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 reality that a significant proportion of its citizenry has multigenerational multiracial roots? . . . The silence on the topic of multiraciality must be understood in context. In the not-so-distant past . . . antimiscegenist sentiments were profound. . . . The history of antimiscegenist laws and attitudes combined with rules of hypodescent, a pseudoscientific literature on race mixing . . . and the internalized oppression still evident in communities of color have unquestionably contributed to the silence on this topic. . . . Whereas one of the breakthroughs of the civil rights movement was empowerment of American racial minority groups by self-naming . . . , this process is just beginning among multiracial persons. In essence, to name oneself is to validate one’s existence and declare visibility. This seemingly simple process is a significant step in the liberation of multiracial persons from the oppressive structure of the racial classification system that has relegated them to the land of “in between.”18

Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy joined the chorus:

Americans are becoming increasingly multiracial in their tastes, affections, and identities. The rates of interracial dating, marriage, and adoption, are inching, and in some places rocketing, upward. This trend is, in my view, a positive good. It signals that formal and informal racial boundaries are fading. . . . Against the tragic backdrop of American history, the flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development, one that lends support to Frederick Douglass’s belief that eventually “the white and colored people of this country [can] be blended into a common nationality, and enjoy together . . . the inestimable blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”19

Ronald David Glass and Kendra R. Wallace were less sanguine than Kennedy about an imagined happy future that would come from embracing the multiracial idea, but they did see multiraciality as a potent platform from which to attack racism.

Race cannot be ignored as a conceptual framework because of its theoretical inadequacy for capturing the phenomenon of race, nor because of its simplistic use of reified notions for historically dynamic meanings and practices. Nor can the politics of race be transcended by a mental act of some sort (like a change in belief, or an act of will) nor wished away in a fantasy of color blindness. Race matters . . . , and we argue for a focus of attention on the continuing significance and changing meaning of race . . . to be linked with projects engaged in contesting that very significance and meaning. . . . But an even stronger challenge to race can come from people at the margins to all racial centers; that is, from people expressive of multiracial existence and evident human variation, who resist efforts to be subdued and brought within racial orders.20

Some critics of the multiracial idea have suggested, to the contrary, that the assertion of a mixed race identity is a move on the part of people of mixed ancestry to flee Blackness and to claim a measure of Whiteness.21 Jon Michael Spencer saw monoracial Black and White as the only races in American society.22 He contended that the assertion of a multiracial identity was an attempt by White parents of part-Black children to construct a third race, “The New Colored People,” between Black and White, in imitation of the oppressive tripartite racial system that had until recently obtained in South Africa. Citing Afrocentrist Molefi Asante, Spencer wrote, “In the context of a racist society . . . white parents want their mixed children to have the same privileges they enjoy, but these children are by tradition considered black. Because in this racist society blackness is viewed as negative, . . . the multiracialists attempt to minimize the effects of this negativity by claiming they are neither black nor white, but multiracial.”23 He continued,

We are faced again with this inescapable reality: black is the bottom line with regard to social caste. So mixed-race blacks, no matter what their mix, are always niggers. No wonder many mixed-race people choose to identify with blacks—revolutionary attitude or not, “black and proud” or not. With the racism mixed-race blacks face . . . in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), it makes sense that the one-drop rule would be viewed by blacks and many mixed-race blacks as a necessity . . . for the sake of the black community being able to maintain a healthy cohesiveness. . . . Any suggestion of changing the one-drop rule at this point would impair rather than enhance black unity and racial progress.24

This criticism of the multiracial movement—that it is a form of seeking after Whiteness—has theoretical validity: it points to a real danger. There are at least some people who advocate a multiracial identity as a way station toward not talking about race at all.25 However, whatever the merits of Spencer’s critique (and some of our contributors think it has considerable merit, at least in the case of some people who are part Black), it depends on the assumption that the multiraciality in question involves people of part-White ancestry.

This volume seeks to understand the often very different dynamics that exist for mixed people who are not part White. The project brings together scholars who study the multiraciality of people who cannot be construed as engaged in a Whiteness move. It draws on research into the social, psychological, and political situations of people of mixed race 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, and so on. It also opens up theoretical questions surrounding the meanings and communication of racial identities in multiple minority situations. It even considers the implications for current racial understandings of prehistoric mixing between Neanderthal and other human populations. It brings together the intellectual perspectives of several disciplines: historians, sociologists, ethnic studies scholars, an anthropologist, a playwright, and a poet.

We seek to create an intellectual momentum that prompts scholars, writers, and others who are invested in multiracial studies to pay better attention to multiple minority communities, couples, and individuals. While these histories are not new, their presence in the field must be granted more attention than they have gained heretofore. In doing so, we also declare the relevance of decentering Whiteness in multiracial studies. In race and ethnic studies, scholars are often coerced into giving Whiteness (and, in turn, White people) more consideration than their numbers or social position warrant. This makes race talk inordinately limiting. When there is an overemphasis on including Whiteness in every discussion, or on taking extra steps to avoid offending White people, we lose out on essential, though difficult, conversations about race. We make absolutely no apologies for envisioning race talk without having to consider the feelings of White people or include consideration of Whiteness. This is not meant to exclude such communities from the conversation. Rather, we are centering the experience of non-White groups who have been historically silenced (and have been expected to accept that silence).

The Shape of This Volume

Part I charts the individual journeys of identity transited by playwright Velina Hasu Houston and poet Janet Mendoza Stickmon. Houston is one of the founding figures of the multiracial movement and the internationally acclaimed author of more than thirty plays. In chapter 2 she recounts her self-fashioning and struggles for acceptance among monoracial Blacks and Asians, and also among multiracial people whose parentage is Asian and White. She presents herself as culturally Japanese, spatially located in California, and frequently profiled as Black. As she says, “Mixed race people are The Other. Mixed race people of African descent are The Other’s Other.” She writes eloquently not just of her own pain at misrecognition by others, but also of quiet triumph among the women of Rising Soul, an organization of Black Japanese women.

Mendoza Stickmon’s essay, “Blackapina,” reflects on her experience of being a biracial woman of African American and Filipino American descent. It is divided into five movements, much like a musical composition: (1) “The Intersection,” (2) “Multiple Families,” (3) “Disconnection Exposed,” (4) “Transformative Impact of Theology School,” and (5) “The Blend.” Through these movements, she explores her progression from identifying as “half African American and half Filipino American” to embracing hybridity as a Blackapina. She describes pivotal moments in her life, from the death of her parents to the birth of her child, that have shaped her understanding of herself as a multidimensional human being, specifically drawing upon the concept of psychosynthesis and its application to multiracial people.

Part II offers three studies of mixed marriage and parenting in multiple minority families and racially mixed communities. In “Intermarriage and the Making of a Multicultural Society in the Baja California Borderlands,” Verónica Castillo-Muñoz takes us back in time. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a boom in mining and agribusiness brought thousands of single men from Mexico, Europe, and China to Baja California. The Mexican government initially required that workers be divided by race. Agriculture and mining companies maintained separate housing for Chinese, European, and Mexican workers—ostensibly for public health reasons but likely to divide the workforce ethnically and tamp down labor resistance. However, by the 1920s there was a big change in demographics: most families in Baja California were racially mixed, and people in Baja California spoke at least fourteen different languages and eight different dialects. Castillo-Muñoz’s chapter examines what led to this transformation and how men and women undermined government efforts to selectively deny mixed race marriages and unions between Chinese men and Mexican women, mestizo men and indigenous women, and other multiple-minority unions.

Jessica Vasquez-Tokos writes in chapter 5 about the dynamics that occur in cross-minority intermarriages. She analyzes the marital choices, orientations to mainstream society, and parenting strategies of six non-White interracial couples. She finds that a minority-minority connection—where being a racial minority transcends identification with any particular racial category—facilitates non-White racial intermarriage. Emotional bonding is based on occupying a shared marginalized non-White racial status. A consequence of this minority-minority connection is the tendency to read contemporary racial politics through the lens of racial history in the United States. While most of these intermarried minority couples feel excluded from mainstream society and critique it from an “outsider-within” position,26 those who claim to feel included in the mainstream do so by citing their middle-class status. Those who are parents rear their multiracial children with an instructional emphasis on racial identity, ethnic culture, immigration history, and awareness of racial inequality. In sum, evidence suggests that cross-racial non-White couples see their partnerships not as a panacea to racial and ethnic inequality in the United States, but instead as a viewpoint from which to critique US racist structures and processes, both past and present.

Research that focuses on racial socialization in multiracial families has been extremely helpful in advancing the field, but there has been an overwhelming focus on the racial socialization of multiracials who have one White parent. In chapter 6, Cristina Ortiz concentrates on the racial socialization practices of multiple-minority multiracial families. Based on extensive interviews and lengthy observations of one multiple-minority family, along with comparisons to several other such families, Ortiz exposes the methods by which these parents help their children learn to navigate race in the world.

Part III presents two studies of individuals who have African American parentage as well as ancestry from another racial group. In “Being Mixed Race in the Makah Nation,” Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly starts from the ethical commitment that lies at the heart of the mixed race movement: that we must honor every person’s right to identify as he or she chooses. She describes the history and memory of mixing between Native American peoples and non-Indians. Then she unfolds the stories of Landon, a Makah Indian who has a rich bouquet of racial ancestries—Black, White, Filipino, and Quileute as well as Makah—and his racially complex extended family. In particular, she illuminates the ways that Landon experiences the limits to and possibilities of his membership in Makah society on account of his father’s Blackness, and the hurdles he has had to jump in order to succeed in claiming an Indian identity, along with Black and mixed identities.

In “‘You’re Not Black or Mexican Enough!’” Rebecca Romo reports on Blaxicans, multiple-minority multiracial individuals who are the offspring of one Mexican American parent and one African American parent. She explores how Blaxicans blend and borrow from both African American and Mexican American cultural and historical sources to formulate identities that are multiracial and multiethnic and that are resistant to monoraciality and Whiteness. She finds that Blaxican identities and experiences are influenced by the socialization provided by their parents, class, gender, and peer groups. While Blaxican identity is fluid and situational, Blaxicans reject the one-drop rule that labels them as Black on an intrapersonal level. Chapter 8 show Blaxicans existing in a borderland space that is in between African American and Mexican American identities.

In part IV, three scholars examine the lives of people who have part Asian ancestry. In “Bumbay in the Bay,” Maharaj Raju Desai explores the identities and experiences of those of mixed South Asian and Filipino heritage, whom he calls Indipinos. He examines how racialization by both the Filipino American and Indian American communities, as well as the larger American community, affects their identity formation and cultural affinity. He uses interviews of four Indipino women from the San Francisco Bay Area to explore how the intersections of institutional, interpersonal, and internalized constructions of race affect the identities of double-minority mixed women. Desai’s goal is to give visibility to the Indipino experience. The South Asian diaspora is not generally discussed in studies of mixed heritage outside of a few Indian mixes such as Black/Indian and Mexican/Indian. Furthermore, there is little scholarship on the South Asian diaspora in the Philippines and the mixing that occurs there and in communities of South Asian immigrants from the Philippines in the United States. Desai fills in these gaps.

Kaori Mori Want takes her analysis to Japan in chapter 10, “Hypervisibility and Invisibility of Female Haafu Models in Japan’s Beauty Culture.” Japan is usually considered to be a racially and ethnically homogeneous nation, but it has racial and ethnic diversity, and haafu have lived in Japan for a long time. Haafu—mixed race people—first emerged in the public imagination in the 1960s when many haafu singers, actors, and athletes were active in the media, and that time is called the first haafu boom. The new century has witnessed the second haafu boom, and we can see many haafu celebrities in the media today. Japanese girls worship the faces of haafu female celebrities, which are characterized as having big double-lidded eyes, long eyelashes, tall noses, and full lips. The cosmetics industry takes advantage of the haafu boom among Japanese girls and produces “haafu cosmetics,” which allegedly make a typical Japanese face look haafu. Magazines also feature articles on how to use makeup to achieve a haafu-like appearance. What is problematic about this popularity of haafu is that the worshiped haafu face is half White and half Japanese. Half Black, half Brown, and half Yellow haafu are invisible in this phenomenon. Mori Want argues that the invisibility of the non-Caucasian haafu faces in the media and cosmetics industry has inadvertently contributed to stereotypes about haafu. She introduces the voices of non-Caucasian haafu and shows them challenging the stereotype.

Lily Anne Welty Tamai takes us back and forth across the Pacific in “Checking ‘Other’ Twice: Transnational Dual Minorities.” She focuses on the narratives of mixed race American Japanese who were fathered by Black and Latino soldiers, who grew up in Japan, and who came to the United States as young adults. Leaving Japan to cross the Pacific Ocean meant arriving in their fathers’ land to deal with a new set of rules surrounding race and the flux of a migrating identity. Welty Tamai connects the importance of oral history methodology with transpacific border crossing to address the issues of mixed race transnational adoption, migration, and citizenship.

Part V, “Reflections,” extends the analysis in two very different directions. Terence Keel is a historian of science who contemplates what it may mean to various peoples to have a distant ancestor who was a member not of Homo sapiens but of Homo neanderthalensis. Since 2010 geneticists have found that Eurasians and Neanderthals mixed roughly thirty thousand years ago, leaving non-African groups with as much as 8 percent Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Keel explains that the story of how humans had children with Neanderthals should push scholars who study mixed race people to evaluate critically their preference for working within human timescales that tend to go no further into the past than the European colonial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and are most often limited to twentieth-century American history. Thus Keel uses the case of human-Neanderthal hybrids to explore forms of mixing that predate the emergence of Whiteness as a racial category. His essay also draws attention to how being mixed is the baseline, not the exception, for what it means to belong to our species. He argues that if scholars of mixed race people take this seriously then they must confront the tension between knowledge of our biological selves as always already mixed and the pragmatic and political goals of mixed race scholarship in its attempt to highlight the experience of multiethnics—and especially first-generation mixed race people—as if they are social and biological exceptions to what it means to belong to our species.

The collection ends with an analytical postscript. Nitasha Sharma reflects on the eleven essays that constitute the body of this volume.

Taken together, the essays in this volume reveal that there are both thematic similarities and great differences between the experiences of multiracial people who are from multiple minority backgrounds and those who are part White.

This collection is only a beginning. One of the many challenges in putting together an anthology like this is the matter of representation. Throughout the process of producing this book, we were acutely aware of not only the voices that we were bringing to our audience, but also the other voices that were missing. We have assayed the lives and identities of a dozen kinds of multiple-minority multiracial people: Black and Mexican, Indian and Filipino, Chinese and Latino, Native and African American, even Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. This does not exhaust the range of possibilities in the realm of people who possess multiple ancestries that have little or nothing to do with White people. Most Pacific Islanders have knowledge of being mixed—Samoan and Tongan, Fijian and Indian, Hawaiian and Chinese, and so on.27 In Central Asia, there are people who are mixed Kazakh and Korean, Uzbek and Tajik, and so on and on.28 As Terence Keel points out in chapter 12, mixedness is the default condition of the human race; it is the very mark of our humanity.

Notes

1. Information for this section is taken from Brian Han, “Hines Ward: The Legend Goes On,” Korea Times (October 23, 2014); Jerry Crowe, “Ward Learned by Mom’s Example,” Los Angeles Times (February 4, 2006); Paul Wiseman, “Ward Spins Biracial Roots into Blessing,” USA Today (April 10, 2006); John Branch, “Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey toward Acceptance,” New York Times (November 9, 2009); Ji-Hyun Ahn, “Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization: Hines Ward and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Media,” Cultural Studies 28.3 (2014): 391–417.

2. All the quotations here are taken from Han, “Hines Ward.”

3. Cynthia L. Nakashima, “An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-Race People in America,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), 162–178.

4. Michael Fitzpatrick and Tim Macfarlan, “‘I’ve Been Called N****r and Had Trash Thrown at Me’: First Mixed Race Miss Japan Hits Out at the ‘Spasmodic Vomit of Racial Abuse’ She’s Suffered Because Father Is African-American,” Daily Mail (April 1, 2015). Other sources for this section include “Beauty Queen Brings Light to Japan’s Racial Issues,” CBS News (April 13, 2015); Traci G. Lee, “Biracial Miss Universe Japan Faces Backlash,” MSNBC (March 26, 2015), http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/biracial-miss-universe-japan-faces-backlash; Martin Fackler, “Biracial Beauty Queen Challenges Japan’s Self-Image,” New York Times (May 29, 2015).

5. Kosuke Takahashi, “Multiracial Miss Universe Japan Symbolizes the Country’s Transformation,” Huffington Post Japan (May 8, 2015), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/08/multiracial-miss-universe_n_7205026.html.

6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/25/miss-universe-japan_n_6938584.html.

7. Ibid.

9. See, for example, Katya Gibel Azoulay, Black, Jewish, and Interracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine, 1998); Lauren L. Basson, White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas, eds., Mixed Race Hollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Secrets (New York: Little, Brown, 2007); Greg Carter, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Penny Edwards, Debjani Ganguly, and Jacqueline Lo, eds., “Mixed Race around the Globe,” special issue of Journal of Intercultural Studies 28.1 (2007): 1–155; Kip Fulbeck, Paper Bullets (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Lise Funderburg, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity (New York: Morrow, 1994); Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008); Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (New York: Free Press, 1995); Patricia Penn Hilden, When Nickels Were Indians: An Urban, Mixed-Blood Story (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995); Kevin R. Johnson, How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Andrew J. Jolivette, ed., Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012); Bernie D. Jones, Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Lisa Jones, Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Kent Anderson Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1949–1893 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (New York: Riverhead, 1996); Robert S. McKelvey, Dust of Life: America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995); Jill Olumide, Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Philip Roth, The Human Stain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Danzy Senna, Caucasia (New York: Riverhead, 1998); Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (New York: Penguin, 2011); Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix, Black, White, or Mixed Race? (New York: Routledge, 1993); Dorothy West, The Wedding (New York: Doubleday, 1995); Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 1995); Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980); Marguerite Wright, I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).

10. Velina Hasu Houston, Tea (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007); Nina Revoyr, Southland (New York: Akashic, 2003); Karen I. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

11. Jeffrey S. Passel, Gretchen Livingston, and D’Vera Cohn, “Explaining Why Minority Births Now Outnumber White Births” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, May 17, 2012), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/05/17/explaining-why-minority-births-now-outnumber-white-births/.

12. Sam Roberts, “Minorities in the US Set to Become Majority by 2042,” New York Times (August 14, 2008).

13. Nicholas A. Jones and Jungmiwha Bullock, “The Two or More Races Population: 2010” (C2010BR-13; Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, September 2012).

14. Places to begin on scientific racism include C. Loring Brace, “Race” Is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of a Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); Paul Spickard, Race in Mind: Critical Essays (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

15. Carolus Linnaeus, Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, orgines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis (Stockholm: Holmiae, 1758); Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1795); Arthur Comte de Gobineau, The Inequality of Races (1853–1855; repr., New York: Howard Fertig, 2010); Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

16. This line of thinking owes much to Gobineau, Inequality of Races. See Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, Including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout the World (1918; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Reuter, Race Mixture: Studies in Intermarriage and Miscegenation (1918; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (1937; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1961). For analysis of this thinking, see Nakashima, “Invisible Monster.” Sadly, this misbegotten kind of thinking is with us still; see Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

17. E.g., G. Reginald Daniel, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); G. Reginald Daniel and Hettie V. Williams, eds., Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ed., “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004); Kevin R. Johnson, ed., Mixed Race America and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Jolivette, Obama and the Biracial Factor; Gary B. Nash, Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America (New York: Holt, 1999); Maria P. P. Root and Matt Kelly, eds., Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Identities (Seattle: MAVIN Foundation, 2003); Paul Spickard, Rowena Fong, and Patricia L. Ewalt, “Undermining the Very Basis of Racism: Its Categories,” Social Work 40.5 (1995): 725–728; Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima, eds., The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

18. Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), 7. Root’s book is the founding volume in the canon of mixed race studies.

19. Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 36–37.

20. Ronald David Glass and Kendra R. Wallace, “Challenging Race and Racism: A Framework for Educators,” in The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 341–358.

21. Lewis Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Rainier Spencer, Challenging Multiracial Identity (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Embrick, “Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States?,” in Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, ed. David Brunsma (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 33–48; George Yancey, “Racial Justice in a Black/Nonblack Society,” in Brunsma, Mixed Messages, 49–62; Hayward Derrick Horton, “Racism, Whitespace, and the Rise of the Neo-Mulattoes,” in Brunsma, Mixed Messages, 117–121; Heather M. Dalmage, ed., The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Minelle Mahtani, Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014). Paul Spickard has explored this critique in more detail in reviews of Sexton’s book in American Studies 50.1–2 (2009): 125–127, and of Jon Michael Spencer’s in the Journal of American Ethnic History 18.2 (1999): 153–156.

22. Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Spencer is not thoroughly consistent on this point, as he does make a few references to people who are part Asian and part Black, but analytically he throws the Asians by implication into the White category.

23. Spencer, New Colored People, 32–33. See also Molefi Kete Asante, “Racing to Leave the Race: Black Postmodernists Off-Track,” Black Scholar 23.3–4 (1993): 50–51.

24. Spencer, New Colored People, 57.

25. Paul Spickard analyzes their positions in “Does Multiraciality Lighten? Me-Too Ethnicity and the Whiteness Trap,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 289–300.

26. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within,” Social Problems 33.6 (1986): 14–32.

27. Paul Spickard, “Pacific Islander Americans and Multiplicity: A Vision of America’s Future?,” in Race in Mind, 235–260.

28. Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Saule K. Ualieva and Adrienne L. Edgar, “In the Laboratory of Peoples’ Friendship: Mixed People in Kazakhstan from the Soviet Era to the Present,” in Global Mixed Race, ed. Rebeca Chiyoko King-O’Riain et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 68–90; Karina Mukazhanova, “The Politics of Multiple Identities in Kazakhstan,” in Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership, ed. Paul Spickard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 265–289.