Racist love or physical preference? Interracial Marriage and the Legacy of Colonialization

Interracial Marriage and the Legacy of Colonialization
By Kumiko Nemoto

Excerpted from "Race Still Matters:Popular Discourse of Interracial Marriage and Asian American Experiences"
2003

While both Asian American men and women I interviewed reported encounters with racism in various situations, the Asian American men and white women I interviewed seem to be exposed to more negative sanctions from whites than the Asian American women and white men. Sothy and Emily have not talked with Emily’s father in more than fifteen years. Kevin and Karen reported hostile reactions toward them in public.

Tracy Tanaka, a twenty-nine year old waitress, has been married to Kenji Tanaka, a Japanese American musician, for a year. She reported various negative “judgments” from her friends and neighbors on her choice of husband. Tracy’s close friends asked her several unexpected questions that imply stereotypes of Asian American men, such as if “he had a bad temper and drank too much.” Tracy and Kenji also have a white neighbor, who, according to Tracy, “wouldn’t speak to us because we are an interracial couple. He wouldn’t even say ‘hi’. He wouldn’t even stare at us,” even though they “see each other all the time” and “we say ‘hi’ and ‘good morning’.” The owner of Tracy’s apartment complex “rented it to me and Kenji because I was white.” But, “he wouldn’t rent to two Asian men” who worked at the same restaurant in which she worked. Tracy worked at Japanese restaurant briefly, where, she describes, she is the only white waitress and “white men come to pick up Asian women.” As a result, Tracy says, Asian/Asian American women who work there tend to “only see the bad side of white people” who sexualize and commodify Asian/ Asian American women. As a result, these Asian American women viewed Tracy as similar to the white men. One Korean American waitress even sarcastically commented on Tracy’s marriage as “some kind of Asian fetish,” asking her “what her problem is.”

Among the white men and Asian American women couples I interviewed, no white man experienced family disownment, and none of the white men reported explicit public discrimination against them. One white man reported that his white male friends sometimes tease him about his preference for Asian women. Bryan Thompson, a twenty- five year-old law student, said his white male friends always “have teased” him about his having Asian American girlfriends and that has made him uncomfortable. But this “teasing” from his peer group is not the same as the negative sanctions that Emily and Sothy, Tracy and Kenji, and Karen and Kevin experienced as “rejection” and “punishment.”

Law always prepares the shift of our perception of race. The War Bride Act of 1946 allowed an exception to anti-miscegenation laws, and about 150,000 Asian American war brides entered the U.S. between 1947 and 1975 (Saenz etal., 1994). It is not difficult to think that this gender-skewed law must have contributed to more public acceptance of Asian American women as “wives” of American men. George Green, a 66-year-old former military serviceman who stayed in Japan, married Sachiko, a 66-year- old Japanese American, in 1956, a decade after the War Bride Act began admitting interracial marriages between American servicemen and their foreign wives. George reported that the military was still strongly discouraging U.S. servicemen’s marriages with Japanese women and that the background check they performed took two years, before he was finally able to bring his bride to the U.S. Sachiko’s father, like other Japanese, had strong anti-U.S. sentiments in the post-WWII era, and disowned her. However, Sachiko says that since she came to the U.S., she has not experienced any explicit racial animosity toward her and her husband.

The difference between the perception of Asian American men with white [women] and Asian American women with white men has a strong link with the hegemonic status of white males. How has this hegemonic discourse governed and legitimized interracial relationships, and how does this produce the ideal subject in terms of gender, race, nation, and citizenship?

In addition to the exceptional treatment of Asian American wives of U.S. servicemen during the period of anti-miscegenation, I believe that historically circulated stereotypes of Asian American women as overly feminine and Asian American men as emasculated produce more social anxiety toward white women and Asian American men as couples, rather than white men and Asian American women as couples. But what ultimately legitimizes this gender difference is the racially and nationally privileged position of white males as an ideal subject, authority, and citizen of this nation. The ideal discourse of interracial marriage has been governed under the discourse of who can and cannot be an ideal “citizen,” which is always gendered as ideally feminine and masculine.

The discourse of the American dream is perfectly explained by the gendered narrative of interracial marriage. Dearborn (1993) argues that intermarriage between white men and racial/ethnic minority women narrates romantic love as part of these women’s liberalization, success, and achievement of the American dream. For these women, she writes, “the commodification of romantic love was a powerfully influential factor in the Americanization of the immigrant woman, who was herself commodified on the marriage market.” As Berlant points out (1996, p. 414) this discourse of intermarriage does not fully differentiate “ethnic,” “immigrant,” “alien,” “minority,” and “illegal,” and in fact naturalizes the chain of these categories as “racial others” to concern and at the same time to be protected for their access to freedom and democracy. But, interestingly, this discourse of intermarriage, through which ideal citizenship and self- realization is granted, is extremely gendered, and minority and immigrant women tend to be targeted as the object of protection, rescue, and also as an exotic commodity. Men of color are excluded from this discourse. Spivak says this gap creates an “‘envy’ of the colonized male” (1999, p. 291) toward the colonized female.

Spivak (1991, p. 291) argues that it is the logic of imperialism and globalization that wants “the establishment of the good society,” which is “marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind” (1999, p. 291). She claims that one should examine “the dissimulation of patriarchal strategy” that rescues these women and grants them free choice as subjects (1999, p. 291). Berlant calls this narrative, which values immigrant women “for having the courage to grasp freedom,” as “the utopian rhetoric of national love anon” that feeds America’s national vanity and serves as critical reassurance of America’s moral practice of freedom and democracy (p. 413).

The hegemonic discourse of white men’s authority as the most privileged has a strong link to the national discourse about who governs the world, nation, and the family. The fear and anxiety over immigrants and racial minorities are masked by the democratic narrative of the protection and liberation of immigrant “women,” who can find their subjectivity by submitting themselves to white hegemonic masculinity. This discourse completely effaces the figure of the privileged master who exerts power, and it covers the fact that it is this authority that needs to change its own logic of domination. Furthermore, Asian American women are seen by white men as a desirable commodity in the global sexual market (Kelsky, 2001). The high value of exotic femininity in a global market of sexual economy enables both first and second-generation Asian American women to exercise their sexual agency within this patriarchal narrative of the “good society”. In this market, these women are coded as a “privileged signifier, as object and mediator; as she is, in the market, the favored agent-as-instrument of transnational capital’s globalizing reach” (Spivak 1999, p. 200). Spivak writes that class privilege also provides “subject-position” even to the colonized as “the privileged inhabitant.” Second-generation Asian American women, who possess larger class privileges than the first generation Asian American women, can more easily utilize this “privileged” position as exotic commodity to be possessed by the colonizer.

It seems that this combination of Asian American women as exotic commodity and the discourse of patriarchal protection of “immigrant,” “alien,” “minority,” and “illegal,” for the sake of democracy and freedom have prepared the ground for the positive reception of Asian American women and white men. This combination reduces public anxiety toward these couples, especially in contrast to Asian American men and white women couples.