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.