Are hafus ‘dirty’ or ‘special’? Negotiating mixed-race identities among Japanese-Indonesian youths in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This is one of the first papers to examine the experiences of mixed-race individuals who have one Japanese parent, commonly referred to as ‘hafu’, living outside of Japan. Specifically, it analyzes the experiences of Japanese-Indonesians living in Indonesia who have attended an overseas Japanese school and an Indonesian or international school in Indonesia or elsewhere. Japan’s dual positioning – as inferior to the West and superior to the Rest – impacts upon the experiences of mixed-race individuals in varying ways depending on the predominant discourse operating at the school. At the Japanese school, the discourse of Japanese superiority, which draws on both the cultural legacy of Japanese imperialism and contemporary regional socio-economic hierarchy, deemed the hafus as inferior in relation to their Japanese peers for not being ‘pure’ Japanese. At the Indonesian school, the regional hierarchy deemed the hafus as superior in relation to their Indonesian peers. In these cases, mixed-race individuals find themselves on opposite ends of Japan’s dual positioning. Finally, at the English-medium international school, the cosmopolitan discourse that privileges mixedness (and western cultural capital) at times inverted the positionality of those who were of mixed descent in relation to their Japanese peers. The paper discusses the way hafus submit to, negotiate or challenge the prevailing discourses through the use of varying strategies (sometimes depending on gender) such as performing Japaneseness or bicultural competence, constructing social distance, or physically fighting. Furthermore, the paper extends the application of methodological transnationalism to analyze the way multiple regional and global discourses intersect to simultaneously and situationally affect hafu experiences.     

Fabulachia: urban,black female experiences and higher education in Appalachia

Abstract

This article draws on focus group conversations with black female college students attending a small, liberal arts institution in Kentucky. Based primarily on group interviews and discussions, as well as observations and analysis – a theoretical domain (referred to throughout the article as ‘Fabulachia’) emerged as a site-specific outcome of events and ideas regarding race, gender and identity experienced by the research participants. Specifically, ‘Fabulachia’ functions as a theoretical hybrid space in which urban (e.g. ‘ghetto fabulous’) black college student-voices find a sense of empowerment as they construct their own narratives of leaving ‘the hood’ to attend college in rural Appalachia. This project revises and updates previous research on race and rural identity/ies in order to situate the urban black female experience into an Appalachian context. Drawing on hip hop feminism and urban education based theoretical paradigms, the Fabulachia study seeks to give voice to black females in contemporary Appalachia, with attention to their self-proclaimed ‘ghetto fabulous’ identities honed in and through their urban upbringings. The unique experiences of (Fabulachian) black females are an important and largely absent part of larger conversations of the growing body of Urban education research that seeks to situate the black student/black youth and schooling experience in the US. In the Fabulachia study, a group of black female students shared personal narratives (part-oral history and part direct response) to prompts and queries about the role of hip hop culture, race and gender identity in their lives. They also discussed and debated what it means to be a black female in contemporary (often racist) Appalachia, and about how their families and urban surroundings influenced their processes of being and becoming in the context of higher educational achievement.     

Institutions,inculcation, and black racial identity: pigmentocracy vs. the rule of hypodescent

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures – a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis-à-vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.     

Making it relevant: how a black male teacher sustained professional relationships through culturally responsive discourse

What we know about the experiences of black teachers is limited, especially considering the vast amount of research conducted on and about black boys and young men. This article describes and analyzes how a black teacher at a suburban high school in the Midwestern United States negotiated professional relationships through culturally relevant discourse. Anthony Bell was the only black male teacher participating in a classroom discourse analysis study group at a diverse suburban high school. Throughout the course of the semester, Anthony’s stated objective for learning discourse analysis was to understand, structure, and facilitate more productive conversations with a struggling student teacher he was mentoring. Yet Anthony also used his discursive inquiry to “trouble the water” in his classroom and in the study group workshops. Participation in the study group provided Anthony with metalinguistic tools to critique his interactions with his students, student teacher, and professional peers. Anthony’s analyses of his own teaching, his student teacher’s work, the study group, and the school index themes in critical and critical race theory in education. As he became a teacher researcher, Anthony reported a greater sense of professional self-efficacy, eventually facilitating a successful workshop at a national teacher conference. Anthony’s case is an exemplar of the unique and critical role of black men who teach, as well as the imperative of practitioner research within the current climate in teacher education.     

The (racial) biases of communication: rethinking media and blackness

The media studies approach to race often examines blackness through depictions in music lyrics, movies, and videos. The vast majority of these studies posit that media may provide ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ depictions of blackness. Less examined is the importance of media environments to the structuring of racial relations in the United States. This article extends the contemporary literature on black media studies by taking a ‘medium theory’ approach to analyzing blackness. I argue medium theory aids studies of blackness by showing the ways in which the technologies we use transform the environments we inhabit in ways that further racialization processes beyond depictions of music lyrics or reality TV. To examine the interrelations between media environments and blackness, I offer a critical rereading of the Underground Railroad. I argue the Underground Railroad's success was related to the necessity of brilliant planning and a complex understanding by slaves and conductors of the essential overlapping of space- and time-biased media cultures. In short, the different understandings of media ensured that the slaves and slave catchers inhabited radically different yet interconnected worlds or galaxies, increasing the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves.     

Interrogating Mixed-Race: A Crisis of Ambiguity?

In many respects, issues surrounding ‘mixed-race’ identities rupture and dislocate much current thinking within post-race and new ethnicities paradigms. This article seeks to critically engage with what is arguably a marginalized and diverse ‘community’. An evaluation of theories emanating from the UK and USA seeks to challenge hybrid degenerative theories, and more recent attempts at explaining how such identities are negotiated in complex social arenas. What emerges is that some theories are underpinned by static and linear behavioural patterns, which appear oversimplified. Key questions are raised in order to further explore whether ‘mixed-race’ identities are genuinely marginalized and remain ambiguous in a range of physical, social, emotional and ideological contexts. Reflecting upon such issues seeks to prompt questions as to whether there can be a more sophisticated and sensitive understanding of the unique experiences (both positive and negative) of ‘mixed-race’ individuals. By doing so, it is hoped that such a topic becomes more central to considerations of how prejudice and discrimination operate across and within a wide variety of settings.     

An anti-deficit perspective on black male student athletes’ educational experiences at a historically black college/university

The purpose of this study was to identify key institutional characteristics and practices at a historically black college/university (HBCU) that contributed to positive educational experiences for black male student athletes. This mixed methods exploratory study involved the use of a 79-item Student Athlete College Experiences Questionnaire (SACEQ), three focus group interviews, and four individual interviews. Participants in this study included 57 black male football and men’s basketball student athletes at an HBCU in the southeastern US. Institutional theory and the anti-deficit achievement framework were incorporated to highlight effective institutional practices at an HBCU. Findings revealed the presence of a nurturing familial campus climate and purposefully designed institutional programs enhanced black male student athletes’ educational experiences. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.     

Tales from the playing field: black and minority ethnic students’ experiences of physical education teacher education

This article presents findings from recent research exploring black and minority ethnic (BME) students’ experiences of Physical Education teacher education (PETE) in England (Flintoff, 2008). Despite policy initiatives to increase the ethnic diversity of teacher education cohorts, BME students are under-represented in PETE, making up just 2.94% of the 2007/8 national cohort, the year in which this research was conducted. Drawing on in-depth interviews and questionnaires with 25 BME students in PETE, the study sought to contribute to our limited knowledge and understanding of racial and ethnic difference in PE, and to show how ‘race,’ ethnicity and gender are interwoven in individuals’ embodied, everyday experiences of learning how to teach. In the article, two narratives in the form of fictional stories are used to present the findings. I suggest that narratives can be useful for engaging with the experiences of those previously silenced or ignored within Physical Education (PE); they are also designed to provoke an emotional as well as an intellectual response in the reader. Given that teacher education is a place where we should be engaging students, emotionally and politically, to think deeply about teaching, education and social justice and their place within these, I suggest that such stories of difference might have a useful place within a critical PETE pedagogy.     

An exploratory study of the academic engagement and beliefs of Latino male high school students

This study provides insights to the school experiences of Latino male students through an exploration of how they describe their beliefs about education and how they engage in school for academic success. Data is drawn from interviews and surveys conducted with Latino males that participated in New York University’s Black and Latino Male School Intervention Study (BLMSIS) between 2006 and 2011. The findings revealed a dynamic interplay among how the students ‘do school’ (behavioral engagement), their intellectual involvement (cognitive engagement), and their strong beliefs in the education for social mobility shaped schooling for them. This focus on the experiences of young Latino males seeks to assist researchers, policymakers, and practitioners alike design and implement programs and policies to promote their educational progress and success.     

The precarious path of student migrants: education,debt, and transnational migration among Indian youth

The drive to internationalise campuses is an important dimension of the globalised neoliberal university, and it is leading to large numbers of students crossing national borders to pursue their education. As key global consumers of higher education, middle-class students from India migrating overseas to study are at the centre of this trend. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted at a public university in New York, this article considers how notions of obligation become critical to these students’ movements, their practices of place-making, and their futures. I use the term educational debts to capture the different forms of indebtedness that not only structure these young people’s educational migration, but also inform the sensibility shaping their negotiations of everyday life as overseas students. Attending specifically to their experiences with work, both the part-time labour they provide on campus and their search for work after they receive their degrees, I argue that educational debts position them precariously in the linkages between global education and labour markets. Elucidating how particular experiences of precarity are produced through the process of educational migration, this article offers insights into the differences that exist among the transnational class formations of Indian high-skilled migrant populations in the neoliberal era.     

In hindsight and now again: black male teachers’ recollections on the suffering of black male youth in US public schools

This article draws from data in a larger qualitative study on the lives of black male teachers in US public urban schools. I examine their schooling experiences as black male youth. By coupling theories of social suffering with life history methodology, this research analyzes how three black male teachers experienced frustration, marginalization, and misery as students. For these participants, academic tracking was a site of social suffering. This suffering persisted into their adult lives as classroom teachers, as they witnessed and attempted to mitigate the struggles of their own black male students. The findings in this study have implications for further research on black male teachers as well as their recruitment and retention in US public schools.     

Using our voices,losing our bodies: Michael Brown,Trayvon Martin,and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy

Abstract

The recent deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other Black males have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black communities and spirited academic discourses in higher education regarding the educational and social plight of Black males in America. Connecting the deaths of Black males to our lived experiences in the academy, we use a text messaging performative writing style to demonstrate how Black males are not only gunned down in the streets of America by police but also are metaphorically gunned down in the academy. That is to say, white colleagues and students attempt to use what we call the bullet of rejection, the bullet of silencing, and the bullet of disrespect to destroy us and our academic agenda. We conclude with a call to action for teacher education programs as a way to deepen their understanding of the racialized experiences of Black males in the academy and Black males in America.     

Thank you Jah Jah fe give me this a colour: Yellowman's revalorization of the dundus

In 1982, Winston ‘Yellowman’ Foster rose to prominence as Jamaica's king of dancehall reggae and popularized the music genre internationally in the wake of Bob Marley's death. As a dundus, or black person with albinism, Yellowman challenged colonial-derived Jamaican social codes that questioned his blackness and masculinity. By using white society's stereotypes of black hypersexuality and symbols of blackness derived from Rastafari and its ideological forebears, Yellowman was able to transform the dundus identity by portraying himself as African, black, and included in what Carnegie in ‘The Dundus and the Nation’ (1996) calls the imaginary racially homogeneous (i.e. black) Jamaican nation. Furthermore, through his performance of slack or sexually themed songs Yellowman contested embedded cultural definitions of the dundus as impotent and instead successfully represented the body with albinism as the sexually desirable ‘modern body.’ This paper uses interpretive methodologies from interrelated fields such as cultural studies, religious studies and anthropology in recognition that the context of Yellowman's racial critique is found not only in his songs but in his life story as well. Therefore it draws on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis of song lyrics and a study of the discourse on Yellowman in the popular and scholarly literature.     

The Color of Debt: An Examination of Social Networks,Sanctions, and Child Support Enforcement Policy

This article is based on face-to-face interviews with 20 randomly selected fathers of black and white children receiving temporary assistance for needy families benefits, followed, when possible, by an interview with the mother of one of the father’s children in Dane County, Wisconsin. The primary purpose of this research was to explore the sample’s level of knowledge about child support enforcement program policy. The informants shared information on their knowledge of child support enforcement program policy and procedures, but also their access or lack of access to social networks for employment to pay their child support order, and experiences with various imposed sanctions for non-payment of their child support order. The data provided an opportunity to conduct comparisons across and within races on their experiences with the child support enforcement program. Results from an analysis of the qualitative data provided an insight into their “lived” experiences with law enforcement by race when their child support was in arrears. In addition, quantitative data obtained from the Wisconsin kids information data system administrative records highlighted the stark racial differences in fathers’ annual (UI) earnings and debt owed in child support to the state and the mother of their child (ren). Further analysis highlights the limited social networks for referrals to employment among black noncustodial fathers and the accumulated debt of child support for black men, which hampers their ability to maintain a minimal level of economic security.     

‘I’m a different kind of biracial’: how black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race

Increasingly, multiracial families have garnered scholarly attention. However, the roles of ethnicity and immigrant ties are largely absent in bi/multiracial studies. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with black/white biracial Americans with at least one immigrant parent, this study analyzes the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, and immigrant roots in the bi/multiracial community. Our findings show that participants struggle to articulate the meaning of race, and they assert specific racial/ethnic identities to circumvent stereotypical connotations of whiteness and blackness. We highlight how biracial Americans with immigrant ties – those who we might assume would have a limited understanding of race – voice clear understandings of racial superiority and inferiority, racial relations, and racial stereotypes. Emphasizing their ethnic roots is not only an attempt to accurately describe their ancestry; it also allows them to avoid the social consequences (i.e. stereotypes, discrimination, etc.) of being (half) white or (half) black.     

Race still matters: preparing culturally relevant teachers

This qualitative study explores racial identity development of teacher candidates during a teacher preparation program dedicated to preparing teachers for diverse classrooms. Two black teacher candidates in the US demonstrate their racial identity development through critical reflections offered throughout the program. Findings suggest that teachers’ racial identities shaped their constructions of culturally relevant (CR) pedagogy. Implications for teacher education programs include considering how the development of CR pedagogues is influenced by teacher candidates’ racial identities and experiences.     

Young,Black, and (Still) in the Red: Parental Wealth,Race, and Student Loan Debt

Taking out student loans to assist with the costs of postsecondary schooling in the US has become the norm in recent decades. The debt burden young adults acquire during the higher education process, however, is increasingly stratified with black young adults holding greater debt burden than whites. Using data from the NLSY 1997 cohort, we examine racial differences in student loan debt acquisition and parental net wealth as a predictor contributing to this growing divide. We have four main results. First, confirming prior research, black young adults have substantially more debt than their white counterparts. Second, we find that this difference is partially explained by differences in wealth, family background, postsecondary educational differences, and family contributions to college. Third, young adults’ net worth explain a portion of the black–white disparity in debt, suggesting that both differences in accumulation of debt and ability to repay debt in young adulthood explain racial disparities in debt. Fourth, the black–white disparity in debt is greatest at the highest levels of parents’ net worth. Our findings show that while social and economic experiences can help explain racial disparities in debt, the situation is more precarious for black youth, who are not protected by their parents’ wealth. This suggests that the increasing costs of higher education and corresponding rise in student loan debt are creating a new form of stratification for recent cohorts of young adults, and that student loan debt may be a new mechanism by which racial economic disparities are inherited across generations.     

内地西藏班(校)藏族学生跨文化社会化的实证分析

内地西藏班(校)教育是我国民族教育史上的一项开创性举措,西藏的藏族学生在内地求学期间,其跨文化的成长经历对藏民族的现代化具有特殊意义.文章从藏族学生在内地这一跨文化环境下完成社会化过程最重要的家庭、同龄群体、学校这三个社会化主体的特殊性,分析了其预期社会化过程,并以藏族学生的自我意识为主要评价指标,得出其跨文化社会化的结果.     

Becoming a black Jew: cultural racism and anti‐racism in contemporary Israel

Many scholars consider ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’ to be among the most important means for cultural minority groups to challenge a discriminatory reality. Others caution that these processes might result in the polarisation of differences, potentially fuelling hatred, harsh conflict, exclusion and even violence. The tension between these two views is presented in this article through an examination of the way young Ethiopian Jews whose parents immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s have developed their own particular identity precisely in the course of and as a result of the encounter with Israeli society and its mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and control. The state declared a policy of assimilation, but in practice relegated the new arrivals to a status of inferiority and marginality. As a result, young Ethiopian Jews reconstructed a new, complex and hybrid Israeli identity, in which blackness is one important element. This unique identity is presented in the paper as a crucial response by the youths to a discriminatory reality of cultural racism. However, the essay also raises doubts concerning their success in minimising their subjugation and in ‘de‐racialising’ Israel.     

Trayvon Martin and the curriculum of tragedy: critical race lessons for education

In what ways do the tragedies centered on the lives of black youth, particularly black male youth, inform teachers, education policymakers, and teacher educators about what knowledge is most worth knowing? In this counter/story, we will examine the details of the life and death of Trayvon Martin. From these details, we will extract and interpret a curriculum of tragedy that draws from Derrick Bell’s particular contributions to critical race theory (CRT) applies its central tenets. This article will conclude with lesson for black education for teachers, education policymakers and teacher educators.