Cynthia Nakashima’s An
Invisible Monster explores the historical background behind social stigma
against mixed race individuals, specifically those who identify as “Hapa”, or
half-Asian and half-European (162). The history behind social stigma against mixed-race
people dates back to scientific racism, which provided a authoritative and
academic discourse to justify anti-miscegenation laws, white supremacy, and “hybrid
degeneracy”.
Hybrid degeneracy, the notion that people of multiracial
heritage are genetically inferior to both (or all) of their parent races, was a
popular subject of scientific research beginning after the Civil War and ending
sometime in the mid-1930s (165). I found it interesting how Nakashima pointed
out that, while historically the theory of hybrid degeneracy posited mixed race
individuals as “unnatural” and contaminating to the “biologically superior
White race,” contemporary views of multiracial individuals as particularly attractive,
beautiful and “extra exotic” directly contradict this idea of hybrid degeneracy
(165, 170). This contradiction reveals the racial biases of scientific research
against people of color, its dominance by white supremacists, and most
importantly, the inadequacies of science in providing the absolute authority of
natural law that it claims to wield.
Overall, this reading reinforces the theme that race, racial
purity, and racial hierarchies are essentially social constructions. As we
discussed on the first day of class, racial science was created by white
imperialists to morally justify colonial rule and violence against their
imperial subjects. In deconstructing this dangerous and false ideology of race,
Nakashima invites her readers to conceptualize race as an artificial concept affecting
our state of mind, rather than rather than rendering ourselves into an absolute
state of being.
Question: How do we cope with and heal with these
emotionally difficult readings?
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