The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

7. MULTIRACE.COM: MULTIRACIAL CYBERSPACE

SEVEN MULTIRACE.COM: MULTIRACIAL CYBERSPACE ERICA CHITO CHILDS THROUGH THE INTERNET, multiracial individuals and families who have negotiated the segregated neighborhoods and schools that mark the U.S. racial terrain can meet other multiracial family members just by clicking and typing. This cyberspace has created an “imagined” community where most of the members may never meet, though “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”1 Type “multiracial” in a search engine such as MSN, Google, Yahoo, or Excite and hundreds of results will be given, identifying the varied websites that exist. Surfing through these sites from individual webpages of interracial couples to larger sites such as Interracial Voice 2 or The Multiracial Activist,3 it becomes clear that these sites are not detached and separate but rather form an intricate web, connected by links. Furthermore, these websites are an instrumental part of the Multiracial Movement because of the ability to reach large numbers of people.4 Unfortunately this Internet community reinforces the color line. Moreover , most multiracial websites simply reproduce the racial hierarchy by further demarcating a separate multiracial community and vilifying blackness. While families are turning to these multiracial websites for information, resources, and support, they are also discovering an underlying discourse about multiracial group boundaries and racial politics. In this chapter, I explore the significance of these multiracial websites, the ideologies they support, the images and ideas they project about 143 144 ERICA CHITO CHILDS multiracialism and racial politics, and their role in the Multiracial Movement . Specifically, I will address the ways these websites attempt to construct a multiracial community and promote a particular type of multiracial identity. Unfortunately, the discourses that thread through these various websites are problematic on a number of levels, simultaneously denying the importance of race and the racial hierarchy that exists while emphasizing multiracial as a separate and distinct racial category. Despite the positive functions that these sites serve in creating a sense of community, beyond the poetry and chat rooms is a larger political agenda forwarded by those running the websites. METHODS Using four different search engines,5 I conducted advanced searches on “multiracial,” “Multiracial Movement,” “interracial,” and “biracial.” My initial search yielded hundreds of matches, yet after removing web addresses for websites that no longer exist and pornographic websites, I grouped the remaining websites into six categories based on their type and size: large multipurpose cyberspace sites; webpages of multiracial organizations;6 sites that sell products geared toward multiracial families;7 Internet magazines;8 interracial dating services;9 and individual web pages of interracial couples and/or multiracial individuals that are linked to these larger websites. Despite the relatively large number of websites, the website “hits” or the amount of visitors these sites receive varies greatly. Search engines such as MSN, along with many of the websites themselves, track how many hits a website receives, with some averaging thousands of hits per day to those sites that have had only a few hundred hits ever. Therefore, based on information from the search engines and my review of the various categories of websites, I chose to analyze a large multipurpose cyberspace site, The Multiracial Activist (TMA),10 edited and published by James Landrith, and an Internet magazine, Interracial Voice (IV), edited and published by Charles Michael Byrd. These sites are two of the largest and most prominently featured and, more importantly, they are exclusively cyberspace communities. The webpages of multiracial organizations such as Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA) and Project RACE also receive a large number of visitors yet they are attached to organizations that were founded and built outside of cyberspace, therefore I chose not to include them. The other categories of websites, such as the interracial dating sites, sites that sell products geared to multiracial families, and personal webpages of multiracial families, were not included primarily because they are smaller, specialized, and lack an overt political agenda. Though both TMA and IV will be the main focus, the discourses and ideologies found in these sites are characteristic of the large cyberspace multipurpose sites, and the Internet magazines devoted to multiracial issues that are increasingly found on the Web. MULTIRACE.COM 145 Since I am interested in documenting discourses and images, I primarily drew from ethnographic content analysis11 and critical cyberculture studies .12 In general, like the transcript of an interview, the language and images of the websites were read and reviewed...