Red and Yellow, Black and Brown

Joanne L. Rondilla, Rudy P. Guevarra, Paul Spickard

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813587325
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Red and Yellow, Black and Brown gathers together life stories and analysis by twelve contributors who express and seek to understand the often very different dynamics that exist for mixed race people who are not part white. The chapters focus on the social, psychological, and political situations of mixed race people who have links to two or more peoples of color— Chinese and Mexican, Asian and Black, Native American and African American, South Asian and Filipino, Black and Latino/a and so on. Red and Yellow, Black and Brown addresses questions surrounding the meanings and communication of racial identities in dual or multiple minority situations and the editors highlight the theoretical implications of this fresh approach to racial studies.  
 

1

Introduction

About Mixed Race, Not about Whiteness

Paul Spickard, Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., and Joanne L. Rondilla

Hines Ward is an American success story. He played fourteen seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the National Football League, which employs many outstanding African American athletes. He played in four Pro Bowls and three Super Bowls, and was named Super Bowl Most Valuable Player in 2006. He is the Pittsburgh Steelers’ all-time leading pass receiver and doubtless will someday be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. As his football career was winding down, he competed in and won season 12 of the American TV dance competition Dancing with the Stars. He has appeared in several TV shows and movies, including The Dark Knight Rises, The Walking Dead, and a cooking show. Recently he has embarked on a second career as a studio football analyst for NBC Sports.1

Hines Ward was born in Seoul and came to the United States at the age of one. He grew up for a time as a Black boy in America, living in his early years with his father in Georgia and Louisiana. But he also had a Korean immigrant mother who was his sole day-to-day parent from the age of seven. As a boy in the American South, Hines felt ashamed of his mother:

I was almost embarrassed to talk about my own upbringing. To me, it was tough. It was never like the upbringing my friends had. At first, I was embarrassed that I had a Korean mom. I was embarrassed that my friends all had to take off their shoes before coming into my house. It was tough when my mom spoke broken English to my friends and their parents and people couldn’t understand what she was saying or she couldn’t understand what they were saying. . . . I remember one day I got in trouble at school. The principal called my mom, and my mom told the school that she would be right there. My mom walked straight into my classroom, all maybe 4-foot-10 of her, and she paddled me right in front of all my classmates. My mom didn’t play. She wanted to teach me a lesson I would never forget, and I have never forgotten it since.2

In time, Hines came to appreciate the Korean-style upbringing that his mother provided.

My mom is my hero. She is the reason why I am who I am today. When other kids were doing all the wrong things, I was doing all the right things because my mom wouldn’t have it any other way. She taught me to never quit on anything in life. She taught me the value of hard work, sacrifice and perseverance. Although she is a little woman, she ruled our house with a big presence. She is my rock. . . . I will always love, respect and honor my mom. She left everything she knew, that she called home in South Korea to come to a foreign country where she didn’t even speak the language to give me a better life. So she sacrificed her entire life, relationships, worked three jobs, kept the house, and took care of me, so that I wouldn’t have to suffer or experience the discrimination that she suffered in Korea.

Now a father himself, Hines Ward values the Korean upbringing: “I have one son, and. . . . My philosophy on parenting is similar to what my mom taught me. I will teach my son to be tough, hard working, never quit, stay humble, no matter what. I will teach him the importance of self-sacrifice. I guess you could say I will teach my son the Korean way when it comes to discipline and education. It worked well for me. And I’m sure it will work well for him. I will always show him that I love him by being there for him as he grows up.”

Still later, Hines and Kim Young came to terms with Korea. Kim Young had taken her baby to America because of anti-Black and antiforeign discrimination she and Hines had experienced in Korea. But after Ward won the Super Bowl MVP trophy, he received an unexpected outpouring of praise from Koreans. Some of this may have been a manifestation of what Cynthia Nakashima calls the “claim-us-if-we’re-famous syndrome”3—mixed race people of conspicuous achievement being acknowledged by racial communities that would have ignored them if they were less accomplished. But the Korean wave of appreciation for Hines Ward in 2006 and after also derived from his display of Korean values.

I didn’t really associate with any Korean people growing up because of how my mom was treated in her own country. So when I won the Super Bowl XL MVP, that’s when I heard that Korean people were calling out my name and cheering me on. I was really confused and shocked at this. . . . Everyone from little kids to the mayor of Seoul to the president of the country came out to thank me. And all I could think of was, “Thank me for what?” Then I was told . . . that the entire country of Korea was very proud of me, as a Korean, for the way I accepted the Super Bowl MVP trophy. He said when I dedicated it and all I had accomplished to my mom, the entire country of South Korea cheered because of the humility and gratitude I gave to my mom, the parent who raised me. . . . He said that I brought the entire nation back to the days when kids would show complete respect and honor to their parents. And for that, he thanked me. I was really humbled by what he said. I was beginning to see how my Korean heritage and culture saw things. And I began to start feeling pride in my Korean side.

Hines Ward is a Black American, but he is also a Korean American. It is an open question whether Ward’s athletic achievements owe more to the size, speed, and coordination some may think he inherited from his father, or to the incredible work ethic he undoubtedly learned from his mother. More important for the purposes of this book is the identity journey that Hines Ward has taken, from being a Black American man in a highly visible professional position, to marking himself as also a Korean American immigrant with ongoing ties to the land of his birth. He is a complicated guy.

Ariana Miyamoto is complicated too. Born in Sasebo, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a Black American father who soon returned to the United States, she grew up experiencing discrimination and abuse from other Japanese people. “There was pretty much a spasmodic vomit of racial abuse heaped upon me,” said the twenty-year-old. “I was called n****r by some of my peers. Some of them threw trash and even a blackboard duster at me. I’m Japanese through and through, but in Japan if you look ‘foreign’ you are often not accepted as Japanese. But I am Japanese—100 percent.”4 Japanese is Miyamoto’s first and most fluent language, although she does speak English and attended high school for two years in Arkansas while getting to know her father’s family. She holds a fifth-level degree in Japanese calligraphy, a high level of mastery.

Although Japan thinks of itself as a very homogeneous country, lots of models and actors these days are haafu—“half.” Miyamoto began a modeling career and soon was approached about being a candidate for Miss Nagasaki. Initially she refused, but she changed her mind when a haafu friend killed himself. “He could not find his identity. He committed suicide a few days after he told me, ‘I don’t have any idea where I should be located.’ . . . To ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated and to eliminate prejudice and discrimination, I decided to enter the contest. I hope that Japanese society will become more open by accepting not only haafu but also LGBT people and others. I hope to make Japan and the world a livable place for anyone.”5

Miyamoto won Miss Nagasaki and in March 2015 was crowned Miss Universe Japan. She went on to represent Japan in the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, the first haafu to represent Japan in that contest. The title brought her accolades from mixed race communities at home and abroad, but it also exposed deep-rooted racism in her country. Almost immediately, negative comments flooded social media and Internet sites questioning her victory. Negative comments from Japanese websites such as Byokan Sunday and Naver Matome questioned whether she was qualified to represent Japan since she is haafu. These included “Is it okay to select a haafu to represent Japan?” and “Because this is Miss Universe Japan, don’t you think haafu are a no no?”6 She was also criticized for not looking traditionally Japanese—she is tall (five feet, eight inches) and slim—and her very presence challenged what defines beauty in Japan. However, not all comments were negative. Haafu documentary filmmaker Megumi Nishikura said, “The selection of Ariana Miyamoto as this year’s Miss Universe Japan is a huge step forward in expanding the definition of what it means to be Japanese. The controversy that has erupted over her selection is a great opportunity of us Japanese to examine how far we have come from our self-perpetuated myth of homogeneity while at the same time it shows us how much further we need to go.”7

The study of multiracial people is the fastest-growing segment of ethnic studies.8 By far the majority of the writing and teaching about multiraciality concerns people who are part White: Black and White, Mexican American and Anglo, Caribbean and English, Japanese and White American, and so on and on.9 This book is not about such people. It is about people like Hines Ward and Ariana Miyamoto, who are racially mixed but have parents from multiple minority backgrounds. Historically, multiraciality has been limited to examining Whiteness in relation to non-White ethnic minorities. However, scholars such as Velina Hasu Houston, Karen Leonard, Rudy Guevarra, Vivek Bald, and others have illustrated that the histories of people who are of multiple minority descent should be given serious scholarly attention.10 We crafted this collection to continue the groundbreaking work of scholars such as these. In putting these works together we expand the current conversations about multiraciality beyond the very limited scope of Black and White, inspire more work that continues to broaden our knowledge of multiracial communities, and explore conversations that reflect the changing racial landscape of the United States and other parts of the world where mixing is common.

It is of historical importance that we turn the center of attention of race relations scholars away from a focus on White/non-White binaries and direct them to a broader inquiry into relationships among different communities of color. Beginning in 2011, non-White births began to outnumber White births in the United States every year.11 Demographers anticipate that by 2042, the United States will become what some have called a “majority-minority” country (in fact, the term “minority” may even fall out of use).12 The US Census Bureau recorded an increase in the mixed race population of 32 percent between 2000 and 2010. Of the people who identified as having multiple racial ancestries, 92 percent reported two different races. Approximately 21 percent of mixed race people reported being multiple minority, while 79 percent had ancestry that was part White.13

There is a persistent myth—an assumption built into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science—that there once existed discrete, pure races on the face of the earth. This idea has a history.14 Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus did humankind the estimable service of organizing all the visible living organisms conceptually into a vast pyramid of nested categories: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and race. At each level of the hierarchy, he supposed the categories to be separate and distinct. His taxonomy sorts out a lot of material, but it creates the illusion of purity in each category. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach decided there were four, then five races of humankind: Negroid, Mongoloid, Amerind, Malay, and Caucasian. Arthur Comte de Gobineau ranked them according to their beauty, intelligence, character, and overall wonderfulness, with Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom. Madison Grant elaborated distinctions within the White race and contributed to the popular acceptance of the idea of improving that race by selective breeding and sterilization.15

These schemas presented the human races as distinct and pure, each with its own separate ancestry, physical morphology (now we might say genotype or field of DNA), intelligence, character qualities, and potential for success. None of the schemas had a place for mixed or in-between peoples like Egyptians, Samoans, Uyghurs, Mexicans, and Filipinos. Insofar as racialist pseudoscience even acknowledged the existence of mixed people, it treated them as defective and inferior to their separate and supposedly pure parent stocks, and predicted weakness, ugliness, infertility, and tortured self-doubt in successive generations of mixing.16

In fact, there are not now, nor ever have there been, any pure races. Every human population—indeed, every human being—is racially mixed. If there is one undisputable fact of human history it is that just about everybody has been moving around the globe and mating with just about everybody else. There are patterns to the moving and the mating, but there are no pure races. Nonetheless, there remains plenty of racialized abuse. By that we mean that racial distinctions are drawn and rhetorically laid onto the body and into the gene pool of individuals and groups. Quanta of intelligence and character are assigned to them. Particular life chances are assigned to them. So if we are not actually (racially, biologically) distinct from one another, we are still distinct in the opportunities we have and the abuse we may have to endure. Race may be a false category—a social construction—but racism is a social fact.

The dominant voice among scholars and activists in mixed race studies has contended that the assertion of a multiracial identity is a positive move that has the potential to undercut racist structures.17 Maria Root, the foremother of multiracial studies, wrote in the introduction to her canonical edited volume, Racially Mixed People in America,

Why has the United States suppressed the historical reali...