Julian Leus, ASA 115 SS1 2019, Week 2 reading

Kip Fulbeck’s photography project “Part Asian, 100% Hapa: A Retrospective” provided a lot of interesting testimony from Hapa individuals. I found it particularly interesting how the first participant, Sunida, a half-white half-Thai woman, found her racial ambiguity as an advantage when living in Thailand: “I got away with so much being half white,” she said. However, upon moving to Santa Barbara, she struggled with stereotypical assumptions and questions about Asians, such as “Do you even flush toilets?” in her encounters with Californians. In this case, her multiracial identity functioned more like a social nuisance for racial prejudice, rather than a social advantage in Thailand. 

This example relates to the theme of “situational identity”, a concept by Jonathan Okamura, discussed in the first week of lecture. As mentioned by Professor Valverde, in the same way that Sunida’s mixed-race identity caused others to make racist assumptions about her lifestyle, Obama’s half-white and half-black identity and his predominant upbringing in Hawaii and in Indonesia around mostly Asian-American and Asian populations caused some people in the U.S. black community to not claim him as raised culturally “black”. I find this dissonance really interesting because Obama––although born as a half-black man and championing the title of the “United States’ first black president’––some members of the black community argued that Obama had to learn “how to be black,” or to develop amongst other African Americans in the culture of blackness, through his work in Chicago as a community organizer. These unique situations are very telling about the differing race-relations and conceptions of mixed-race individuals in the United States and in Asia. The variety of advantages and/or disadvantages of mixed-race individuals is very fascinating because each experience is unique and relative to each individuals’ social environment. 

Question: Out of all the 1200 participants photographed, why did the artist choose those 5 people for their book?