- Author: Kwon, Eunhye
- Title: The Mixed Marriage Policy and the Racial Construction of Mixed-Race Children in Mixed-Marriage Families and Japanese Adoptive Children in White Families during the World War I I internment of Japanese Americans
- Language: Korean
- Journal: History & Culture 24: 177-198
- Publication Year: 2012
- Publisher: The Korean Workshop For The History Of Culture
■ Abstract This essay examines the ways in which the race identity of Japanese orphans adopted by white parents was defined by the Western Defense Command’s mixed marriage and mixed blood individual policy during the internment of Japanese Americans, 1942-1945. At that time, the Western Defense Command ruled that “all persons of Japanese ancestry” must evacuate from the West Coast and be sent to internment camps. The mixed marriage policy, however, was devised to exempt some mixed-race children born to mixed marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese. The policy also exempted a full-blooded Japanese child adopted by white parents from evacuation orders. To be eligible for exemption, mixed-race children of part Japanese ancestry should have less than 50% of Japanese blood and be able to prove that their “environment” before the war had been “Caucasian.” This blood quantum rule was never applied to Japanese children adopted by white homes and it was assumed that such children were under the Caucasian environment of their white adoptive parents.
This essay argues that the mixed-marriage-policy exemption of full-blooded Japanese children raised by white adoptive parents from evacuation orders was not an aberration. It reveals that the mixed marriage policy did not―or could not―account for the lack of inconsistencies in measuring the Caucasian environment of mixed marriage families and adoptive families across racial lines between Japanese and white. The mixed marriage policy and its unaccountable inclusion of the Japanese children of white adoptive parents as sort of non-Japanese race category showed that race categories are elusive and arbitrary.
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