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.