Popular wisdom suggests that we are in the midst of a transformation in the way race is constructed in the United States. Indeed, so strong and so inevitable is this shift said to be that longstanding racial dynamics are purportedly being dismantled and reconstructed even as you read these words.
According to this view, individuals of mixed race, particularly first-generation multiracial people, are confounding the American racial template with their ambiguous phenotypes and purported ability to serve as living bridges between races. This perspective is reflected in television and magazine advertising and coverage and in books both academic and nonacademic. As long as a decade ago, the sociologist Kathleen Odell Korgen wrote in From Black to Biracial: Transforming Racial Identity Among Americans (Praeger, 1998) that “today mixed-race Americans challenge the very foundation of our racial structure.”
From his well-received speech on race, in which he positioned himself as having a direct understanding of both black and white anger, to his reference to himself as a “mutt,” Barack Obama and his historic election have significantly boosted this view. Many Americans hail his background as portending our postracial future. We hear that self-styled multiracial young adults accept their mixed identity far more than did their pre-civil-rights-era predecessors; but precisely what they are actually assenting to and what it means may be little more than a fad.
People who see us accepting a new multiracial identity have long argued that it is destructive of race: that recognition and acceptance of multiracialism will bring about the demise of the American racial model. The American Multiracial Identity Movement thereby suggests that multiracial identity possesses an insurgent character, a militant stance against the idea of recognizing race in the United States.
Regardless of their contemporary popularity, such claims are without merit. Indeed, they are self-contradictory. If one holds that multiracial identity is a real and valid identity, then it can be sensible only as a biological racial identity. If words are to mean anything, and they should, it quite obviously cannot be that a multiracial identity is somehow not a biological racial identity. Rather, multiracial identity merely falls in place to join other, already existing racial categories.
If the issue were ethnicity, we would be debating the idea of multiethnic identity. If the issue were nationality, we would be debating multinational identity. If the issue were cultural affinity, we would be debating multicultural identity. But in the debate over multiracial identity, the nature of that identity is made clear by the very wording in which the debate is framed. Nor is there any escape through asserting that racial identities are socially designated, since it is the sexual (and thereby biological) union of parents of ostensibly different races that produces multiracial children.
There are a variety of names in the popular literature referring to those children: Generation Mix, Generation M (multiracial), Generation EA (Ethnically Ambiguous), Remix Generation, and other just as authentically hip terms. The very hipness should alert us to the pop-cultural bandwagon mixed-race identity currently rides. Those (very typically, but not necessarily, young) people who consider themselves to be the mixed offspring of parents of different biological racial groups are proclaimed the path to America’s postracial future. Will, as we are assured, the (multi) racial ambiguity of Generation Mix usher in a new American racial order? Will it undermine centuries of racial hierarchy?
Those questions hardly ever receive even the minimal sort of critical analysis one might expect for so important a topic —especially because some academics assume too readily the role of scholarly cheerleaders, as opposed to the intellectual referees they should be. That group includes the sociologist G. Reginald Daniel, the psychotherapist Ursula M. Brown, the anthropologist Marion Kilson, and others. They in turn provide quotations and sound bites to popular news-media writers more interested in hip story lines than in objective journalism. Consider that no less a source than National Public Radio avers that “race, culture and identity are changing in America.” We are witnessing nothing less than a self-inflicted and self-authorized societal hoodwinking of the first order.
That may seem harsh, undercutting the progressive role that has been assigned to multiracialism of late. But it would be just as unwise to underestimate the degree to which we Americans allow ourselves to be influenced by the manipulations of the popular media; just as it would be to underestimate the ferocious tenacity of those who are invested heavily in maintaining the current racial order, even if it means making concessions in the form of minor adjustments to the American racial model that appear to privilege this newfound multiracial ambiguity. The vital point that seems to be missed is that racial ambiguity, in and of itself, is no guarantee of political progressiveness, racial destabilization —or anything in particular.
As Catherine R. Squires, a professor of journalism, writes in Dispatches From the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America (State University of New York Press, 2007), multiracialism is fundamentally ambiguous: “This ambiguity is about exoticism and intrigue, providing opportunities for consumers to fantasize and speculate about the Other with no expectations of critical consideration of power and racial categories.” Squires makes an important point, for it is crucial to be able to separate racial ambiguity that might be utilized to work consciously against racial hierarchies from racial ambiguity that is simply a form of self-interested celebration that ends up reinforcing those racial hierarchies.
Dealing with mixed-race identity in that context requires us to consider “hypodescent,” the term for the longstanding practice by which mixed-race individuals have long been relegated to the identity of the parent whose racial status is lowest. Although hypodescent developed in various ways throughout the Americas as a result of European colonization and slavery, it achieved its most extreme formulation in British North America, where (aside from notable exceptions in places like New Orleans and Charleston, S.C.) the particular evolution of slavery relegated all degrees of black-white mixture to the black category. We must recognize as well that biological race, hypodescent, monoracial people, and multiracial people are all figments of the American imagination, as they have been for centuries.
Although hypodescent applies de facto nearly exclusively to black people, it is the basis for structuring the American racial paradigm, since it ensures that blackness remains separate from whiteness, providing the fixed endpoints of our racial schema. The category at the top of the racial hierarchy, white, has no way to constitute itself absent its relation to blackness, a phenomenon that has been well established by the (related) fields we now call whiteness studies and critical-race theory and exemplified by the work of scholars like the historian David Roediger and the law professor Cheryl Harris. One might reasonably inquire as to whether something other than blackness could serve this function, but I do not, at this point in our history, believe so. Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian categories do not yet possess the level of revulsion that continues to mark blackness.
For several centuries, the primary racial dynamic in America has been the black-white one, with American Indians being too few in number and also too somatically close to whiteness to stand as the kind of Other that Africans and African-Americans have represented. Recognition of that somatic nearness is reflected in the failed, late-19th-century attempt to assimilate American Indians fully into American (white) culture —a horrifyingly destructive mission that included removing children forcibly from their parents and sending them to boarding schools where their language and religion were punished out of them. Certainly no such effort has ever been mounted to assimilate black people. And until the relatively recent wave of Asian and Hispanic immigration, over the past 40 or so years, those latter two categories were not only too geographically limited to regions of the United States but also too small in number to produce the fear that blackness did and still does.
Moreover, despite a current rise in anti-immigrant feeling that is largely anti-Hispanic, there is also a countermovement, what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “the Latin-Americanization of racial stratification in the U.S.A.” As in the case of some Asians, many Hispanics are taking advantage of multiracialism to transition to a state of “honorary whiteness,” a phenomenon whose corollary is that, once again, African-Americans are seen as the group to avoid.
A key failure of people who oppose the American pattern of race relations —including those who see the multiracialism as a useful weapon against it —has been an inability to articulate correctly the most critical aspect of the pattern’s nature. We like to think that it consists of four or five races, with whites at the top of the hierarchy, followed by Asians, Hispanics (if conceived of racially), American Indians, and then black people. (While commentators might debate the relative placement of the middle groups, the endpoints —white and black —are fixed.) That conception is accurate, but it doesn’t go far enough: It doesn’t problematize the fact that whiteness —while it has been forced by recent population trends into expanding its boundaries by accepting specific and limited numbers of people with Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian ancestry —cannot admit the public entry of blackness and still remain white. That is surely not to say that members of the other groups live unproblematic lives untouched by racism, but rather that there simply is no American racial paradigm without blackness serving as the antipode of whiteness. Unless something arrives to radically deconstruct the status of whiteness at the top of the hierarchy, there is no hope for real change.
What that means is that those who proclaim that multiracial identity will destroy race are living a lie. Some people whose race is ambiguous and who possess the “right look” may well be able to distance themselves from blackness, but such movement has no ultimate effect on the general American racial scheme; it merely adds an additional category. For how can multiracial identity deconstruct race when it needs the system of racial categorization to even announce itself?
We may shuffle the intermediate categories, we may add nonwhite categories (including a multiracial category), and we may even see whiteness expand a bit to include some previously excluded people. But as long as black remains at the bottom of the hierarchy —and as long as it remains impossible for a black woman to be seen as giving birth to a white child (while the reverse case continues its unproblematic acceptance), nothing has changed.
As Squires points out, the scholarly analyses that might challenge our norms are “not the ones normally consulted by the mainstream press.” In fact, there is a pitched battle being waged within scholarship over the status of multiraciality. A recent provocative book —Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) —by Jared Sexton, a professor of African-American and film-and-media studies, is just one example. But there is little hope that popular news-media sources will seek out Sexton’s views before filing their next story on multiracial identity.
The solution to our national racial madness does not lie in altering the racial paradigm so that it is somehow more equal or so that it includes more groups; the solution lies in rejecting both the idea of biological race and the hypodescent that flows from that idea. What popular wisdom tells us is the supposed twilight of how Americans have thought about race is merely a minor tweaking of the same old racial hierarchy that has kept African-Americans at the bottom of our paradigm since its very inception. Multiracial ideology simply represents the latest means of facilitating and upholding that hierarchy —while claiming quite disingenuously to be doing the opposite
