Every human born becomes a member of ir^(hr-1) races -- in which
ir = imaginary races -- all the races a person thinks he or she is, and
hr = human races = 1 -- the number of human races.
By William Wetherall
Racialist countries have laws that classify people according to one or another official "race" -- usually for the purpose of treating people of one putative race differently from those of other races. The United States was such a country until fairly recently -- and is still, today, a "race box" state in which "race" matters in law and politics.
Even in countries with raceless laws, like Japan, most people socially view themselves and others "racially" -- and such racialism can result in discriminatory behavior. And in Japan, like the United States and most countries, people speak of being "half" this or "a quarter" or "an eighth" that -- and "mixed" are common and controversial.
Everywhere in the world, there are discussions of whether children of "mixed" or "interracial" marriages are "half" one parent and "half" the other parent -- or whether they are "whole" as humans or "double" in terms of parental "heritage" or "culture". Never mind that the parents themselves could be "mixed" in various ways that may or may not be reflected as "heritage" or "culture".
Nibun-no-ni
In Tokyo, on 19 September 2009, there is an event called "Nibun-no-ni" -- meaning "2/2". The two halves reduce to one. This is progress -- but only to a point.
The event features two speakers. One is described as "a kuota ('quarter American') and transgender" writer. The other is called "a fellow hafu with British and Japanese lineage". The last time I read my elementary school primer on fractions, 1/4 was only half of 1/2 -- though they could be said to share a certain fellowship as ratios.
The Japanese words are actually "haafu" and "kuootaa" -- and, strictly speaking, they describe quanta of putatively "non-Japanese blood" in which "Japanese" is taken to be a standard of purity. "Hachibun no ichi" means "one-eighth".
Sounds familiar.
Infinite series
Mathematically, "half" and "quarter" and "one-eighth" and "one-sixteenth" are evaluations of 2^-g at g=1, g=2, g=3, and g=4 -- where "g" is a person's generational distance from the g=0 progenitor of impure genes. The progenitor of impurity is a "full" (2^-0 = 1) alien, and a child of a "full Japanese" and the alien is one generation removed from the alien -- hence "half" (2^-1 = 1/2). The Japanese progression is comparable with mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and quintroon (hexadecaroon = 1/16) in English measures of "black" impurity in "white" blood.
Akihito -- Japan's present "emperor" -- is not pure by Yamatoist standards of purity. As he himself publicly stated in 2001, the mother of Emperor Kanmu (r. 781-806) was a descendant of Prince Sunta, a son of the Paekche King Muryong (501-523).
Many people had migrated from the Korean peninsula and amalgamated with the mainstream -- as did all manner of non-Yamato people already in early Japan. So Akihito's veins undoubtedly contain several kinds of blood, all of them red.
Even if his lineal descendants were able to find and marry only "pure Japanese", it would take an infinite number of generations for the imperial family gene pool to purify. But there is not a single "pure Japanese" on the islands.
All Japanese are to some degree blends of the people who -- over the millennia, centuries, and decades -- have migrated from various parts of the world to what is today Japan. "Culturally", too, Japan is "homogeneous" only if one ignores regional, communal, familial, and personal variations.
"Hafu Japanese"
The "Nibun-no-ni" event is organized by the same people behind the "Hafu Japanese" project -- a photographic and social "exploration" of "hafu or half Japanese". Check out their website, in English or Japanese, at www.hafujapanese.org. It is full of things to ponder.
The website does not equate "mixed heritage" with "mixed race" -- but the visuals suggest that "race" is perhaps the "defining" part of its "race, culture and nationality" concern. "Heritage" -- like "culture" and "nationality" in the minds of some people -- is a slippery word that is very fashionably used today with nuances of "race" and "racioethnicity".
The idea of "'nibun-no-ni' (2/2)" is, however, a good start toward achieving the goal expressed by one of the "Hafu Japanese" project organizers. According to a 28 February 2009 review of the project in The Japan Times -- titled "'Hafu' focuses on whole individual" -- the project is predicated on "the need to discuss and analyze it [the word "hafu"] as a classification before it can be removed from society."
I wonder about this -- because social history teaches that, in the process of classifying anything for publicity or research purposes, labels tend to spread and gather momentum. The momentum of an object increases if either its mass or velocity increases. Changing the direction of movement requires force. Stopping or reversing the spread of a label requires as much or more force than was expended to create and apply it.
Racial labels have the habit of becoming indelible and multiplying. The momentous continuation and proliferation of legally-mandated "race boxes" in the United States is a case in point. Japan has no race boxes, but labels abound. "Zainichi" -- of fairly recent invention -- is increasingly used in mass media and academia as a racioethnic epithet for anyone in Japan who claims to have -- or is thought to have -- a drop of "Korean" blood.
Bipolarism
One reason I demur at "2/2" is because it implies "1/2 + 1/2" -- which implies a "mixture" of "one half" of each of "two worlds". Despite the "multi-" this and "multi-" that rhetoric which crops up in discussions of "haafu" -- and of "hapa", a popular tag in the United States for "multiracial Asian Americans" -- the "two-halves=one" formula reinforces the stereotype that offspring of racially or otherwise "mixed" unions are somehow bipolar.
Both my mother and father were products of "multiple worlds" -- yet I, as their offspring, had to contend more with their distinct, different, and complex personalities than with their multiple, and equally complex, familial and social heritages. My father and mother are both called "white" on my San Francisco birth certificate. Maybe they were. Who knows. Certainly I had nothing to do with it. I don't believe they did either.
n imaginary races to the zero power
"In-ichi ga ichi" in Japanese -- which mean "1x1=1" -- might be a truer statement, since the product of one parent's whole gene pool and another parent's whole gene pool is one child -- leaving aside identical and fraternal twins and other multiple births.
Yet 1x1=1 -- though not as elegant in its simplicity as 2/2 -- shares with 2/2 the flaw that it does not accommodate the freedom all individuals should have to "identify" in any manner they like. Both formulae work fine for nondescript mongrels like myself -- who constitute the vast majority of the population in any country you name, including Japan -- and for self-styled bipolar mixtures. But people like Tiger Woods -- who once called himself "Cablinasian", a portmanteau of caucasian, black, american indian, and asian -- might like to arrive at the conclusion that they are at once both "one" and "whole" through a different formulation.
Hence I prefer to compute raciality as the value of n imaginary races to the zero power or n^0. No matter how many races or ethnicities or cultures or heritages or nationalities an individual might choose -- or not -- to string out, ad infinitum, with or without hyphens -- this equation will always evaluate as exactly one. No more, no less. For no individual can be more or less than one human being -- leaving aside those with multiple or fractional personalities.
In any event, "mixture" is a fundamentally shared quality of being human. Anyone who claims not to be a mixture of various human ingredients is delusional.
18 September 2009
