Yongho Kim

Category: race

  • Making connections with the audience: professionalism and alienation

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    May 10, 2004. (due May 7th – three days late )

    Making connections with the audience: professionalism and alienation

    In reflecting on the production of “Forgotten”, I want to focus on the difference between the performance at the Union Hall and the one at Macalester in the level of connections it allowed student performers to make with the audience during the show itself.

    The Union Hall was not meant to be used as a performance space – it had a podium dedicated to lectures and some backstage space. Bob arranged it so that the main actors would hide behind the backstage space when they were not performing, but the worker’s chorus had to stay in the back of the hall, visible to the audience. In between scenes, and in the majority of scenes where the worker’s chorus was not present, we (the worker’s chorus) could stand in the back and listen to peoples’ reactions – laughter, exclamations, suspense, etc.

    Having not had the time to stay and chat with audiences, this was a medium through which I could connect with the audience. They laughed when the foreman said “It’s in the corner where no one else ever goes”, they were focused and silent during the introduction of “The Ford Hunger March”. I also had a chance to confirm feelings I had towards situations – a bitter taste for Lewis not listening to his wife, for example – by finding reactions or the lack of them in the audience. In the same vein, not having a proper lightning set helped view the expressions in the faces of the people present there.

    On the other hand, Macalester’s concert hall was conceived from the beginning as a performance space. There were doors that closed well (the Union Hall’s backstage was not an enclosed space, but just a wall separating the hall from the back stage) at the stage and a separate entrance hallway outside of the concert hall, which was where the students waited. Behind the thick walls, we could only follow the general melody in order to know when to enter. The intense spotlight also prevented us from seeing the audience.

    This contributed to separating the student performers from the performance experience. Although a stretch, I parallel this to a general pattern where technical professionalism matches an increased distance between artist and audience as in Rose’s account of western music isolating the musician through sheet music. As Pete Seeger’s effort to incorporate the audience in the singing was a way to break through his contradictions between the message portrayed and his own life (Filene 196), directions to the opposite pole seem to alienate the performers.

    As a side note, I would like to point out that our Thursday concert was the second time I had listened to the lyrics for the whole show attentively and could figure out what the whole story was about.

    As a result, in the brief moments that I exchanged brief commentaries with audiences after the show, I felt there were more shared emotional links in the Union Hall, not because it was a working class space, but because it was less professional and allowed for informal human expressions such as laughter to transmit both sides.

  • imagined conversation between Benjamin Filene and Ruth Glasser on "authenticity"

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    May 10, 2004 (due April 15 – 3 weeks late)

    [DJ plays “We shall not be moved” by the Almanac Singers]

    Glasser: I like how the band uses the banjo, which gives it a more folk feel. Were the instruments made in the east coast before being sold to the singers? (G 18)

    Filene: I think you are right in that it was made in the east coast through the producers.. but I look more into the intention of the singer behind using “traditional” instruments. Pete Seeger was always torn between wanting to speak out for the working class and only being able to do so through a commercial distribution process. He faced the contradiction and expressed it overtly. (F 201)

    G: Did he? Still, that sounds a bit hypocritical – if you do not come from a middle class background, why would you pretend to sound like one, and then “apologize” for doing it? Pete should have worked along with singers from true working class background – those who worked partly in music and were dedicated in daytime to mining and other working-class jobs. (G 93)

    F: It can’t be that easy… he had to negotiate with the industry in order to be heard – we could most likely not be able to discuss his music had Pete not gone commercial. (F 203)

    G: Maybe.. what about the lyrics, though? What does he mean by “we” in “we shall not be moved”, “the union is behind us”, and “we’re black and white together”, when the Almanac Singers does not come from a working class background, is not really related to the union, nor is racially diverse? Puerto Ricans bought the discs made by Puerto Ricans about Puerto Rico, not because they expected people to imitate their accents and present a self-image intended to represent them, but because they knew that these were their brothers and sisters telling their stories. (G 124) Why cannot we expect a similar background for American “folk” singers?

    [Music shifts to “Casey Jones”]

    F: With folk musicians it’s a bit of a different story – people needed to work together for common causes. Civil rights activists, for example, didn’t mind a white guy singing the struggle of African-Americans – we could say that they didn’t expect him to represent the cause, but rather to draw middle class, white sympathizers to be able to identify with the movement. (F 201) The story of Casey Jones, for example, is a case in point. Pete also brought the folk music back to the folk with his sing-alongs. (F 195)

    G: That sounds more like a transitional way of negotiating the limitations of the music industry. Shouldn’t Pete’s goal to change the fact that singers cannot reach audiences unless they are abiding by commercial demand?

    Kim: Ruth! Hello! What are you people talking about? I heard you mention Pete Seeger.

    G: It’s that Ben annoys me because he says that all musicians face contradictions by their involvement with commercialized music industry and that Pete did what he could – highlighting the limitations of folk music, without really trying to do anything about it.

    K: Oh, you should check Tricia Rose! I guess you read her.. doesn’t she say in Black Noise that hip hop’s relationship with the commodity market does not necessarily mean that hip hop is being absorbed by the system, but rather an appropriation of the conditions of production. (Rose 40). Take women graffiti writers, for example – they use colors and shapes set by society (pink color, landscapes) but not as a way of reinforcing preconceived notions, but in order to gain visibility in an area often known as male-dominated (R 44). Rappers also encourage audience participation (R 54), which is not the focus but could be seen as a continuation of Pete.

    F: Thanks for the help, Yongho. Indeed, singers to subvert commercial structures – for instance, Lead Belly sued the Lomaxes, his former [scrip] employer, for the control of revenues produces from his concerts. (F 62) It’s just that during Pete’s times the industry was very complex.

    [Yongho plugs “The Message” with Dr. Dre]

    G: But it’s still not authentic – granted, judging authenticity by merely the country the artist is from is quite silly (G 155) But what if a white, suburban, middle-class singer claims a share of black hip hop identity while hiding his backgrounds?

    F: Dylan would be a good example. He concealed his background but his songs were consciousness-raising in a number of ways.

    G: No. You don’t just justify racial masquerading by saying that the singer was trying to face contradictions in a creative way, in the same way you would do it along class lines.

    Y: [silence] I think it’s about how we’re locating the artist within society – is the artist going to merely become part of the music industry, or is the artist conceive as an active agent working with the given tools and environment? (R 63) That’s how we could see some hope for the working class people who have to deal with societal structures of exploitation on a daily basis.

  • Coalition-making in The Fuse’s Seattle 1919

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    February 25, 2004

    Coalition-making in The Fuse’s Seattle 1919: Class Solidarity and Divisiveness, and Incorporation of the Other in post-World War I Unionism.

    Seattle 1919 addresses issues of class solidarity frequently present in the newly emerging U.S. unionism and attempts to unite workers from different race, gender, and skill groups under a common struggle against the capitalist classes. Babson defines solidarity as that which “defined an injury to any one worker as an injury to all workers” (Babson, 9). In practice, this amounted to workers striking in sympathy for a strike held by workers from another industry brought together by geographical links (such as the different unions in the Seattle 1919 strike) or by relationships in their modes of production (such as the Pullman 1894 strike, in which railroad workers joined train operators’ strike). Indeed, the Seattle 1919 strike appears to have been a major show of class solidarity in the inter wars period; was this the reason that it was picked as the title for The Fuse’s rock opera – because the songs focused in class solidarity and Seattle 1919 was its symbol?

    A major point of contention between workers (particularly the skilled) and the factory owner class in early 20th century was scientific management and the scrip system (Zinn, 9). Scientific management, a system of production introduced by Taylor in which workers were to perform minimum tasks on pieces carried on a line (Babson, 27), involved a decrease at the cost of production and the de-skilling of workers, which threatened to end with the relative autonomy enjoyed by skilled craftsmen. (Babson, 29)

    Class solidarity was a problematic concept in early U.S. unionism, especially when applied over marginalized minorities among the working class. White workers would often not accept African-American authorities, although they would appeal to class solidarity in times of hardship. (Arnesen, 80)

    In “Street Speech”, a rhetoric that seems to have been transplanted from that of freedom for slaves is used to advocate the right for workers to be free from the scrip system. The singer says, “brick by brick / nail by nail / we built the mansions / and we built the jails”, pointing out that the power to bring about both opulence of the upper class and oppression on the worker class lies within the worker class. At the same time, it is suggested that the struggle of the working class is akin to that of the African-American peoples because both are directed against a group that owns the means of production. The song goes on: “We don’t want them / we don’t need them / these parasites who live off someone else!”. Thus “Street Speech” is a coalitional effort to incorporate African-Americans to the organizing effort, while at the same time it is meant to rouse feelings of class solidarity from white union workers towards African-Americans who, driven by poverty, often acted as strikebreakers (Babson, 48), triggering racial lynching from union members.

    Unskilled workers were also often excluded in the support from skilled workers’ unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL). During World War I, unskilled workers’ unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were prosecuted by the government under the implicit consent of the AFL (Babson, 37). In Seattle’s 1919 strike, even though local AFL affiliates cooperated with each other on a radical path more on IWW’s lane, national AFL representatives dissented. (Brecher, 105) It is to note that the price of such non-cooperation only came back to the worker. In “Caught in the middle”, the singer laments: “I joined IWW for a principle / and the AF of L for a job / now I’m caught in the middle / don’t know which way to go”.

    The uneasiness between the AFL and IWW is also closely bound by the tensions around the newly introduced scientific management. Scientific management, introduced by Taylor, was encouraged to union workers to work in small, mechanical tasks that didn’t require a specific skill. This meant that whenever a strike broke among skilled craftsmen, managers could easily replace them with dozens of unskilled workers from the streets. (Babson, 28) This was the chief reason why AFL would not offer membership to industrial workers. (Babson, 32)

    Seattle 1919 uses strategies of incorporation by appealing to shared experiences as described above. It also points out a common struggle against the capitalist class as a reason to unite forces. The scarcity of solidarity among different minority groups is sometimes compensated by recognizing a common opposing force.

    One form of such approach is by weighing the capitalist’s power against powers traditionally held as authoritative. The singer expresses this in “One Step Further”, in which he sings “I don’t care about the government / I think Rockefeller owns the president”. The capitalist class is portrayed as am powerful force that flies above any controlling mechanism. The weariness of an opposing force that go beyond law is a compelling reason to join a struggle against it.

    A definitive split between AFL and IWW, and the eventual demise of the IWW while AFL grew under government protection, took place during World War I. On the one hand the demand for industrial output increased, while available labor was held steady because immigration routes were blocked. The government, worried that a general strike may disrupt the highly profitable war machinery exportations situation, created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) that mediated negotiations between corporations and unions in order to prevent strikes from erupting. AFL was highly cooperative in the process, alienating the draft-resisting IWW in the process. (Babson, 39) Seattle 1919 is critical of this relationship. “The Push” goes like this: “You say it’s for the war but I think it’s for the money”, which may be referring to the NWLB that is pleading for no strikes because it would damage the country but also to the AFL that claims to show its patriotic stance while receiving compensations in the form of organizing support. I think the song lines up with the IWW, which is evident in the anti-war stance of the lines “In the bloody trenches / where is law and order? / Dying for your country”

    Seattle 1919 is a call to class solidarity across skill and racial lines, because there is a common struggle against a common opposing force. Unfortunately, the brief one-month general strike in Seattle, which most closely resembled such close knit solidarity among the working class in the city, fell down because of fissures with external AFL pressuring and the government threat of turning the peaceful manifestation into a violent one.

  • Ejercicio Etnográfico: Consumo de la cultura latina popular en los EEUU

    Theorizing U.S. Latina/o Popular Culture.
    Prof. María Elena Cepeda
    Macalester College , Febrero 11, 2004
    Yongho Kim

    Ejercicio Etnográfico #1: Consumo de la cultura latina popular en los Estados Unidos

    Metodología: Mis preguntas podrían categorizarse en tres: Las dos primeras tenían el fin de aprender más de cerca la vida diaria de los entrevistados y su relación con la cultura popular (con énfasis en “tiempo libre”.); dos preguntas cuestionando el concepto de latinidad como unidad conceptual y una pregunta general, solicitando una opinión general sobre tendencias contemporáneas en el ámbito de la cultura popular. Entrevisté a tres personas en el Mercado Central – Gerardo, Mayo y María – todos empleados de una de las tiendas. Estaban en su jornada de trabajo pero creo que los encontré cuando el tráfico de clientes disminuía un poco (a eso de las 5 p.m.). Después entrevisté a mi colega de trabajo, Jane, en una ONG en Franklin y a una compañera – Maura – en la otra clase de Latino Studies. Las entrevistas se efectuaron con grabadora bajo permiso (a veces no muy explícito) de los entrevistados por 10-20 minutos. Las preguntas que terminé haciendo no siempre coinciden con el formato original, pero llevan más o menos ese ritmo, como podrá observar en el transcript.

    Don Gerardo es de Durango, México. Ve televisión en casa y escucha música en el trabajo o en el carro. En particular, ve Univisión y ENCL (¿es esto un canal o programa?) y escucha radio Rey. Recibe los canales vía disc. Escucha preferentemente bandas y corridos, como el Gutillo Rivera, Miguel Peña, Vicente Fernández, Tigres, que toquen música ranchera, y no otro. La música ranchera, según Don Gerardo, se distingue porque en la portada del CD dice que es ranchera. Cuando le dije que quería hacer preguntas sobre música latina, afirmó que música ranchera es a la vez latina. Dijo que los cantantes mexicanos y de Latinoamérica son todos latinos. Dijo haber visto un incremento de música latina en el mercado, y que eso es bueno para los artistas y para el mercado hispano.

    Don Mayo es de Durango, México. De vez en cuando sale a los moles hispanos o americanos con su familia o ve televisión mientras descanso o hace trabajos de casa. El domingo, vio los premios de la Furia Musical, en la que salieron premiados Vicente Fernández, la banda del Recodo, John Sebastián, a quienes ya conocía. Le gusta más la música de banda norteña, que necesita varios instrumentos. Dijo que la música de acá está en inglés y no le gusta porque no es de su tierra. Una tendencia en el mercado es que los grupos de Durango están sonando muy fuerte y han estado primeros en los billboards. La música de Durango comparten un estilo – en que se toca el tomborón, órgano, batería, saxofón y batería-, nacieron en Chicago con el grupo Montés de Durango por gente que era de Durango, y ahora hay varios grupos como Montevideo Durango, Patrulla 81, los Alacranes Musicales de Durango y los Imperiales de Durango. Todos llevan el nombre “de Durango” para identificarse. Tenía posters de los Imperiales, quienes tendrán un concierto. Estos días la música duranguense, el pasito duranguense, está volviendo a México.

    Ms. María es de Guajaca, México. No escucha música en el trabajo, pero los miércoles cuando está en casa, música latina, como Chayanne, Enrique Iglesias, música que es bailable, como merengue, cumbia, bachata. También escucha música en inglés como 50 cents, San Pol, y Eminem. La música latina es la que se cantan en español pero también debe ser por gente de méxico. De vez en cuando compra CD’s en el segundo piso. Con respecto a televisión, ve el canal TeveAzteca, #527 en la Dish Network, con programas como novelas, programas en que cuentan chistes, o casos de la vida real como por ejemplo “Lo que callamos las mujeres”. Dice que hoy en día los americanos compran y escuchan más la música latina, lo cual es bueno porque se está compartiendo mutuamente la música.

    Jane Doe es de Ohio. Ella no escucha mucha música en general, pero hoy había sintonizado el NPR y no había música en la programación, salvo comerciales. Últimamente ha visto películas en DVD, como Finding Nemo y Legally Blonde 2. Entonces le pregunté si podría pensar en cosas que hacía que pudiera reconocer como explícitamente latinas. Dijo que en el verano iba a fiestas de baile donde habían designated nights for latino en los bares, dance club y discos, y que también se mezclaba música latina en combinaciones estándar. Se sabe que son designated porque como tal se promocionan en los anuncios. La diferencia entre una designated y una non-designated sería que hay más latinos en una, y que por ende resultan en mejores bailes. Bailar mejor, dice ella, es moverse más y get into the music. Dijo que no ha visto una tendencia a que la música latina haya aumentado su influencia en el mercado.

    Maura es estudiante de Macalester, female, tiene 20 años, es white y está en segundo año. No tiene tanto tiempo libre, porque se dedica mucho a correr, pero de vez en cuando trata de ver cosas en la televisión o escuchar música que sea fácil, para despejarse un poco de las tareas. Por eso tiende a escuchar sound tracks, lo cual es música de fondo para videos de Disney – para poder cantarlo. También escucha Ani DiFranco, que es más algo estereotípico en los estudiantes universitarios. Dado que Ana escucha mucha música en español o que “se sienten latinos”, ella llega a escucharlos también, aunque no los conoce por el nombre. Dijo que en general no ve una tendencia en que lo latino esté aumentando en Estados Unidos, o al menos en Minnesota.

    Observaciones: pude ver que entre los más adultos, se escuchaba la música por ser del lugar de donde provenía uno, mientras que los más jóvenes escuchaban música por su practicalidad. También se daba que la palabra latinos era más familiar a los jóvenes. (O quizás las implicancias del término hispano les era más aparente, o quizás eran los vínculos comerciales que uno establece con la edad). Cuando les expliqué que esto era para una clase de Cultura Popular, todos excepto María y Maura sintieron que no conocían tanto de la “cultura” popular, pero con la entrevista resultaron ser excelentes informantes. No observé tanto el otherness del que habla Storey – ciertamente a todos les era claro de qué estabamos hablando cuando hablamos de televisión y radio. Lo interesante es que no tenemos un sentimiento de que esto sea una cultura “baja” (Storey 8) mientras hablamos de la radio y televisión, pero cuando decimos en general “Cultura Popular” la sensación era (al menos para mí) de alienación. Por otro lado, existía un fuerte sentido de oposiciones binarias como apunta Freccero, pero este concepción de anglo/latino (usé la palabra anglo, o “los de acá” para referenciar a la mayoría white de EEUU) fue en parte inducido por mis propias preguntas que buscaban una distinción del latino (implícitamente en contraste con el anglo)

    Preguntas Iniciales:
    1. ¿Qué haces en tu tiempo libre? Y si miras televisión, ¿qué canales o programas ves?
    2. ¿Escuchas música mientras estudias/trabajas? ¿Qué escuchas?
    3. ¿Qué aspectos de lo que haces en forma diaria lo consideras “latino”?
    4. ¿Hay elementos en tu vida diaria que son más latinos o menos latinos? ¿Cómo son así?
    5. ¿Cuál es tu perspectiva sobre los cambios que está experimentando la cultura popular en Estados Unidos, y cuál es tu opinión al respecto?

  • [Comment] Blues people: negro music in white america

    Yongho Kim
    Telling Labor’s Story through Music
    February 10, 2004

    Baraka points out in chapter 2 that West African music provided a baseline for the music sung by African-Americans who came to the United States through slavery. Two main tenets of these West African roots are the multilingualism of its lyrics and the narrow albeit continuous range in the melody (24). While traces of an unique West African melodic range is visible in the songs assigned, the heritage of multilingualism becomes slightly problematic.

    Baraka explains that West African harmonic system, from which the African-American one develops, unlike European harmonic system, does not follow a scale of tones and half-tones. For ears trained solely around classical/medieval European music, the melodic variations of a West African music may appear either chaotic or static. (The same should be true for the contrary. 25) This is because the West African melody moves subtly between the spaces that a European scale considers discrete. This feature seems prominent in songs that belong to the African-American musical tradition. (Consider, for instance, “O, Lord, I’m waitin’ on You” (CD9, 2) at the instance when te singer sings “Oh Lord” for the third time.)

    However, when Baraka’s assertion that Spanish, French, the different languages from West Africa, and Creole, mixed during the experience of slavery to create a multifaceted lyric for the African-American music, seems far stretched. It is true that in early slave work songs, such as “Ouendé, ouendé, macaya!” (21), mixed French and African portions. This split, Baraka goes on, served the purpose of hiding subversive ideologies from the masters. But in listening to early 19th century’s folk, blues, and spirituals, I find no such mixing. On the one hand, there is obviously no further need to hide messages. On the other hand, most of these words have been incorporated into (almost) everyday English. When I hear foreign-derived words in the songs assigned, I can feel no distinct foreign ethos such as those found in Latino speech which may mix Spanish words (which are distinguishably identifiable as “non-english” words) or any other language.

    I am not sure if this happens because of the long history of African-Americans in the US, or because of some preferential pattern in which the media portrays certain words as foreign/exotic whereas others become merely slangs. But in either case, I can argue that should many words in contemporary African-American/African-American derived lyrics originally come from other languages, it has reached a distinctive familiarity that sets it apart from other foreign-induced words.

  • Integration Paper on Race and Ethnicity

    Introduction to Sociology
    Professor Sharon Preves
    Due by December 9th
    Turned in by December 16th (7 days late)

    The U.S. banned the discrimination based on race, sex or ethnicity, through the Civil Rights Act, almost 40 years ago in 1964. However, more subtle, permeating forms of racism are prevalent in today’s U.S. society according to sociologists. Newman argues that to end racism it is necessary to recognize first the artificial nature of race as concept and then to differentiate between the various types of racism in society.

    The relativistic meaning of the word “Race”

    Various sociologists throughout the world have proven that the same color is recognized as different races in different societies. For instance, what in the U.S. might be classified as simply “black” can be divided up as “zambos” and “mulatos” in Chile. To group them together as “black” would make no sense since the term “negro” is reserved for a particular tone of black skin and facial shape. In England or Ireland, any skin color that is not white is considered black. And white in Ireland does not signify the skin color, but rather to be of Irish descent. These kinds of multifaceted terminology around the world prove that race is not a given biological fact.

    Recently, as people with markedly different facial and skin characteristics began marrying each other, to define race has become even more complicated. In the church I go to, the pastor has a Korean mother and a U.S. father – what race does he belong to? He has brown hair and non-epicanthic eyes, but his cheek bones and cranium shape belong to those of the Ural-Altaic people.

    Personal racism, stereotypes, and Prejudice

    Personal racism is manifested through individual contact of a person to another person, in such acts as threats, avoidance, or verbal or physical insult. The use of stereotypes gives an easy solution when justifying personal racism. Stereotyping involves exaggerating certain features in a given group of people from the same race and assuming that a particular feature applies to everybody. For example, since the Los Angeles riot in 1993, during which a large number of stores in the city were destroyed and ransacked by a mob which was, rumors say, mostly black, Korean communities in the west coast assume black people will be violent by nature. I had some uncles in Los Angeles, who kept saying that it was all very evident that black people are poor and hence prone to vandalism and violence. Common reactions are moving to the opposite side of the sidewalk when one sees a black person coming on the other side, or moving to another table (or getting out of the restaurant, to “protect the kids”) if large groups of black people enter a restaurant.

    Stereotypes are hard to break because both the agent and victim of stereotyping are active, not passive, agents of the process. Furthermore, proofs against stereotypes are often refuted with arguments that claim the proof to be an isolated exception, but that the majority of the population keeps being “violent” or “greedy” or “lazy”, etc. In this is the self-fulfilling prophecy theory again applied.
    As seen in an article of past chapters from Newman, victims of stereotyping actively use the stereotype to their purposes. Thus, a group of black kids in ghettos pretend to be more violent that what they are, just to keep people away from them.
    Newman presents the research of Steele, who obtained more biased results when he explicitly told his subjects -black students- that he was testing something related to their stereotyped image – something like intelligence, the students performed in accordance to their expected social stereotyped images. Thus, it seems like there is an unconscious component to the self-fulfilling prophecy in race, because the black students didn’t meant to score lower than when they were not told that it was about intelligence, but rather their societal selves reacted to the suggestion of Steele which reminded them of the pre-existing stereotypes.

    The ghost of “Race”

    On the other hand, it seems like “race” is not a concept that can be easily deconstructed just out of realizing that it was originally a social construct. In some communities, the whole identity of the group falls back on the idea of race. Koreans for example, pride themselves in being a mono-racial country [unlike China, Russia or the U.S., towards which they look down on because they’re “mixed”, and thus “less pure”] For example, the current presidential candidate representing a party that matches the Republicans in the U.S. politics, often recurs to the great mono-raciality of Korea when arguing for the need to defend national interests by increasing military funding.

    But even when “race” does not involve a sense of ethnic belonging, de-framing race seems a challenging task. Movements that counter the discrimination racial minorities suffer in the U.S., carry on the assumption that race exists, because if there was no race there could be no movement to protect a particular race. I wonder if the dilemma of Affirmative Action, which so far I understand is an attempt of the dominant race to purge itself of injustices of the past, is precisely the paradox of solidifying the notion that race exists, while at the same time combating the discrimination arising from the existence of race as a notion. This problem seems directly related to the fact that proponents of civil rights movements were opposed to the integration of the “multiracial” category in the U.S. census form (Mathews), because such blunder would not benefit the traditionally groups protected by such measurements.

    Newman points out that as people from different races mix, the distinguishing features across races are fading, and takes the optimistic prospect that a gradual fusion of races will end the problem of racial discrimination. I should agree with him, even though this idea is again brought from the Melting Pot theory, which happens to be a rhetoric of the dominant class in the U.S.