Hapa

Categorization of Race

People of multiracial Asian descent have a long history in the United States. But their existence is often grouped within Asian American history and sidelined in discussions of race category and multiracial identity within the United States. In contrast to a long, explicit history on the part of the American legal institution to clarify and reinforce the boundaries of whiteness and blackness via naming and category—including the “one-drop rule” and the terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon—official state discourse has either evaded or had difficulty naming people of multiracial Asian descent outright (with the notable exception of “Amerasian,” explained below). This is not to say that there has not been state legislation against interracial mixing with Asians in the United States. All western states in the United States except Washington and Colorado had antimiscegenation laws that prohibited marriage to Asian people, and the 1907 Expatriation Act and 1922 Cable Act forced any woman who was a U.S. citizen to give up her citizenship upon marriage to any “alien,” a term that applied to almost all Asians in the United States at the time. State antimiscegenation laws were reversed [Page 1019]on a piecemeal basis in the mid-20th century and nationally by the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision in 1967.

A Difficult History of Naming

People of multiracial Asian descent have been the object of various labels that come from a plethora of cultural sources, almost all of which have had derogatory connotations at any given time. The term Eurasian, originating in the context of British colonialism, has a history of association with colonial power structures as well as tragic or villainous literary figures, and encompasses only white and Asian multiracial identity. The blanket terms half-breed and half-caste are considered offensive, while “halfie” or haafu carry the connotation of being less than whole. The Vietnamese term bui doi (dust of life, or children of dust) as well as the Korean term honyol have derogatory in-group connotations and associations with the U.S. imperial presence in those countries.

...