>Some names appear obvious in their ethnicity (as most are in
>gender). Some are suggestive. (DRR has mentioned California. In
>Hawaii, South America and north west Australia there are also
>indigenous and "white" people with Japanese names.) Others are not
>even suggestive.
Those who have one or more remote ancestors but look white or Black or indigenous through generations of inter-marriages, almost without an exception, fail to keep their Japanese names (certainly not both the first names and family names) and seldom identify themselves as Japanese-Americans, as being Japanese-American has not been governed by the one-drop rule that has shaped Blackness in America for a long time.
The point that I was making, though, was that white folks tend to believe that, even while they take note of others' racial/ethnic identities, their being white is invisible to people of color, so they tend to get upset if people of color mention it.
>I dispute that anything I've said suggests anything specific about
>my biological race.
Race isn't biological -- it's social identification, i.e. how the history of social relations within and among nations has created categories, into one or more of which others put you and with one or more of which you may deeply or shallowly identify.
To take just one example, I think that it's mostly a white thing to see the act of making whiteness visible as an act of "race-baiting." Exceptions exist -- for instance, there are some Blacks, Asians, and others -- mostly richer and more conservative than others of their races -- who feel the same way about race as most whites; and there are a number of whites who politically try to learn and identify with the ways of seeing the world through the lenses of Black and other experiences. But patterns do exist -- enough to make it possible for social scientists to identify and explain them, electoral campaign experts to exploit them for left-wing or right-wing purposes, etc. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>