner 2001).
However, this conceptualization of blackness created the dynamic for many
people of Asian/black heritage to be interpreted as having an external black
identity by people who were not black, while not being seen as black by other
black people. Even though Sumi was born and raised in Japan and struggled
with her racial identity, she made it clear that Japanese people saw her as black
even though she was culturally Japanese:
Sumi (abf 20) - When I was in Okinawa, the people who love
Black people and loved the history about them would be more
interested in me, but there were those who were not so interested
in me, they would drift apart from me. It’s like that for both sides.
Only Japanese people who are interested in the Black culture
usually draw close to me to learn more about the Black side of
me.

The idea that Japanese people are now interested in black culture suggests a shift
in racial thinking, however, current research suggests that interest is more about
consumerism than genuine interest in black culture (Cornyetz 1994).
Although having an external racial identity of black has a lot to do with
how Sumi looks, which she described as mostly black, when asked how black
other people think she looked Sumi immediately stated that black people see her
as more Japanese rather than black. Sumi arrived at this conclusion herself
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because she observed that black people talked to her differently than they did to
other black people:
Sumi (abf 20) - From what people have told me, I would say
slightly. Black people would put me more into the Japanese
category than the Black category. They see me as way more
Japanese. When they talk to me, it is a lot different than how they
communicate with their other Black friends… My friend would
be more active and more excited when she talks to her other
friends. She also uses a lot more slang when she’s talking to them.
It’s probably because I don’t know a lot. She is calmer when she
communicates with me… I don’t mind. I know that they aren’t
trying to do anything on purpose or anything.

Sumi went into further detail when she made the observation that other people
saw her as black because they were not as familiar with black culture, while she
believed that black people could tell if someone was acting black or not:
Sumi (abf 20) - I think they see me as more Black. I think it’s
because Black people know the Black culture and the Black
feelings more than other races do. I guess they can see if I’m
acting Black so they would know more than the other races. With
the other races, they can see me as Black because I’m different
from their cultures. Here is a Black person who knows their stuff,
and they see me. They know the ways I’m acting. Here are the
other races who aren’t Black; they don’t know the Black culture
or Japanese culture so when they see me doing one or the other
they will put me into whichever category they see.

Sumi’s experiences strongly suggest that for black people, looking black was not
enough you also had to act black.
Although it would be easy to ascribe Sumi’s experience to the fact that
she was born and raised in Japan; Theo who was born and raised in the United
States had a similar experience because black people thought he acted white.
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Theo, self described as looking mostly black to other people, conveyed an
experience where he was told by a black woman that he was the whitest black
man she ever met:
Theo (abm 33) - It's just kind of hard to describe. Blacks just see
me and my skin color. I had one black girl, for some reason,
when I lived in DC she told me I was the "whitest" black guy she
ever met (laughter). I don't know what that meant, but I said, oh,
thank you. Then I said what the hell is she talking about (hushed
voice)?

When asked what that meant to him, Theo suggested that black people used a lot
of slang, while he spoke “properly:”
Theo (abm 33) - What I am thinking is that the Black guys she
knows talk slang and all that stuff, but me I talk proper, you know,
grammar with manners. I could be wrong, but that is what I
thought it meant. It did kind of stun me, because I did not
know how to take that in.

Therefore, the political shift that connected race and identification made it
where looking black was not enough; you also had to act black. In other words,
black people have defined blackness to encompass both phenotypic and cultural
attributes and if you looked black, but did not act black, then you were not
considered black (Hall and Turner 2001).
The experiences of Sumi and Theo as they interacted with black people
seem to run counter to the experiences of Mary, Ai and Tyrone with Asians as
they suggested that it was more important to look Asian that to act Asian.
Rebecca Chiyoko King’s research (2001) on the San Francisco Cherry Blossom
Queen Pageant strongly supports that it is more important for multiracial Asians
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to look Asian in order to gain acceptability in an American context. King
illustrates this with how Japanese-American participants did not know as much
about Japanese culture, but looked Japanese, while Asian/white participates knew
more about Japanese culture, but used heavy eyeliner to make themselves look
more Asian. By Sumi and Theo’s own admittance they both look black,
however, this begs the question as to what happens when someone who is of
Asian/black heritage does not look black?
“You’re not black enough, part 2:” Asian/black people who do not look
black

Although a few people of Asian/black heritage stated that they thought
they looked mostly black to themselves and to other people, most of the people in
my sample described themselves as looking somewhere in the middle regarding
their facial and body features. Being something less than black, i.e. having long
hair, having straight or wavy hair, having almond shaped eyes, or being petite,
had a strong effect on the experiences of Asian/black women and men within the
black community.
The Treatment of Asian/black Women
Asian/black women that looked ambiguous became “exotic” to men in
general, but to black men in particular and therefore attractive; while being
interpreted as different by black women led to being alienated at best and
verbally and physically abused at worst (Kennedy 2003). Finding women of
Asian/black heritage attractive was a discernable pattern with the vast majority of
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black men, but Jane uncovered that these men found them attractive because they
were “exotic” looking rather than fitting into traditional understandings of black
feminine beauty:
Jane (abf 24) - I think black guys find me attractive. They like
the long hair, light skinned, petite person… This black guy I
dated, he actually spoke Vietnamese which was interesting, and he
always told me to wear my hair down because I looked more
Asian that way. I was older and so I didn't conform to his wishes
as much as I did with past boyfriends. So I was like whatever, I
didn't feel like doing my hair. He was not my ideal guy, but it had
nothing to do with him being black.

Elizabeth found black men linked her to traditional images of black feminine
beauty, but would also recognize her difference. This was most clearly seen
when black men changed the words to “She’s a Brick House” by the
Commodores, a funk/soul/r&b group of the 1970’s, when they referred to her:
Elizabeth (abf 48) - Well in California, the men I dated who were
predominately black men. They liked the fact that I had long hair
and the Commodores had a song called “Brick House,” and they
used to call me a little brick shithouse (laugh). I have always had
the legs, but people would always say that my ass was the black
side of me.

Black men referred her as a brick house, which fell within traditional black
feminine beauty, but the addition of “little” and “shithouse” was used to
recognize her overall petite frame with the notable exception of her butt.
However, being labeled as exotic made Margaret feel “alien” rather than
beautiful:
Margaret (abf 46) - I had a teacher once that told me in high
school that I look pretty darn good "considering." That was a
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psychology teacher in high school… Considering that I was half
black and half Japanese, I guess I look pretty darn good. That's
how I took it and that's how he meant it. I'm not a monster… I
mean, I don't look like a bizarre alien, but "considering" (laugh).
It's like, considering your girl you play sports well. Meaning you
can't just play sports, because you're a girl. "Considering" I'm this
weird taboo, I look pretty darn good. Anyways, I just laugh it off
because people say weird things to me every day.

Therefore Margaret saw through the “exotic” label as one that connoted beauty,
but most important was that it signified difference.
Although being seen as exotic by black men was a benefit, being different
to black women caused serious social interaction problems. Reiko spoke of how
she has tried to get along with other black women, but that they have not
accepted her because of her difference:
Reiko (abf 20) - One day I figured it wasn't working that way and
my grandmother would yell at me that I embrace my Japanese
side more than my black side. But I told her that I'm not really
well accepted on that side. I'm proud that I'm half black. I do
what I have to do to be half black, or whatever, but I'm not
comfortable and obviously they're not very comfortable. We don't
hate each other it's just I don't fit into that group and that's OK.

This difference, as noted by Aiko, always started with the hair (Hall and Turner
2001; Root 2001). When asked about whether black people accepted her or not,
Aiko originally stated that she was completely accepted but had to change her
assessment because she had blocked out how badly black women have treated
her:
Aiko (abf 35) - Yes, black people love me, especially black men.

So nothing with black women?
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Aiko (abf 35) - Well, of course they don't like me (laugh). I guess
I was only thinking of black men. Black women do not like me,
my God they don't like me. They would call me half breed; they
would say I think I'm too good. It was based on jealousy. I dated
two black men, and when I've done that black women treat me
nasty. When I was young and went to church, I had hair past my
butt and my mom would put it in two ponytails, and the black
girls would pull my hair and say half breed. They would pick
on me and my sister a lot because we weren't full black.

The issue of hair in the African American community is of extreme importance:
In African cultures, the grooming and styling of hair have long
been important social rituals. Elaborate hair designs, reflecting
tribal affiliation, status, sex, age, occupation, and the like were
common, and the cutting, shaving, wrapping, and braiding of hair
were centuries-old arts (White and White 1995, p 49).

And the hair of black women has been used to symbolize freedom and self
appreciation in many acclaimed novels by black women (Weitz 2001; Ashe
1995). Therefore, I argue that the negative association of women of Asian/black
heritage and their wavy, rather than kinky, hair become symbolic of their lack of
black authenticity.
The idea that Asian/black women thought they were better than black
women was also shared by Elizabeth who was continuously verbally and
physically assaulted by young black women because of her differences:
Elizabeth (abf 46) - I remember being about twelve or thirteen
and going to school in Oklahoma and I remember all the little kids
not knowing what I was or who I am. So they would pull their
eyes tight and call me “ching-chong”. There were two black girls
that would follow me home everyday from school, but keep about
six paces behind me, and on weekends they would wait outside
behind the bushes or the trees and wait for me to come outside so
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that they could pounce on me, or intimidate me more. It came to
the point were I would be walking home from school and they
would be walking behind me and my father would be driving very
slowly behind them. Once they actually chased me home into my
house and my stepmother was mopping the floor and she ran them
out. Since I was younger, I have always been ridiculed by black
people.

All of the Asian/black women in my sample were proud of being black,
but the ill treatment they received by black people in general, but black women
specifically, caused many to not develop an internal black identity. Aiko spoke
about how the sum total of her experiences had influenced her to just state that
she was Japanese when people asked her about her race:
Aiko (abf 35) - Now that I think about it, in my experience black
people have been more prejudice to me than anyone. Black girls
were prejudice to me here, but just black people in general in the
Midwest. Maybe that's why I don't care for certain black people.
This may sound prejudice, but I can see one as they're walking
towards me because of how they walk or how they dress. And
when they talk to you they always make it a point to tell you who
they are as if you can't relate, like I'm black and I'm proud. And
I'm okay with that and always give people a chance, but there's so
much more than just being black, and maybe since I've never been
given a chance I just don't get into that issue very much. Now that
I think about it, I always say I'm Japanese and I never say I'm
black. But to me that's just obvious, so I don't state it.

Although these experiences told us what happened, it has not told us why
it would happen. Many Asian/black women stated that black women were
jealous (Kennedy 2003), but what originated the jealousy? Jane hinted at what
the origin of this jealousy might be when she spoke of how one of her black
female friends always commented on her beauty:
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Jane (abf 24) – I have a friend who's black, well actually her
mom is white and her dad is black, but she really doesn't identify
with the white side and she's sweet. She would always say you're
so lucky that your hair grows long. She would say you're black
but you're very pretty. She was always very complementary of
how I looked. I don't think black women looking me negatively, I
don't know. I guess I would think more about it there were more
black people around.

The fact that Jane referred to her friend as black, even though her friend was of
multiracial white/black heritage, clearly demonstrated how people of white/black
heritage are still considered black (Davis 1991). More importantly, her friend
being understood as black added meaning to when her friend said, “you’re black
but you’re very pretty.” This statement suggested that black women have, to
whatever degree internalized whiteness as the standard of beauty and therefore
have placed themselves on the bottom of the beauty hierarchy (Collins 2000;
hooks 1981).
The Treatment of Asian/black Men
Although not looking black was a problem that both Asian/black women
and men faced, men gained a huge social advantage to fitting in if they were
good at sports (Messner 1992). Tim observed that his team used racial humor as
a method of socialization and that the multiple races of his baseball team came
together as they played other teams with more homogeneous compositions who
made racist comments toward members of his team:
Tim (abm 41) - I had a lot of friends of different races and we
made fun of each other but it was always within the group. We
were comfortable calling each other names, but it would be more
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threatening if it were someone outside of the group. We use racial
humor to socialize on. For example, on my baseball team we
were a lot of different races, but then we would play against
another team's that was just one race. And you would hear from
that one race about all of our different races. I've mentioned rice
ball and I never heard that in my family before, and when I played
against other teams they would make that my nickname. I would
think to myself I like rice and everything, but why do they have to
call me that? They were trying to get down on me, and I took it as
a defensive thing. People that want to make fun of my race is a
defensive thing. So that was my analysis of that. Even my friends
got called pineapple, banana, spear chucker or whatever and I
defended that, but in their group they were defensive because they
were only one race and so that's all they knew. So we played with
that, we listened to that, we took that in, but it we never got
physical over it because there was no reason for that.

Tim also noticed that the better they did, they worse the crowd taunted them:
Tim (abm 41) - We never threw anything back at them, well we
threw back at them was our talent and our ability to play. So the
better we did the more we would hear from them. Not only from
them, but also their families sitting in the stands, they would even
write signs that said things like "go back home". Yeah, I were
talking late 70s early 80s, but we did what we knew and that was
play the game.

Being good at sports provided Tim with a productive outlet to deal with the vile
racist taunts of the crowds and made the team conscious of how they taught new
team members about race:
Tim (abm 41) - We were damn good (laugh)! We had a lot of
good talent back then, but it was nothing to brag about. It helped
us with our self-esteem and it was a confidence you kept it
yourself rather than worry about race because you were a team. A
half black half Japanese pitcher throwing to a
Hawaiian/Chinese/Portuguese catcher with a white first baseman
and a black shortstop, but you didn't even think about that. But
the opponents did, and they would see it and use it against you.
We just thought that it was not part of our game and nothing to get
141
down about. If anyone new came to our team who was unfamiliar
with that would get educated real quick.

Therefore, Tim and his baseball team learned that winning was the answer for
racism.
Playing sports was beneficial to the development of good race relations
amongst team members, but playing sports did not make a team colorblind. As a
matter of fact it made it more colorful as teammates made racial jokes and
nicknames. This was noted by Tyrone whose teammates made nicknames for
multiracial players:
Tyrone (abm 28) - In high school, we had a couple guys who
were White and Filipino and Black and Filipino on the team; they
had nicknames for everyone. White and Filipinos were “flights”
and I was a “fligger.” Just names like that because guys do that. I
don’t think it was on purpose racially though.

The appreciation of diversity within sports may have something to do with how
sports were structured. Most team sports have discernable positions that had
very specific qualities and attributes. Therefore, playing sports magnified
difference, but also demonstrated how differences were incorporated into a single
team.
Sports proved to benefit Asian/black men as it regarded social
acceptance, but it also had the effect of developing a constrained black identity.
Reggie commented on how he supported black players because they are a “dying
breed:”
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Reggie (abm 22) - I don’t like to put people in categories, like
he's black because he dresses this way, or he listens to this kind of
music. I just think it is how you think of yourself. You don’t need
a label with it. But at the same time, I do look up to Black athletes
and black musicians… Because they are good and because they
are Black. For example in baseball, Blacks in baseball is a dying
breed, and I try to support that however I can to try to get that
back. I feel like that should be stronger for the community.

When asked to go into more detail, Reggie explained that there was a bond
amongst black players because there were so few:
Reggie (abm 22) - I’m looking for myself to get up in the ranks,
but I’m also rooting for other guys too. It’s a different special
bond that we have because they're so few of us. I only had one on
my team last year, and everybody else was either white or Latin.

Although sports in general made socialization and fitting in easier for
Asian/black men, the racial dynamics of the sport could also create a bond
between black players and draw them closer to a black identity.
Conclusion
In conclusion, race has had a detrimental effect on the assimilation
process as racial categories are (re)negotiated, (re)examined and (re)defined
through the multiracial subject. The multiracial project has allowed the
reestablishment of white supremacy through the minimizing of Asian heritage by
people of Asian/white heritage.. One way that this was shown was in the fact
that people of Asian/white heritage in my sample were more likely to state that
they had a white racial identification than people of Asian/black heritage were to
143
identify as being black. This strongly suggests that, although constrained, there
was a social advantage connected to a white racial identity.
Our current racial order was also (re)established through the
(re)inforcement of black inferiority through the racist treatment of people of
Asian/black heritage from people of all races, including black people. Although
they were of Asian/black heritage, Asians and white people most often treated
them like they were just black by calling them nigger or treating them inferiorly
at a job. However, some of the most racist attitudes and behaviors towards
people of Asian/black heritage came from black people themselves who saw
them as “not black enough.” Also, some of the most physical abuse came from
black women towards women of Asian/black heritage because of the
internalization of black inferiority and led to these women push away from a
black identity. This negativity thus allowed for the creation of a rational
multiracial identity for people of Asian/black heritage.
Although Asian/black women were verbally, emotionally and physically
abused by all members of society, Asian/black men who were good at sports had
an altogether different experience as it pertained to fitting in socially. Sports
allowed for these men to bond with other races of people and to acknowledge
and appreciate the differences amongst them. Also, racial dynamics on an off the
field also had the tendency to pull Asian/black men towards a black identity.

144
Chapter 7

All in the Family:
Learning Racial Hierarchy from the Ones You Love
Interracial Marriage and the Assimilation Process
One of the most common notions regarding the seeming explosion of
interracial marriage is that this signifies the acceptance of people of color into the
white American mainstream (Patterson 1997; Hollinger 1995). This idea is
supported by assimilation theorists who follow the ethnicity model for race
relations and suggest that as European ethnics eventually melted together to form
what we now understand as white people, so now will people of color blend
together with white people and become Americans. Although this is a common
understanding of how race will be absorbed within the assimilation process, this
chapter will ask two questions that will challenge the major assumptions of this
paradigm: is the assimilation process alone the best way to understand the high
intermarriage rates of Asians? And, are interracial couples less likely than the
rest of society to hold onto notions of racial hierarchy, which will be the driving
question for this chapter.
Can Assimilation Alone Explain Interracial Marriage with Asians?
Hwang, Saenez and Aguirre, in their article, “Structural and
Assimilationist Explanations of Asian American Intermarriage,” conducted
research in order to figure out how the assimilation process has affected Asian
145
American interracial marriage patterns. What was initially found was that
English fluency was a major factor contributing to interracial marriage with
Asians, which suggests that the increase in interracial marriages with Asian
Americans is due to the acculturation process of assimilation. The assimilation
position was strengthened by the association of more intermarriages occurring
with Asians who immigrated to the US before 1965, thus concluding that
interracial marriages are more likely once cultural barriers are removed.
However, the authors also found that the higher an Asian person’s education
levels are the less likely they were to interracially marry, which they could not
explain with an assimilationist or structuralist framework. Although they could
not reconcile this seeming contradiction, the authors conclude that, “Our
evidence provides overwhelming support to the claim that high acculturation
leads to more intermarriage.” (p. 770) However, I argue that an explanation that
places race as the center of analysis can be used to explain this seeming
contradiction.
Connecting the context of most interracial marriages occurring amongst
Asians that have arrived before 1965, places this population within a war bride
context rather than an assimilationist framework. This assertion is strengthened
by the fact that the vast majority of people in interracial marriages were born in
foreign countries rather than in the United States (Saenez et. al. 1994; Thornton
1992). Although current studies show that American-born Asians are more
146
likely to intermarry than foreign born (Liang and Ito 1999), placing Asian
interracial marriages within a war bride setting allows the comparison that 60%
of foreign born Japanese women interracially marry in comparison to only 25%
of their US born counterparts (Jacobs and Labov 2002). If this is the case, one
would then have to conclude that fluency in English is relative to a pre-
assimilation and not an educational context, and suggests is that there is
something about a United States environment that lessens the chance of people of
Asian heritage to interracially marry.
With this new understanding, the difference between educational level
and interracial marriage must be re-examined. If Asians with higher education
levels have a higher ethnic identification (Xie and Goyette 1997) and are less
likely to interracially marry, this strongly suggests that the assimilation process
of the United States actually strengthens understandings of racial categories, not
lessens them. If understood in this manner then any argument regarding social
distance and interracial marriage must be understood as a combination of socio-
economic status (Kuo 1970), and racial status within the US.
An examination of interracial marriage statistics strongly suggest that
these marriages follow our current racial hierarchy with black people being
grossly underrepresented in the statistics of who intermarries. Of the six major
Asian ethnicities in the United States, interracial marriage amongst black people
was about 1.5% of total marriages of foreign born Asians, while whites
147
represented approximately 27% (Le 2006). This suggests that foreign born
Asians are approximately eighteen (18) times more likely to interracially marry
someone who is white versus someone who is black. Of Asian Americans this
number increases even further with black people representing approximately
2.3% of interracial marriages with Asian Americans, while whites are
approximately 52% (Ibid.). This suggests that Asian Americans are about 22
times more likely to marry someone white rather than black. Since black people
represent about 13% and non-Hispanic white people represent about 67% of the
US population, the probability of an Asian person marrying a white person over a
black person should only be five (5) times greater (US Census 2000). Therefore,
what this suggests is that the color line is being re-established within the context
of who marries interracially, and who does not.
Although this huge disparity exists, the multiracial project keeps society
focused on how interracial marriages have “dramatically” increased since the
Supreme Court decided that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional
in1967 (Johnson 2003; Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001; Root 1996) in order
to lead us away from the fact that racial hierarchy is manifesting itself within the
patterns of interracial marriage. Therefore, this chapter will examine how the
people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage in my sample learn about race
and racial hierarchy within their family structure.

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It Starts in the Home
When speaking about race and racism, most people would state that “it
starts in the home.” Therefore, my analysis will begin with an examination of
the parents to uncover how color lines become visible and are established within
family and peer relationships and whether their experiences fit an assimilation
framework.
Throughout my study, it was made clear that Asian cultures in general did
not like interracial marriages. This has to do mostly with the relationship of
Americans as a military presence in Asian countries and the inherent power
relationship between these forces (Enloe 2000; Thornton 1992). Although this is
true of all interracial relationships with Asian people, notions of racial hierarchy
emerge within the context of how interracial couples were treated by their
parents and peers. Whiteness often afforded a pathway that was acceptable, even
if it were not particularly appreciated by immediate family members. However,
this was not the case with being married to someone who is black where
immediate family members often vehemently enforced the notion of the
unsuitability of black people as marriage partners.
Although the military experience fits four of the six sets of parents that I
interviewed and almost all of the multiracial respondents, the most notable
difference between how Asian and white and Asian and black interracial couples
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are treated happened with two couples where all members were raised in the
United States. These two couples were also in the opposite pattern of the vast
majority of my sample where in both couples the male was Asian and the woman
was either white or black, both men were of Chinese heritage, both men were
highly educated, and no one was directly involved with the military.
When We First Met
Melvin and Alexandria
When speaking of how these two couples met, it is important to
understand the socio-political context in which they grew up. The ages of
Melvin, Alexandria, Rosie, and Ted allowed them to experience most, if not all,
of the countercultural revolution that was happening during the sixties and
seventies (Spates 1976). Therefore, the belief in non-traditional couple may have
been in the minds of Melvin, a 52 year-old Asian male parent, and Alexandria, a
49 year-old white female parent when they met each other at the wedding of a
mutual friend:
Alexandria (wfp [1] 49) - I met him at my best friend’s wedding,
and he was in the wedding, he was one of the groomsmen. I
remember his smile mostly. I wasn’t introduced to him; I just
went through the reception line.

And then a chance phone call to a friend’s parent’ house, while Melvin was
house sitting led to them going on their first date together at a Christian music
concert:
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Alexandria (wfp 49) - I told him why I was calling, and we
talked about political and church stuff. He mentioned he was
going to concerts at church. I had always wanted to go, but didn’t
want to drive to Orange County by myself. I wanted to go with
friends, but we ended up going by ourselves. We were both just
brave enough to go as friends. It was Christian music with a Bible
study afterward.

Rosie and Ted
Although Melvin and Alexandria met in a seemingly race neutral manner,
race was at the center of how Rosie, a 65 year-old black female parent, and Ted,
a 64 year-old Asian male parent, met each other as they worked for the American
Friends Service Group:
Rosie (bfp [2] 65) - It was in the summer after I graduated college
and moved to California to be with the American Friends Service
Group. It was different groups from all around who came to be
one big group in California. It was there that everyone was
introduced and found out about the project we were doing for the
summer. I don’t remember the first meeting; only that everybody
was friendly and so was he. I don’t have anything clear in my
mind on a first meeting.

American Friends Service Group, founded in 1917, was a Quaker organization
that is focused on social justice and equality and won a Nobel Peace Prize in
1947 (Nobelprize.org). So from the start, Rosie and Ted’s relationship began
within the context of an organization that had a high racial awareness and a
desired to create social equality. Ted went further by saying that he developed
his current social awareness because of an event that he attended in his youth that
was associated with the same group, which he believed allowed, him to be open-
minded enough to eventually marry his wife:
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Ted (amp [3] 64) - One of the formative events in my life was in
the summer of my freshman year of high school. I went to a thing
called Anytown which is run by the National Conference of
Christians and Jews. The whole organization began in 1937. They
used to be the organization that ran Brotherhood week. I went in
1958 that summer, and it was a camp. It might have been called an
encounter group for high school teenagers. It lasted a week in the
mountains in Prescott, Arizona. They took student leaders and put
us together to talk about issues of race, religion, and ethnicity. I
was not socially aware. That summer I had a different look into
the world. I think it led me to study psychology instead of
engineering. So Anytown was a very important turning point for
me. My wife and I about five years ago were counselors for an
event. I think I had a better understanding of people and racism by
then. I was excited about people who were culturally, socially,
and religiously different than I.

Anytown, a residential youth leadership program, was establish in 1950 and was
sponsored by the National Conference for Christians and Jews, a human relations
organization dedicated to fighting bias and racism in the United States (NCCJ
2002). It was this experience that allowed Ted to study psychology rather than
engineering and put him on the path to eventually meet his wife.
Even the first real date between Rosie and Ted involved race as they
watched Westside Story, a love story that crossed racial lines:
Rosie (bfp 65) - A few of us lived on the grounds where we
worked. We would get together to do social things, but it wasn’t
boy and girl deal just in a group. Then from that we just talked as
friends, and then we became really close friends. At some point he
asked me to go out, and we went to see “West Side Story”. We
had fun together, but it wasn’t serious like boyfriend/girlfriend;
we just knew we enjoyed each other’s company. Then we started
going out more to dinners and movies, and it got pretty serious
then. It just grew from there.

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Family, Friends and Interracial Marriage
Melvin and Alexandria
As things blossomed, I asked Melvin to tell me how his family and
friends felt about his interracial relationship and he immediately began talking
about how his dating was affected by his physical location:
Melvin (amp 52) - I don’t think they had a problem with it. We
originally were from Gardenia, and there were a lot of Japanese
people there. All my friends were Japanese. We moved from there
to Torrance which was an all Caucasian area. There weren’t many
Japanese.

Melvin, who was fourth generation Chinese American, spoke about his Japanese
friends and how “… all of my friends were Japanese,” strongly suggested that he
and his friends had developed a pan-Asian identity (Espiritu 1992). Although
Espiritu fully explained that physical similarity amongst Asian people did not
create a primordial sense of community within Asia, she made it clear that these
similarities helped create a definite experience within the United States as Asian
people.
However, primordial understandings of race were affirmed through
Melvin’s own exclamation about why he became friends with people of Japanese
heritage and how he had never had a problem with Japanese people, “I don’t
know probably because we look similar!” This statement completely neglected
to address the historical legacy between Japanese and Chinese people in Asia and
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in the United States in favor of a racial explanation as to why these two groups
seemingly get along presently. This assertion further (re)enforced the
understanding that physical similarities build community, rather than cultural or
individual attributes.
Melvin maintained the physical limitations of who he dated and married
as the primary reason why no one, including his parents, had a problem with it:
Melvin (amp 52) - After high school, most of my friends were
White. They didn’t think anything of it. My parents didn’t think
anything of it either because that was all that was around. I have
three cousins who marry Chinese people. Basically our family is
pretty mixed. My brothers are both married to Caucasian women.

This formulation of “I just married who was around” is important to note because
it allows for someone to eliminate the idea that they chose not to marry someone
of a different race other than those that were around. This construction also
negates the reality of racial segregation in order to create an innocence regarding
why his parents may have moved into that area in the first place
(Frankenberg1993).
Rosie and Ted
For Rosie and Ted, things were different. Once it got serious, that was
when notions of racial hierarchy came into play, even with their close friends:
Ted (amp 64) - You asked me about my friends. I had one friend
tell me that what I planned to do was a bad idea. About ten years
later he married a Black woman, and he’s White (laugh). At the
time, he though it was going to ruin my life. In general, people
thought we were just young. In terms of our colleagues, they were
surprised we got married. It just wasn’t the thing to do. Dating
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was bad enough, but getting married made people ask what are
you doing? Our friends did support us though.

This seems like the expected response given that Rosie and Ted probably met
before anti-miscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional. However, this is
an interesting observation considering the radical political time frame they grew
up in, which suggests how deeply racial notions regarding who was proper
marriage material were ingrained.
By placing everyone’s concerns within a socio-historical context, Ted
creates a sense of innocence regarding the people involved, which also happened
with Alexandria later in this section. Ted used it to illustrate his point and
connect larger social factors to their eventual marriage. His white friend literally
thought that Ted would ruin his life if he were to marry a black woman, but
eventually married a black woman himself. This clearly demonstrated how the
concept of race has shaped black people to be viewed as the bottom rung of
society.
Rosie talks about how difficult it was to make African American friends
because of having an Asian husband:
Rosie (bfp 64) - I base that on attempts to make social
connections with women. They would be nice, but if they got
together to do certain things I wasn’t invited. We would invite
Afro-American couples to dinner at our house, and some would
reciprocate and some didn’t. I think it had a lot to do with not
knowing anything about the Chinese culture. They, Black males,
didn’t know how to relate to Ted.

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In this situation, it is not Ted’s race that Rosie considered, but his culture.
However, it seemed clear from the context of the quote that African-Americans
were also making racial assumptions about Asian Americans. Interestingly
enough, these types of complications were anticipated from the start, but the
confidence of youth prevailed:
Rosie (bfp 65) - We set out to conquer the world, and we did. We
felt very confident and naïve and young. It was to our advantage
because if we had been smarter, we would’ve thought it out. We
just went on though. I remember working at a children’s house,
and this girl told me that marriage was too complicated to mix
race or religion. She said like she really believed it too. Over the
years, I wish she could see me now.

This youthful confidence can also be a product of the times, as America’s youth
rebelled against authority and attempted to change the world (Smiley 1977).
Parental Establishment of the Color Line
Rosie and Ted
Although friends seemed skeptical and hesitant, they remained
supportive, but the parents proved to be much harsher in their dealings. Rosie,
who knew that her mother would probably disapprove, decided to wait until after
her and Ted had eloped to tell her mother:
Rosie (bfp 65) - I figure she disapproved, which she did. I thought
if I told her before hand that she would try to stop it from
happening. I went ahead and did it because once it’s done; it can’t
be undone (laughs).

When asked if her mother’s disapproval was racially based, Rosie stated that it
was, but more so because of the lack of knowledge of Asian Americans at the
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time, rather than and overarching ideology of Asian American unsuitability for
marriage:
Rosie (bfp 65) - Initially yeah because she didn’t have any
concept of who this person was or anything. In life I think you are
always more afraid of the unknown. Race probably entered into it
because if I just up and married an Afro-American man that would
have been the end of it. So the shock was the marriage as well as a
marriage outside of the race.

Ted remembered Rosie’s mother’s first question after finding out he was
Chinese; which side would he be on if the US and China go to war:
Ted (amp 64) - When Roz told her mother, her first question was
if America and China go to war, which side would I be on? That
was five or six years after the Korean War, and the Cold War was
heating up. She did support us in all ways though. Her Black
friends were supportive.

In questioning his allegiance, Rosie’s mother demonstrated a political
consciousness grounded in racially essentialist notions that Asians were
somehow super-patriotic (Smythe 1953), but after some time did manage to
support the newlyweds.
Although racial hierarchy did not seem to be at the center of Rosie’s
mother’s disapproval, it definitely was at the center for Ted’s parents. As a
matter of fact, Ted knew that the consequences of marrying a black woman
would be so severe that he purposely did not tell his parents that he was married
for several years:
Ted (amp 64) - My parents didn’t know until after we got
married. When they found out, not from my help, they disowned
me. My father called and said he didn’t want to see me, and if he
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did he’d kill me. My siblings were supportive, and I got calls from
them. My family has seven children; five are my half brothers and
sisters, and I have a full sister. My full sister found out, wasn’t
happy, but afterward accepted it. My father and step-mom were
totally against it. My brother and sisters were too young, but my
oldest younger brother called and said he supported me.

Ted then goes on to explain how racial hierarchy worked for Chinese people; if
you are not Chinese then you are a barbarian:
Ted (amp 64) - In China, there are only Chinese people. There
are no Black people or White people. It’s a homogeneous country.
I remember when I was young, there were comments about the
Indians in Hong Kong. The Indians were darker than the Chinese.
China is so big. It’s not that integrated; Chinese people are very
ethnocentric. Their words for people who aren’t Chinese are
barbarians. White people we call “white devil” and Black people
we call “black devils” or “Mr. Ink”.

However, Ted did make it clear that his parents did not approve of him
marrying outside of his race in general, but a black woman specifically:
Ted (amp 64) - My parents were upset because I married
someone who was not Chinese and especially someone who was
Black. Totally not acceptable… They would’ve been upset if I
married a White woman. In fact my brother married a White
woman and was able to keep it a secret for three years. The family
wasn’t supportive at all. They didn’t re-own me for twelve years.

Although being interracially married was bad in any context, it can be inferred by
the text of his brother’s experience that if he married a white woman that he
would not have been disowned by his family. This situation clearly
demonstrated the privileging of whiteness even within communities of color.
When asked if his parents brought a pre-existing color line from China,
Ted stated that was not the case. He suggested that his parents internalized the
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racial structure of the US in order to put black people at the bottom of the racial
hierarchy:
Ted (amp 64) - It’s not China, it’s here. My dad was in the US
Army and after the war, he brought my sister and me since my
mom died when I was six months old. We went to Tucson,
Arizona where my dad owned a grocery store. There was racism
toward Black, Latino, and Whites. They understood the social
structure; Blacks were worse off than Latinos who were worse off
than Whites. From the view point, they adopted the social
standards of racism.

This is consistent with interracial marriage statistics and how these mirror the
color line of the United States (Le 2006).
Interestingly enough, as well established notions of white suitability for
interracial marriage were set in his parents; Ted somehow convinced Rosie that
their experiences with his parents were not based on race, but on nationality:
Rosie (bfp 65) - I thought it was, but Ted said not. I believe him
because later he had a brother who married a White woman. The
reaction was not as strong, but my brother-in-law he married this
person, he didn’t tell his family for five years. I realized then it
wasn’t because I’m this color, it is because I’m not Chinese.

Despite Rosie’s disbelief, this color line maintains itself even through the
reconciliation process with his parents through a lack of admission of racist
thinking. So when asked if his father ever forgave him, Ted was not
overwhelmed with the forgiveness of his father:
Ted (amp 64) - More or less. I married Rosie in 1963; I go my
doctorate in 1968. We went east to Pennsylvania and then cam
here. In 1975, my brother, dad, and mom asked to come down for
a visit. It was very awkward; we talked, and he asked if we could
come to a dinner in Chinatown. That is Chinese speak for, we
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have a banquet, and now you are forgiven. It wasn’t anything I
did; they decided I didn’t ruin my life after all.

Melvin and Alexandria
Notions of racial hierarchy become apparent as Alexandria’s mother
demonstrated a heightened concern for her future choice in husband from the
start. When asked about how her mother felt about her dating practices,
Alexandria stated that her mother was concerned because she regularly dated
black men:
Alexandria (wfp 48) - Well, they were probably relieved. Before
I was a Christian, I was dating notorious Black men (laughs).
When I was younger, I ran away to Inglewood, so there you go.
Inglewood was mainly Black people, and I made friends there.

The seemingly innocent line about her not being a Christian while dating black
men suggested that her sexual morality was moderated by her whiteness (Collins
2000; Davis 1981; hooks 1981); therefore, dating black men was somehow
immoral because she did that when she was not a “Christian.” The other thing to
take note in this quote was how race was spatially located with her assertion
about running away to Inglewood and how that explains her relationships with
black people. But the question remains, what exactly were they relieved about?
Alexandria continued to speak of how her mother felt when she thought
that she was going to marry a black man and tied that into how her parents felt
relieved that she married someone with lighter skin:
Alexandria (wfp 48) - I dated a Black guy for a long time, and
my mom didn’t want me to marry him because it looked like I
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might. I’ve always liked Black guys, so my mom was real happy
when I found someone with lighter skin… She knew at the time,
in the 70s, there was prejudice. She would ask me what if I had
children, what it would be like for them. You're already getting
enough stares, because interracial dating is not well accepted. It
was not the she was prejudice, because she wasn’t. She raised me
that it wasn’t a big deal. But as far as dating someone of a
different race, especially when there was such a distinct
difference, she thought it would be really hard for me and my
kids. And that was a time when it would have been, but in
California I don't think it is now.

By putting her mother’s comments within a socio-historical context, Alexandria
tried to justify her mother’s angst as parental concern and not as prejudice or
racist. Concerns about her daughter’s interracial relationships were not a trivial
matter during this time period, because bans against interracial marriages were
deemed as unconstitutional only in 1967. This largely explained why her mother
was concerned about the stares of the general public in regards to her interracial
dating.
However, Alexandria’s mother’s notions of whiteness become clearer
when she took note of the assumed experiences of the children. Race was seen
as so important in our society that people that are “mixed” are seen as being
between the two groups rather than of both groups (Williams 1996; C. Hall
1992). Therefore, multiracial children were seen as marginalized because of
their assumed inability to “fit in.” However, one must realize that this concern
was rather new within the social construction of race. With the rules of hypo-
descent, also known as the one drop rule, firmly in place for the large majority of
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United States history, issues regarding the children of interracial unions, whether
coerced or not, was relatively simple; the child was of the minority group
(Nagashima 1992; Spickard 1992; Davis 1991).
However, Howard Winant stated that racial discourse had shifted from a
purely white supremacy model to a paradoxical model that incorporates both
white supremacy and racial equality after WWII (Winant 2001). The move
towards a racial equality paradigm created the link between race and identity
through the various power movements of the 1970’s, which was when
Alexandria’s mother was making her comments about her concerns about the
children and suggested that her mother was concerned about what this new
reality of multiracial people would be like.
Also, Alexandria privileged whiteness in the previous statement that
being in a black and white interracial union was not so noticeable today in
California. To make this statement, Alexandria had to equalize black and white
with Asian and white interracial marriages. By equating these experiences,
Alexandria does not acknowledge the existence of an overarching color line that
placed white and black at the poles and Asian somewhere in between (Kowner
2000). Therefore, to equalize the experiences of interracial black and white
couples with Asian and white couples do not fully acknowledge the difference
that society places upon each union and in essence negates them. In other words,
if someone from a black and white interracial marriage states how many
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problems they might have because one of them is black, Alexandria might negate
the difference because she believes her experiences are directly equivalent and
she has not had similar experiences.
Alexandria also revealed her understanding race and skin color when I
asked her to explain what was so distinctly different between white and black
people:
Alexandria (wfp 48) - Like the contrast in color. People notice
the opposite on the color wheel and pick up on it more. When
we’re walking down the street, and we see a Chinese and White
couple, we might not notice, but if we see a Black and White
couple we notice that pretty quickly.

This quote revealed how the difference between white and black in our society
has been emphasized and how important skin color was to her regarding
proposed similarities. The juxtaposing of Chinese and white and black and white
couples clearly demonstrates how whiteness, and by default lightness, was
privileged in our society.
The color line was more clearly drawn by Alexandria’s father, who made
it clear what he thought of black people:
Alexandria (wfp 48) - I think growing up my dad would tell me
to not play the “nigger music,” and it was mostly Jimmy Hendrix
at the time. I think it was that whole time period that drove him
crazy though. It wasn't necessarily black music that drove him
crazy; it was the beat, the way the songs were sung, drug music
and it was that whole period time that he associated with black
people.

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The construction of white innocence seems necessary and all-encompassing for
Alexandria as she speaks of both of her parents. By trying to construct her
father’s distain towards black people as a product of the times, she was
completely disregarding how her father was connecting these concepts in his
mind. I do not like this music, therefore it was nigger music. In other words,
Alexandria’s father was connecting not liking black people to a particular genre
of music, which must mean that he did not like black people regardless of what
music they produced!
What about the Children?
Melvin and Alexandria
The privileging of whiteness and notions of racial hierarchy eventually
translated to how their children learned about race in the household. When asked
how race was discussed in his household, Melvin stated that he did not do it at all
except for one time he pointed out an Asian and white family to his daughter:
Melvin (amp 52) - I don’t think we ever discussed it. One time
my daughter and I were at a Chinese restaurant, and we saw a
family where the dad was Chinese and the mom was Caucasian.
They had two girls that looked half-and-half, and they had two
babies. I made mention to my daughter, and she said she didn’t
care and that there are a lot of half and half people. And I was like
I just thought it was special, like your special. Other than that, we
didn’t talk about race.

In this seemingly warm father/daughter moment, race was reified and whiteness
was privileged. This was done through equating Asian and white to special; like
his daughter. However, this construction begs the question of what interracial
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relationship would not be special? Would he have made that comment if the
woman was Asian and the man was white? Would he have equated being black
and Asian with being special?
Alexandria also reified race when talking to her children about who they
should marry by assuming that they would marry a white or a Chinese person:
Alexandria (wfp 48) - Well, the only times it came up was when
I told my children that if they married a Chinese boy/girl, we’d
have Chinese grandbabies, but if they marry a White boy/girl,
they would look like White babies. (laughs) It was a couple of
times.

So people who are Asian and white can be expected to marry someone who was
either Asian or white, not something else. What Alexandria did not admit nor
acknowledge was that if her initial construction where true then she would not
have married her Asian husband because she was white!
The privileging of whiteness can be seen through her statement that
religion, not race, was the most important thing that they want for their children:
Alexandria (wfp 48) - As they got older, it was only about being
a Christian. I don’t care if he’s black, blue, or green, he or she
needs to be Christian, and he could even be short (laughter). Being
a Christian is a big deal for us. Race becomes a non-issue if
they’re a Christian.

The process of connecting being black to completely foreign concepts of blue or
green, for a person’s skin color privileges whiteness by suggesting that black is
as foreign to her as a blue or green person would be. This construction, because I
have heard it many times before, makes me wish that I could do an experiment
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and paint someone blue or green to see if skin color really does not matter. Also,
the last sentence that race is not an issue if a person is Christian strongly suggests
that race is an issue if the person is not a Christian. Connecting this with her
assumptions regarding the races of her children’s possible partners, it can be
deduced that being Chinese or white is automatically acceptable; however any
other race would have to be Christian to be acceptable.
Rosie and Ted
Although race was not a strong factor in how Melvin and Alexandria’s
raised their children, such incredible racial, and racist experiences lead to Rosie
and Ted being concerned about how their children were going to be raised and
treated in the places that they decided to live, due in part to their three sons’
racial ambiguity:
Ted (amp 64) - You didn’t know they were Black. My oldest son
looks like he’s Polynesian. And then there’s my other two sons’.
People probably thought they were Asian of some sort. It’s not
clear on what sort. People ask what they are. Some people still
come up to my youngest and speak Spanish… When my son was
at the college dorm at Santa Cruz, and he had picture of Roz and
me, and a friend of his, who was Black, said he didn’t know his
mom was a “sista”. I guess it’s not clear.

Although this was a concern, Rosie and Ted never had a “race talk” like parents
have a “sex talk”, which allowed them to instill what was necessary to be good
people rather than focus on their race:
Ted (amp 64) - We decided to raise them as good people. They
understood it at the level they could. At some point, my son was
watching “Star Trek”, and he realized Mr. Soolu was Chinese.
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We had Chinese food. Our children were exposed to; here’s mom
and dad, and we’re different from everyone else. We talked about
race in the extent that was necessary. Race wasn’t talked about as
you would talk about crossing the street safely. It’s not like here’s
race in the U.S.; how do you talk about race to a five year old or
even a ten year old? If they had questions, we responded, but
there was never a “race talk” like there was a “sex talk”.

Not talking to their children about race, even though they both acknowledged
how problematic it could be, is a little troubling to me, but this was probably the
result of a time when the concept of parenting was much less involved than how
it is understood today. Even without discussing race with their children, Rosie
did state clearly that she was always looking for signs of discrimination from
their sons, but never encountered it:
Rosie (bfp 65) - It was one of those things we talked about it as it
came up. We were both looking for any signs of the children
being harassed or teased or singled out because of their looks. The
fact that we were in college communities, it tended to be more
accepting. Even the parents, who didn’t work at the college,
seemed to be influenced by the college community and were
accepting too.

Although well intentioned, the lack of any racial dialogue with their
children created some ambiguity and confusion about their racial category, as
was noted by one of her son’s identifying as white:
Rosie (bfp 65) - I don’t know that we ever discussed race. I think
the discussion about race came up when the children began school
because you have to check red, yellow or green. We told them that
you are part Black and part Chinese. They could see that mom and
dad had different features. We didn’t make a big deal about it. If I
was filling it out and there was nothing that satisfied me, I would
write it in myself. When they got older, I told them they could
decide if they wanted to put Afro-American or Chinese or other
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and write it in. I think there was some confusion. Our middle son,
David, at one point thought he was White, and we had to have a
discussion about that.

The first part of this quote captured a moment where Rosie spoke of racial
categories on school forms and used the color “green” as a skin color. The use of
this color denotes an overall discomfort towards reporting her children’s race.
Therefore “green” then came to symbolize the alien quality of being multiracial
to her. The end of this quote demonstrated how race was a social construct rather
than an assumed, biological category. Rosie and Ted believed that their sons
would “figure it out for themselves,” but found themselves correcting their son
when he made an inappropriate choice; identifying as white. Given his highly
educated parents and their acknowledgement that they generally lived in all white
neighborhoods, their son probably had every claim on an internal white racial
identity, but when social push, comes to social shove, racial categories were
recreated and reinforced even by well-meaning, highly educated, interracially
married parents.
In the end, Melvin and Alexandria seemed to be able to live lives that
were affected by race to only a small degree by any measure. Race was never a
main point in their lives and the lives of the people around them, while Rosie and
Ted lived lives that were highly racialized and constantly under surveillance.
Although Melvin and Alexandria’s experiences seem to coincide with an
168
assimilationist framework, it is clear that Rosie and Ted were together in spite of
assimilation processes, rather than because of them.
“It’s just different:” Interracial Marriages and the Reformation of the
Color Line

Although interethnic marriages between European ethnicities may
symbolize the breakdown of ethnic barriers for people who consider themselves
white (Waters 1990), the experiences of Asian/white and Asian/black children
with their interracial families did not support this notion. As will be clearly
demonstrated within parental advisement regarding dating practices, the parents
of multiracial children maintained racist notions regarding the superiority of
whiteness, especially when speaking of black suitability as marriage partners.
Within and Asian/white context
When speaking about dating, Lenny stated clearly that he had dated
women of every race:
Lenny (awm 22) - No, it did not affect it. I have been with every
race you name it Black, White, Mexican, Chinese and etc. you
name it. It not fun dancing with white girls. Even when we
would go out to the club in the Navy, it was kind of reverse all the
black dudes knew how to dance. I was one of the few, other than
the Blacks, that knew how to dance. So when I would be dancing
they would say look at him.

Although people of all races were accepted by Lenny, his Filipina mother clearly
stated that she wanted him and his siblings to date white people:
Lenny (awm 22) - I wouldn’t my mom would. Yes, she really
wanted me to date White girls… I would ask her why do you
want me date just White girls, she didn’t even want me to date
169
Filipino girls. I don’t know where that comes from. My sister
and I would ask where does that come from why does she always
want us to date White people. I remember dating a Black girl and
telling her and she would say rude things. I would say why are
you saying things like that? I would call it old thinking. When I
would bring home a Filipino she was still not happy. Every time I
bring home a White girl it was fine.

The privileging of whiteness by his mother may have been the result of an
internalization of the superiority of whiteness through the Spanish and US
colonial periods of the Philippines (Ngozi-Brown 1997).
In trying to justify his mother’s actions as not racist, Lenny actually
reinforced the concept that white people had an assumed higher wealth status
than all other races, but they are especially higher in status than black people:
Lenny (awm 22) - I think my mom wants me to date a White girl
because White people are well established and my mom’s whole
thing is money. I don’t know why she always wanted me to date
White girls, but most White people generally always have more
money than say a Black person or a Filipino person would.

Although this argument was couched as a difference in class, white supremacy
revealed itself in the assumption that white people are more suitable as marriage
partners as a race, with no regard for each person as an individual.
Although Lenny’s mother seemed to only view things as either white or
not white, James’ white mother definitely set up the framework that white was
superior to black, while Asian was somewhere in the middle. This was
uncovered in a discussion that James had with his mother about who he should
marry:
170
James (awm 22) - Well, you know your family the best. It was
like she was saying you'd better get an A on that test, or B. A “B”
is still passing, it's not what I want, but it's acceptable. She better
be white, (lower his voice) or Asian, that's acceptable. Maybe she
sees me like my dad and thinks that I should have a woman like
her, I don't know.

This construction made it clear that white was an “A”, while Asian was a “B”.
However, black was clearly an “F” as uncovered by James as he tried to joke
with his mother by having a friend, who was a black woman, act like she was his
girlfriend:
James (awm 22) - I have a friend that's black, and she and I just
played one time, and that was not cool. I'm not friends with her
anymore because of that. My mom and my grandfather acted
really stupid. I couldn't believe that they would be such assholes.
So I started with me telling my mom that I was in love with this
girl and she said, yeah right. Then she said, you better be joking!
And my friend was fine with it until my mom said, you better be
joking. Then my grandfather said do you want to take care of
someone who's lazy for the rest your life? And then he said no
offense, I'm sure you're not, but the rest of you are. What [do]
you say about that? She was cool, she was educated, and she was
from France actually.

As one can note from the comments of the white grandfather, James’ mother did
not fall very far from the tree. However, what became an issue for me was to
wonder why James would subject his friend, who’s friendship he lost as a result
of this “joke,” to the possibility of such racist behavior? Did his mother’s
notions of white supremacy enter into this space where he made a “friend” into a
“test subject?”
171
When confronted by James of his mother’s racist beliefs, she embedded
her concerns regarding him marrying a black woman within the context of
worrying about what the children would be:
James (awm 22) - My mom would say if I got married to a black
woman, then what would the kids be? Well, they would be Asian
black and white, whenever I am. I don't know why that such a big
deal is not the 60s 70s or 30s. It still happens the day, but is not
nearly as bad as it was back then. She would say think about your
kids, they're not going to know what they are. Then how in the
hell was I supposed to know what I was? She would say you
would choose, you are both, you were raised both. Then she said,
it's just different.

James stated that if he were to marry a black woman, then his children would be
black, Asian and white, but the assertion of his mother that being married to a
black person was “different” strongly suggests that his mother understood the
concept of the one drop rule on an intuitive level, if not a conscious level
(Frankenberg 1993; Nagashima 1992). In other words, the proper response in
this framework was that people who are of Asian/white heritage can choose their
racial identity, while if you were mixed with black, society would choose your
identity for you, and that would be black (Davis 1991).
Although James’ mother seemed particularly concerned with the racial
categorization of hypothetical grandchildren, this concern did not seem to
actually extend itself to the character of the women that her son’s were involved
with:
James (awm 22) - She would say this behind closed doors, but
she's never open with it. If someone would ask her she would say
172
it is my decision, she just wants someone who will make me
happy. And I'm like bullshit you just told me something
completely different than that. Now don't get me wrong, I love
my mom, but one of her jobs is to make sure that her sons marry
the right girl. My brother has a fiancé, who is very rude, but my
parents except her. I guarantee you if she was any other race she
would have been gone a long time ago. Rude, ungrateful, so
centered, egotistical, I could keep going. But she fits into what
my mom wanted.

This was a direct case where white privilege acted as a shield to overall bad
behavior. This was duly noted when James makes the observation that if his
potential sister-in-law were a woman of any other races his mother would have
had issues with her, but since she was white she was all right.
In the end, James seemingly alleviated his parents concerns regarding his
potential marriage partner by being involved with a woman who was of Filipina
and white heritage:
James (awm 22) - My dad was cool, but I know that when I got
the girlfriend that I have now that it was a relief, because she's
Filipino and white… So it's good that I have a white Asian
girlfriend, because that's about as good as my mom and dad could
get. They keep saying it's just the kids and the social class you
give in an interracial marriage.

This construction maintains racial categories and adds another racial category for
consideration; being multiracial (Hollinger 1995). However, now people who
are multiracial need to stay within the new multiracial category for a potential
spouse.
173
The importance of a black/white continuum continued with Karen as her
Asian father and grand parents firmly establish the black/white dichotomy within
her dating practices:
Karen (awf 18) - I was dating a Black guy, and I brought him to
the house to meet my parents. When my grandma found out about
it, I had to go to her house. She basically yelled at me and told me
I had to stop dating him. I told her that it was my life and I was
going to do what I wanted. I told her that she didn’t stop my mom
from marrying my dad, but she said that was different. She didn’t
like him because he was Black… She thought the guy I was with
was lazy before she even met him.
Not only did the grandmother yell at her, but her Asian father was also angry
with her for dating a black man:
Karen (awf 18) - My dad was furious, and his beliefs are the
same as my grandmother’s. My mom was upset because she
thought no one should tell me what I should do with my life.
She’s been like that with my grandma. My grandmother feels like
if I’m involved with someone who isn’t Japanese, I’m ruining
the blood line. My dad thinks that too, but he won’t say it to your
face.

This quote encapsulated notions of white being constructed as pure, or at the very
least neutral, while black was seen as a pollutant to the family bloodline.
Karen’s grandmother clearly stated that being involved with anyone not Japanese
would dilute the bloodline, but allowed her son to marry a white woman. This
strongly suggested that Karen’s Japanese grandparents actually saw themselves
as white. Although this seems to fly in the face of US racial categorization, this
notion can be partially substantiated by Lopez where Japanese people made the
legal claim that they should be considered white (Lopez 1996).
174
Karen picked up on the seemingly contradictory comparisons between
black and white and confronted her father about it:
Karen (awf 18) - That is my biggest issue because I ask him what
the difference is. I ask him if I marry either a Black guy or a
White guy would he disown me. They’re both not Japanese. He
said as long as they are disciplined and supportive, it didn’t
matter. Then I ask him why we stop then after I tell you he’s
Black. I tell him that the guy is in college and working towards his
bachelors’ degree, but he only hears one thing. He says I can’t talk
to him like that because he’s the head of the house. Later I did
find some stuff out about the guy, and my dad threw it in my face.
My dad still tries to talk to me about Japanese guys to get the ball
rolling again. It’s hard because I’m eighteen, and I have my whole
life ahead of me. My dad wants my children to have Japanese
names, and I do too because being Japanese is something I’m very
proud of and don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to lose that; it’s a
touchy subject.

Karen did not challenge her father’s racial lumping practices, which made all
black men like the one she was dating, but this probably had to do with her being
so young and the Japanese cultural attribute of strict obedience towards authority
(Schneider and Silverman 2003; Smythe 1953)). Karen further admitted to the
fact that, although she was looking for relationships that are more serious, she
clearly felt limited in her options even with other Asian ethnicities:
Karen (awf 18) - It is more about what my dad thinks even before
my grandmother’s whole deal. Right now I am looking for
something more serious, and I don’t want to do things anymore. I
am focusing on what is going to be serious. I do want someone
who has Japanese traits to preserve that. I want to keep my options
open, but I think about how it would never work out because he’s
White or Afro-American or Mexican. I haven’t dated everyone in
the rainbow, but my dad hasn’t been pleased with any of them. I
think any father would be leery of any guy dating his daughter. I
remember one time I did bring home an Asian guy, and he was so
175
happy and excited. When my dad found out he was Vietnamese,
the doors shut again… He called him a “gook”, and that he’s not
good enough for me. Even though he was Asian, he still wasn’t
good.

This demonstrates that Karen’s father believed that all other Asian ethnicities the
Japanese, which is strongly supported in research about the socially constructed
superiority of the Japanese to all other Asians (Kowner 2000; Morris-Suzuki
1998; Smythe and Naitoh 1953).
These experiences actually follow an assimilationist framework, as
people of Asian heritage fight to improve their social placement on the racial
hierarchy by intermarrying with white Americans, while willfully not marrying
black Americans.
Within an Asian/black context
Although, Asian and white parents externally enforced the black/white
paradigm because they told their children to not marry someone who was black,
Jane’s black father was an example of how white supremacy notions of racial
hierarchy were enforced internally. This internal enforcement was noted by Jane
who was dating a Chinese man at the time of her father’s confrontation with him:
Jane (abf 24) - One time my father confronted my Chinese
boyfriend. My boyfriend called my house and my father
answered the phone and asked him where he lived. My boyfriend
got freaked out because my dad was asking him 20 questions, so
he lied to my dad about where he lived. He gave him a street, but
he said he didn't know his house number which is stupid because
you have to know where you live (laughs). So my dad said that he
didn't like liars and that he didn't want liars to be hanging out with
his daughter so my father told him not to come around the house
176
again. Being a teenager of course I thought it was the end of the
world and this is where my father and I parted ways, but other
than my boyfriend being a liar my father broke it down for me and
said your boyfriend is Chinese and that his family is never going
to accept you and that I needed to understand that. And I said just
because you have problems with mom's family doesn't mean I
will. Things are different now. And I remember that he gave me
a hug and said someday I would understand and I pushed him
away and said I hate you. I thought that was one of the most
hurtful things you can hear coming from your parents that you
have to choose who you date because their family is not going to
accept you.

Although most would say that he was only being a concerned father, by
suggesting that his daughter would someday understand his concerns strongly
suggested that he too has assumed that black people were unsuitable mates to
people who are not black. This concept was further established by a discussion
with her aunt’s that questioned the availability of black men in California:
Jane (abf 24) - Oh, here's another story I was visiting my aunts in
New Jersey and I was calling my boyfriend, and they asked me
who is this boy that I'm calling? They asked me what is he and I
told them he's Asian, then they asked don't have any black guys in
California? I told them yes there are black men in California, and
they told me I should bring a nice black boy home. And they tell
me that I should move to New Jersey and find a nice black man.

Although this quote did not set up the color line in the same manner that it has
with Asian and white people, one must ask the question as to whether black
people can accept and use notions of racial categorization and not also internalize
the racial hierarchy that must come with it.
This question was answered by Jane herself as she told of a story that
involved her Chinese boyfriend who was a body border:
177
Jane (abf 24) - Also one more story, I needed a Chinese guy who
was a body border, this is one of the things I'm embarrassed about.
We would be at the beach and it would be hot, and I would be the
only moron sitting there with pants and a hooded sweatshirt with
my hood on. And the dumb part of it was that he asked me to
wear his sweater so that I wouldn't get dark, and I did. And I hate
myself for that, and when I look back and think how non self-
respecting can you be? That someone can tell you what skin tone
you can have or not have. So I've come a long way (laughs).

This quote made it clear that it was possible for people of Asian/black heritage to
internalize black inferiority, while at the same time giving hope for the future of
race relations through her current assertion of pride in who she is as a person.
Again, the experiences of people of Asian/black heritage do not fit into an
assimilationist framework, as it is clearly demonstrated that part of being
American is knowing where you are at on the racial hierarchy and that the
bottom of that hierarchy is blackness.
Conclusion
In conclusion, although interracial marriages have been heralded as the
end point of the assimilation process and would usher in a period were racial
categories and racial hierarchy would be ended, this is clearly not the case in my
sample. Starting with the experiences of an Asian and white couple and
comparing them to an Asian and black, where the man was Asian in both cases,
revealed startling differences regarding the assimilation process that lied directly
along racial lines. Being married to either a white or a black person was woven
178
into every experience; from how the couples met to dating practices and child
rearing, which all privileged whiteness.
Interracial marriages between the Asian and White people in my sample
consistently reinforced racial hierarchy upon their children, which was seen most
clearly with dating practices. The distinction was explicitly stated that being
married to someone who was black was different and this difference was linked
to the social construction of black at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Assimilation processes seemed to be working, if only partially, in the case
of Asian and white interracial couples and people of Asian/white heritage in my
sample as they assimilated towards Anglo conformity. Being of Asian/white
heritage did allow more choices that regarded racial identity within an interracial
Asian and white family, but these same choices were not afforded to their
children outside of a black/white framework. What was also noted in the
experiences of Jane and her black father and family, was that the notion of black
inferiority could be internalized by black people themselves and this was evident
through the family’s limiting of Jane’s dating practices and because of the
rejection of black people as acceptable mates was assumed and internalized.

179
Chapter 7 Endnotes
1. wfp = white female parent
2. bfp = black female parent
3. amp = Asian male parent

180
Chapter 8

Conclusions:
From the Beginning to the End then Back to the Beginning

In conclusion, what my research has clearly demonstrated is that equating
race to ethnicity has led the multiracial project to wrongly promote that an
increase in the number of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage and the
increase in interracial marriages with Asians signifies the end of racial categories
and the completion of the assimilation process for all racial groups. The idea that
people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage will challenge racial categories
was roundly refuted as it was found that the multiracial people in my sample
used biology to help to make the distinctions between racial categories even
clearer. Therefore, after interviewing thirty-two (32) people of Asian/white and
Asian/black heritage and six (6) pairs in interracial Asian and white and Asian
and black parents what can be concluded is that racial meanings have become
stronger and that the lines between racial categories have become clearer due to
the multiracial project.
Although the people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage in my
sample both fought against constrained notions of their racial identity, their
experiences with society demonstrated the continued salience of a white/black
color line in the United States and in Asian countries. Although many people of
Asian/white heritage in my sample developed a white identity, whether rational
181
or constrained, the overall effect served to lessen discrimination by Asian and
white people. This was not the case for people of Asian/black heritage in my
sample as they were treated as “just black” by people of Asian and white heritage
both in the United States and in Asian countries and suffered through many racist
experiences ranging from name calling to on the job discrimination and physical
abuse. However, the Asian/black people in my sample were also treated as a
marginalized other by other black people, especially in the case of black women
towards Asian/black women.
Assimilationist notions of the meaning of the increase of interracial
families where shown to be false as it was clearly demonstrated that the
interracial couples in my study could still be racist towards black people, and
even people of their own racial groups. Interracially married Asian and white
couples were accepted, although not really appreciated, by family and peer
groups, while the Asian and black couples in my sample were often disowned by
immediate family members. Furthermore, interracially married Asian and white
couples in my study reestablished and reaffirmed white supremacy notions of
black unsuitability as marriage partners time and time again to their children
when they had chosen to date someone who was black.
Understanding the inherent hierarchy of racial categories suggests that
their can never be a true cultural pluralism model within the US because this
paradigm assumes that races can be considered equal, but they cannot. This
182
inequality, coupled with the one drop rule, also strongly suggests that a true
melting pot model cannot exist because blackness is something that will never
melt away. However, there is some evidence that the people of Asian/white
heritage in my sample are moving towards an Anglo conformity identity, since
some rationally chose or where socially constrained to do so. What this suggests
is that there could be a radical reordering of who is considered white in the
United States, which will include people of Asian/white heritage as white while
reestablishing the inferiority of blackness.
Ultimately, this research has uncovered that the concept of race and
assimilation are inherently incompatible and that the multiracial project in its
current construction is being used to reify and quantify racial categories. Racial
hegemony is keeping pace with the challenges that people of Asian/white and
Asian/black heritage are supposed to present by allowing racial groups
themselves to develop, create, and enforce their identities thus continuing to push
people who claim multiple racial heritages to the margins, while constantly
redeveloping, recreating and reinforcing white supremacy.

183
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Appendix A

Pseudonym: _______________________________

Sex: _____ Age: _____ Height: _____

Birthplace: ___________________________________

Mother’s race: ______________________Birthplace (country): ___________

Father’s race: _______________________ Birthplace (country): __________
*If parents are from different countries:
Did you ever visit your mother’s homeland? _____ Father’s? _____
Did you ever live in your mother’s homeland? _____ Father’s? _____
If yes, approximately how many years? _____ Father’s? _____
Did you ever live in Hawaii? _____

Where either of your parents in the US military? _____ Which one? _____ What
branch? _____ Officer or enlisted? _____

Eye color: _____ Hair Color: _____ Hair Texture: _____

1) How do you identify yourself racially? Explain.

2) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none and 5 being completely
__________, how __________ do you believe you look?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
None Slightly Moderately Very Completely
3) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none and 5 being completely
__________, how __________ do you believe others think you look?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
None Slightly Moderately Very Completely
199
4) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none and 5 being completely identify,
how closely do you personally identify with being __________?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
None Slightly Moderately Very Completely
5) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being complete rejection and 5 being
complete acceptance, to what degree do you believe that __________
people accept you as being __________?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
Complete
Rejection
Mostly
Reject
Some of
Both
Mostly
Accept
Complete
Acceptance
6) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none and 5 being completely
__________, how __________ do you believe you look?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
None Slightly Moderately Very Completely
7) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none and 5 being completely
__________, how __________ do you believe others think you look?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
None Slightly Moderately Very Completely
8) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none and 5 being completely identify,
how closely do you personally identify with being __________?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
None Slightly Moderately Very Completely
200
9) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being complete rejection and 5 being
complete acceptance, to what degree do you believe that __________
people accept you as being __________?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
Complete
Rejection
Mostly
Reject
Some of
Both
Mostly
Accept
Complete
Acceptance
10) Did you have any experiences that you feel are related to your racial
heritage while you were growing up? If so, please explain.

11) Are there any other racial/ethnic communities that you have interacted
with that you feel accept or reject you? Explain.

12) What about other types of groups, i.e. athletic teams, cheerleading, speech
and debate, or drama club.

13) Some families talk to their children about race and some don’t. Tell me
how race was discussed by your folks?

14) Is there anything that you would like to add to this interview that you
thought we were going to talk about that we have not covered?
201
Appendix B

Pseudonym: _______________________________

Birthplace: ____________________

Age/gender of children:
_________________________________________________

Age: ________ Race: _______________________ Spouse’s race:
______________

1) Please tell me about the day you and your spouse met.

2) How did the people in your life, i.e. your parents, siblings and friends,
feel about you dating someone of a different race?

3) Did you have any experiences that you believe are related to your
interracial marriage? If so, please explain.

4) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being complete rejection and 5 being
complete acceptance, to what degree do you believe that
_______________ people accept your marriage?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
Complete
Rejection
Mostly
Reject
Some of
Both
Mostly
Accept
Complete
Acceptance
5) On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being complete rejection and 5 being
complete acceptance, to what degree do you believe that
_______________ people accept your interracial marriage?

0 1 2 3 4 5
Don’t
Know
Complete
Rejection
Mostly
Reject
Some of
Both
Mostly
Accept
Complete
Acceptance
202
6) Some families talk to their children about race and some don’t. Tell me
how race was discussed in your household?

7) Is there anything that you would like to add to this interview that you
thought we were going to talk about that we have not covered?

Abstract (if available)

Abstract It has been argued that the increase of people of multiracial heritage in our society represents the fulfillment of the assimilation process. People of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage have been singled out in multiple works as posing a direct challenge to how race is understood in the United States and that this group's assertion of their multiracial identity will ultimately lead to a raceless society (Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001

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An application of Clark and Estes' (2002) gap analysis model: closing knowledge, motivation, and organizational gaps that prevent Glendale Unified School District students from accessing four-yea...

Asset Metadata

Creator Hoskins, Bruce Calvin (author)

Core Title "What is black, white and yellow all over?" an analysis of the racial experiences of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 04/30/2007

Defense Date 03/20/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag assimilation,interracial marriages,multiracial Asian,multiracial black,multiracial identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race

Language English

Advisor Kaplan, Elaine Bell (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Sanchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email bhoskins@miracosta.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m473

Unique identifier UC1295500

Identifier etd-Hoskins-20070430 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-495748 (legacy record id),usctheses-m473 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hoskins-20070430.pdf

Dmrecord 495748

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hoskins, Bruce Calvin

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California