Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Abstract
This ethnographic study analyzes Japanese perceptions of racial otherness, with a focus on Japanese perceptions of White Westerners. Despite the country’s pronounced lack of racially non-Japanese and non-Asians, Japan is arguably one of the most “Westernized non-Western” societies in the world today. Under this presumption, this essay explores how Japanese introduced, interpreted, and incorporated images of White Westerners. The empirical study confirms that overly positive images and affirmations of White Westerners are a central theme in the Japanese imagination. In addition, the study suggests some complexities in Japanese people’s consumption of racial imaginations. These complexities include (1) how Japanese people use images of Whites when they see their own skin tone and other phenotypic features, (2) some of the psychological struggles that Japanese people experience when they actually associate themselves with White Westerners, and (3) a few antithetic perceptions that Japanese people have of the dominant racial ideology, an ideology that praises Whites.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Is the process of White ethnic identification beset with political ramifications? Is it a response to increasing ethnic identifications on the part of new Asian and Latin immigrants? Or is it a mere leisure-time activity, as Herbert Gans suggested, engaged in by people who already enjoy the fruits of being “mainstream” (read White) in a country whose institutions and social systems have been defined as racialized? The question that is explored in this paper whether there is significant difference between the attitude of the white ethnics and that of the non-ethnic White Americans towards affirmative action to support minority groups. Answering this question will help us substantially understand whether ethnic Whites and non-ethnic Whites are two categorically distinct groups with different political orientations, or whether ethnic self-identification can be thought of as a manifestation of social action among Whites in a particular historical context.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Jane Lazarre’s 1996 memoir, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, and Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish, published in 2001, both couch the public potential of mixed racialism in terms of intimacy and kinship. However, just as the interracial “movement” gives way to separatist identity politics, Walker’s parents eventually divorce, establishing places in separate worlds—one black, feminist and bohemian, the other white and staunchly middle class. As it is represented here, the resurrection of these separate publics implies a late twentieth-century failure of a liberal idealism that requires the minimizing of racial and ethnic particularity in favor of an “empathic link […] between black and white, family and friend” (322).

If the family drama that Walker narrates suggests that the multiracial subject announces a “new” racial formation that can posit interracial “love” as part of the conditions of social change, and as that which comes “before” the tragically segmenting effects of “identity politics,” then Lazarre’s narrative also posits the potential “love” has to do the work of social “transformation.” Lazarre’s narrative, which traces her own “transformation of consciousness” (3) as a white mother of black, biracial children, may be seen as an extension of the manner in which “white motherhood” has been mobilized around an emergent racial politics. Both Walker and Lazarre’s texts suggest that the figure of “love” has the capacity to enable an antiracist agenda—either in an idealized, pre “identity politics” past or in a racially “transformed” future. However, “love” also stands in for a late twentieth century impasse regarding how “race” continues to signify the demands of history, public policy and participation.

Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: See attached pdf file

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores shifting understandings of white American identity during the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the wake of Bacon’s rebellion in 1676, the British colonies began to make laws that drew distinctions between white and black bond-laborers by providing more extensive protection of civil rights to white bond-laborers than to black bond-laborers. This encouraged white bond-laborers to perceive themselves as having more in common with higher-status whites than with black people who shared their social class. This was to the advantage of white elites, who wanted to prevent solidarity among laborers. By the end of the 1800s, however, white elite interests had shifted. Alarmed by the rising immigration rates of “off-white” people from Ireland, Southern and Eastern Europe, and eugenic concerns about the reproductive rates of poor and otherwise “unfit” whites, white elites needed a means to separate pure whiteness from tainted whiteness. I argue that in the early twentieth century, white elites used the concept of “feeblemindedness,” which was formalized during this time in psychology, eugenics research, and in the law, to group together different forms of tainted whiteness. The concept of feeblemindedness, formally defined in the American context by Henry Herbert Goddard in the second decade of the twentieth century, was based upon a prior racialized conception of intelligence, according to which white people supposedly have normal and above normal cognitive ability, while members of other races supposedly have subnormal cognitive ability. This racialized understanding defined cognitive ability as the capacity to make contributions, in a way appropriate to one’s gender, to the building of civilization. White people are “civilization builders,” while members of other races supposedly lack the ability to produce civilization. By the early 20th century, however, the racialized understanding of cognitive ability was used to signify not only the difference between white and non-white people, but also the difference between pure and tainted whites. I argue that white elites deployed the concept of feeblemindedness to link the different versions of white impurity—off-whiteness, poverty, and lack of civilization-building skills—together. The concept of feeblemindedness became a tool that could be used to exclude tainted whites from the full protection of civil rights afforded to white people in American society, for example through involuntary sterilization and incarceration in institutions. The legalization of the concept of tainted whiteness through the concept of feeblemindedness marks a significant shift in the understanding of American identity in terms of white racial identity.