Melanie Manuel | ASA 115 001 | Week 2 Blog Entry

Melanie Manuel
ASA 115 001
Week 2


This week focuses on "Race Translators, Traitors, Cultural Intermediaries, and Mixed Race Makers," but for the topic of this blog post, I will focus more so on the themes found in Kip Fulbeck's "Part Asian, 100% Hapa: A Retrospective," which highlights the journeys of five Hapas during a project in which the author has taken their photos ten years prior and asks them to reflect now. What stuck out the most was on page 7, where Teresa talked about how her involvement in the project has allowed her to provide healing for both herself and audience members. There is a comment on how history had been made within Harper's section when her mother Sheri talks about her experience with race many years ago, and it shows the evolution that has come with time. We often talk about how the past haunts us even in the present, which is no doubt true in many ways, but it is also a site of education for many that are brave enough to look back and move forward.

Not only do we see people of color in the media, but we see representation among Hapa folks. For example, the movie, "The Sun Is Also a Star" includes two mixed raced leads, and it is written by a person of color. This is something still very much new to Hollywood, but its normalization may allow for more progress and evolution as noticed by Shane, Sheri, and other of the Hapa folks from Fulbeck's project. 

Included is the movie poster:

Analí Cine, ASA 115, Week 2

The book The Hapa Project by Kip Fulbeck is a book which talks about hapa people, their feelings, and what they identify as. I found the book to be quite nice and interesting. It’s really interesting to see how people change over the years, and not only that, but how their thoughts also change. I think of the hapa project as a project to take in your roots and be okay with who you are, regardless if you are not sure what that is. Since I am not very familiar with Asian American Studies, the word hapa is still a bit unclear to me. Do you just need to be part Asian and another race in order to be hapa? Another thing about this book caught my attention: although this was a great book to take pride in your identity, I felt like there could have been more representation. As I was reading, I noticed that the people were scholars, and if not scholars, semi-educated. I feel like the author could have included people who didn’t have an education, but who also felt a strong sense of self. I really like where the author was trying to go by showing how part-Asian people or people who identify as hapa go through a process of growing and learning to eventually take pride of who they are.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hapa&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS710US710&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG2raylJPjAhVXbc0KHR3jAcMQ_AUIECgB&biw=1280&bih=578#imgrc=48izduwAU6ruFM:

Anthony Tran, ASA 115, Week 1 Reading Blog

This week's readings heavily focus on the themes of race traitors and eugenics. Race traitors from each side of a mixed person can be argued for. With a mulatto, a person of white and black blood would desire to be considered only white, if possible. White elitists completely rejecting anybody that was not "pure" causation without any blood relation to anything else. Dr. Plecker, a public health advocate in the early twentieth-century, fought his hardest to put down people of color in any way possible. In J. Douglas Smith's Article, "The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia," Plecker removes colored children from white schools, publically released pamphlets publicizing his disgust towards people of color and harm they supposedly bring biologically, and, overall, kept the colored population socially and economically second-class citizens. He has such a strong passion for trying to tear colored people down that he went on to try and refine colored people from American Indian, and their mixes, to African American, and their mixes. It is mindblowing reading about someone doing so much hard to an entire group of a people, practically devoting his life to it. He lost court cases and his job, doing what he did. Luckily, by the end of the 1930s, white elites lost this fight, as the color line/boundaries began to fade, black activism rose and paternalism as a strategy for managing white supremacy eroded.

How has today's stereotypes an influence of eugenics, whether or not we want to believe or accept it?
Personally, do you think you are good at judging whether or not someone is of mixed race like Powell or Plecker claimed to be?
A question about the reading: Was Trinckle neutral, completely, or slightly against people of color? Smith's article made him sound like he tried to be considerate to the people of American Indian tribes, but only wanted to keep the eyes of the public unquestioning of his devotion to white supremacy.

ASA 115 Week 1 Reading Blog- Julian Demegillo

Readings for Week 1 include "Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-Race People in America" by Cynthia L. Nakashima and Arwin D. Smallwood’s “Race Mixings: A Brief History with Maps”. 

The first entry, “Invisible Monster” by Cynthia L. Nakashima focuses on the topic of mixed-race individuals and how they are portrayed  and treated by society. Nakashima further explores and explains what she describes as the way American culture has adopted two specific “strategies” into dealing with individuals of mixed-racial heritages. The first strategy is the creation and definition of multiracial individuals as a specific group by way of constructing defining theories and beliefs. The second strategy is the blatant refusal to acknowledge the very existence and validity of multi-racial people as individuals and as a collective group. Nakashima mentions the hardships mixed-race individuals experience from feeling isolation or not belonging to a group due to their unique phenotype. Some are even subjected to question their very identity brought by the shallowness of others to quickly judge the way they look. In some way, mixed-race people are viewed by narrow-minded society as “Hybrid-Degenerates” due to the fact they seem to not be able to belong to any established group. This inability to be classified and assigned to a standard group is a threat to the American way of life. A country that runs on the requirements of clear categorizing of its citizens from political, social, economic and psychological organization of its citizens just seems incompatible with these new mixed-races. Despite this, multiracial groups are still fighting for equality and recognition.

The second entry “Race Mixings: A Brief History with Maps” by Arwin D. Smallwood talks about the history of Racial mixing from the time when humans multiplied and expanded out of Africa to the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and then further in the Western Hemisphere into North and South Americas and the Caribbean. With this expansion to multiple locations brought for  the development of Human race into subgroups.  Ethnic groups formed and developed their own language, culture, religion and identity. This in turn brought in the need of early classifications of racial groups. From the early three broad continental races o Asian, African and European groups to the classification of the hundreds of different ethnic groups in China alone, our way of understanding the diversity of the Human race has also developed throughout history. In Addition to this, racial-mixing have been occurring for hundreds of years before America was even founded. Migration brought different groups in contact with each other through various processes. The Philippines for example, also portrays the mixing of races as Filipinos can trace their lineage from different ethnic groups such as Malays, Chinese, Indos, Spanish and Arabic to name a few. With the context of racial-mixing and its history, what will become of the United States’ ethnic landscape in the future? 

Link: http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/mark-of-four-waves Article on the group Tatak ng Apat na Alon or Mark of the Four Waves, is a reference to the  “waves” of immigrants who came to the Philippines over many millennia: 1) Afro-Asiatic; 2) Malay-Polynesian; 3) Deuteron-Malays; 4)Spanish.

Melanie Manuel | ASA 115 001 | Week 1 Blog Entry

Melanie Manuel
ASA 115 001
Week 1

Cynthia Nakashima's "Invisible Monsters" heavily reminds me of the quote, "Saying someone isn't Asian enough, Black enough, Indian enough, Hispanic enough, whatever enough is basically saying they don't represent your idea of what the color of their skin means" by Anna Akana in her video titled "Am I White Washed?" The reading itself doesn't discuss white washing per se, but it does lead a discussion into the repercussions faced by mixed raced folks when society tries to define them for what they are and who they are meant to be. I was both shocked and unsurprised at the way in which Nakashima defined race as a means of categorizing individuals, because despite how we try to convince ourselves that we don't stereotype and 'define' people as Akana claims, we do. As Nakashima claims, those who don't fit those race categories "threaten" the social order (164). This social order is monoracial and hegemonic in its thought process of "purity," but mixed race folks break these norms simply existing, which shows how their existence is important and valid even if they are constantly denied and hyper-sexualized. These sorts of psychological and sociological phenomenon show just how much these individuals have to get through to accept themselves for who they are rather than what they are.

Attached is the video mentioned:

Week 1 -- Sunday Comic Strip | "Hollywood's Choice" by Analí Cine, Diane Lee, and Melanie Manuel

"Hollywood's Choice" by Analí Cine, Diane Lee, and Melanie Manuel

The piece was created by first establishing a scenario involving a mixed raced individual. We then made a storyboard on paper, transferred it onto a computer, used digital media to create a rough draft and then a final draft. Some of the special tools we used were a drawing tablet and Adobe Photoshop. During our brainstorming in class, we discussed Cynthia Nakashima's "An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mix-Race People in America," where Nakashima mentions that mixed race women are sexualized as well as how being mixed race implies attractiveness. While this is not necessarily true, there is a problem in Hollywood that values such traits of "mixedness" to set others apart from one another; in this instance, it gets someone a part despite their not being deserving of it skill-wise, but simply due to their appearance. We decided to comment on this issue within Hollywood, because even in this "progressive" era, Hollywood is still very much entrenched in eurocentric ideals and values of beauty. It is important to critique such things, because there are reasons why this is happening, and it begs the question of whether we may see change - of course, there are still pockets of change like "Crazy, Rich Asians," "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," and even "The Sun Is Also a Star." The latter of which includes two mixed race leads. We hope that this sparks more conversations about mixed race roles in Hollywood, and the potentiality of more inclusion as well as a decrease in their sexualization.
Being an artist, for us, means that we get to convey our messages through art. It means that we can express how we feel or think in a way that is different than just using words. As artists, we are community advocates, we are courageous creators who want to promote awareness and equality. Our core belief in creating art is to start conversations about issues that multiracial folks experience as well as monoracial folks, because we believe it is important to understand where ideologies like colorism, internalized racism, and others such topics we have discussed come from. And although we are educating, we also seek to learn as well.

Janine Nguyen and Anthony Tran, ASA 115, Art Project Week 1

To criticize Elizabeth Warren, a Caucasian female senator from Ohio, it is critical to bring into light how Warren has utilized multiraciality as a ploy to give herself clout as a senator until her involvement in the 2020 presidential campaign. For years, since the early 1990s, Warren has been convinced that she is of Cherokee Nation heritage. Native people have been relegated to being invisible, whereas Warren is clearly not as a phenotypically white woman of influence. Warren has established herself as the only Native American woman in Congress, yet she has failed to make any advances in rights for Native American people, notwithstanding the Cherokee. In Cindy Nakashima’s “Invisible Monster”, multiracial people are described to be the outcasts of society; they are unstable, unnatural and threaten the foundations of society. However, using multiraciality to boost her career, Warren was celebrated as the first minority woman to receive tenure at the Harvard Law School; to boot, she tends to “flip-flop” in her stories of her ancestors which she seems to derive from racist stereotypes. In addition, Warren’s motives are suspicious because the Cherokee Nation has no official records of her or her family, and she avoids even talking to Native American leaders despite public opinion of her multiracial roots. After years of ignoring the concerns and criticisms of the Native American people, only now in 2019, Warren apologizes for her misappropriation of Native heritage. It is clear to day that her decision is based on garnering the most votes and gaining the forgiveness of the general public as a presidential Democratic nominee, not out of actual guilt and shame for making fraudulent claims. The case of Warren emphasizes how white privilege has overshadowed the cries and grievances of ethnic minorities. Warren is still commemorated as a progressive, white Feminist, despite her ignorance and how she clearly took advantage of being Cherokee on basis of the one-drop rule. Native Americans remain invisible at large, especially in politics where representation is crucial in advancing in their rights and improving the current conditions of the Native people. The case of Warren highlights how there is a divide in which phenotypically Caucasian multiracial individuals do not experience the same hardships; while this case is interesting and complex, it is obvious that Warren faces little to no repercussions for her actions.

This piece was inspired by my favorite cartoon series, Steven Universe, and white paternalistic elites from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Dr. Walter Plecker and John Powell. The piece is an adaptation of various scenes throughout the films in order to convey a similar story to its original plot. Here, we have the main character, Steven, being asked about "what" he really is in order to fill in the schema that people naturally feel a need to complete. Steven is half human and half gem, an alien species with supernatural powers that allowed him to fight off enemies and fuse with other gems. 

The way that fusion works is trust and love between two gems, at least that was what they knew. Steven's love interest, Connie, is a human that was able to fuse with him and are now worried for their safety, as this a new territory in biology that has not been discovered, or explored. Outsiders, like the larger more powerful gems overlooking the planet, feel the need to express their disgust and try to stop Steven and Connie from continuing to mingle and spread. It was believed that only gems of the same kind are allowed to fuse. Already being a human and gem fusion, Steven has to pick a side to fight in this upcoming alien invasion/war. He struggles to see that he can’t be himself without either side.

Addressing the reading, Powell and Plecker advocated against interracial marriages and for bills that segregated people by color and did much worse things in the fight for oppressing non-white folks. The idea of fusion between Steven and Connie, here, speaks to Plecker’s ideas of biological inferiority of American Indian and African American folks and any other hybridized offspring. Steven Universe is a beautiful story that speaks to issues beyond interracial love, but LGBTQIA+ issues, and being such a progressive series for a network as old as Cartoon Network, the channel that develops and premieres this show, really drew my attention for this project. This piece was created using the AutoSketch and Goodnotes 5 apps on my iPad Air. Being an artist to me means someone that can produce a work that somehow releases feelings or ideas and may be viewed by others to share those ideas and feeling in any kind of medium, or invoke new ones through interpretation from and with that medium. I love projects that are assigned with general ideas that allow me to produce something more complex, whether it is a new idea or practice a more sophisticated technique. My philosophy on creating art mostly resides to mental and emotional relief/release. It is a great way to redirect one’s energy from what might be a stressful life, but it is also something that can make one think. Whether it is in creating that piece or analyzing it, thought goes into the development of each element.

Xu Zhao, Kaishan Wang,Zi Yang Huang, ASA 115, Week 1 art project

This cartoon is simply about an American born Chinese having a crush on an adorable white girl, but the reality is that this white girl only dating with whites, and  she has already have a crush on another white boy. So, he is in the self-abasement that he wishes he were one of the white.

Living in a neighbor with other races can be both exciting and desperate. Precisely speaking, multiracialism could generate diversity, but it could also generate racism. As a Chinese student living in the US and seeking for a relationship with local white people is a burdensome task. As you can see from this picture, what’s striking audiences is the topic of self-identification. From the bottom of our heart, we can simply ask ourselves: Who are we?

The motivation for creating this piece is from our bloodline. Our group are composed of three Chinese students, and we’ve been to US for several years. We’ve had similar experience for dating white girls. At first, we didn’t know ethics is one of the major factors for seeking a relationship. Nonetheless, it seems to us that white boy dating a white girl makes more senses than an Asian dating a white girl.

Being an artist is quite a sensitive job, since we have to reveal what’s being covered and to express our emotion for it. The main purpose for this piece of art is that we advocate each race should be respected, and more importantly, we can’t lose our own identity but to keep it and remind ourselves of who we really are.

Ziqi Yin and Qian Zhang, ASA 115, Art Project Week 1

This is the carton me and Ziqi did for the art project week 1. It's describe unfair between international students v.s in state students.

Ziyana Huang. Week one blog

Ziyang Huang

ASA 115, Section 1

Professor Caroline Valverde

June 30th, 2019

    Blog One

After reading the article, I truly have had a deeper understanding of the status of multiracial people in the past and had a compassionate feeling for them. To be more specific, the article shows the readers that people in society used different reasons to prove that the multiracial people were not as good as homogeneous people. In other words, people in the past published various articles, claiming that the multiracial people could be unstable and question their possibilities, by using the perspectives from scientific, social, political, and so on, in order to strengthen their power and guarantee their own profits. However, this is such a stereotype and discrimination to the multiracial people because everyone in this world is the same and should be treated equally and fairly. In details, from my own perspective, all types of races in the world have some fields they make the most contribution. However, there are no measurements on them, so it is impossible to compare them and conclude which type of races are better. The multiracial people are not an exception either because there are a lot of multiracial people that are pretty successful and make a significant contribution to society. Therefore, the difference in a race is not a factor that people should use to determine and judge the value of a race because successful people include people from all types of races in society nowadays.

For example, Karen Mok is a well-known artist in China, she has achieved an impressive accomplishment in her singing career, and people even call her the “Diva” and “Queen”. Karen Mok’s parents are European and Chinese, so Karen is a good example of showing that multiracial people can also be very successful in society.

My question is that nowadays, even though multiracial people demonstrate their abilities and good qualities to others, why do some people still have a bias towards them but hide their bias in front of people?

Wang KaiShan, ASA 115, week 1 blog

This article is the perfect illustration to the misguided understandings about people

of mixed race. People have extensively varied and maintained ideas about the entire concept of race. However, whenever the same people are asked to define the race of the person representing more than one culture in his/her identity, the questions are often left with no answer. The existence of mixed race challenges the norms and standards that characterize races and put a clear-cut separation among them. In fact, race is a socially coined understanding that has been cherished for decades and centuries to justify the dominancy of a race in public. Mixed race questions the justification of this superiority, which the reason is why people with power tend to always use all the scientific, social, and political means to make the society believe in the interpretation of mixed race as mentally, socially, emotionally, and politically unstable and vulnerable state. The application of this power gave birth to two misjudged perspectives about people embodying various races. Those are: having a mixed race is a curse, and people have to reject it in the society. As result of this, the interracial marriages used to be banned in a variety of mighty countries, like the US, from colonial periods until the 1960’s. Women representing more than one race are more targeted in the society as they are referred as sexual objects and prostitutes, such as the mixed race females in Vietnam. Unfortunately, even the literature boosts the mixed-race discrimination by describing mixed race characters as mentally and emotionally unstable. Thankfully, the author points out that this mindset of the society about mixed race is changing now, and hopefully in the nearest future people will not have to be underestimated or mistreated because of displaying more than one racial identity in their appearances.

In my opinion, this approach towards mixed race people is a form of racial segregation even if many people do not want to acknowledge this fact. This understanding is definitely one of the bricks of the foundation of racial inequality and destructing this brick will be another step taken toward the enforcement of racial equality in our world.

My question: I would like to know whether the US government monitors the race sensitive contents of the stories published in the books to avoid educating generations the mixed-race discrimination as a justified concept, like in the past.

 

Picture Illustration: Megan Markle & Prince Harry, and their new born mixed race child as the overcome of mixed race-based stereotypes in the royal family. Royal family is the role model of almost every British man, and this mixed-race marriage raises awareness and hopefully acceptance towards the matter.