The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

4. LINKING THE CIVIL RIGHTS AND MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENTS

FOUR LINKING THE CIVIL RIGHTS AND MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENTS KIM M. WILLIAMS IN THIS CHAPTER I make four primary claims, the most fundamental of which is that the Multiracial Movement could not have happened, nor could it have taken the forms it has, had it not been for both successes and failures of the civil rights movement. At first glance, the trajectory of largely acrimonious relations between the multiracialists and civil rights advocates throughout the 1990s might seem to suggest little overlap between these two movements. Yet, I will demonstrate that the Multiracial Movement is a spinoff movement of the civil rights movement. More strongly stated, the outcomes of the civil rights movement are imprinted on the Multiracial Movement: they explain important aspects of the timing, characteristics, and even the goals of the latter. To advance these arguments, I draw upon a number of social movement concepts to demonstrate the ways in which the civil rights successes helped to set in place a working definition of race that is currently under considerable strain. Although conceding that there are no pure races in a biological sense, the civil rights establishment, most prominently the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Council of La Raza registered steadfast opposition to Multiracial Movement demands for mixed-race recognition in the 2000 census. The crux of their objection centered around the belief that the addition of a multiracial category on the census would dilute the traditional minority count; giving substantial numbers of people who are now counted 77 78 KIM M. WILLIAMS as black or Hispanic the opportunity to choose “multiracial.” A new multiracial category would not only undercut the aims of the Voting Rights Act, they argued, it would also jeopardize various state and federal programs aimed at minorities, such as minority business development programs and some affirmative action plans. In short, civil rights groups have perceived the contemporary assertion of multiracial identity as a threat because it disrupts a logic of race in which such organizations have become increasingly invested over time. Racial statistics began to hold new political potential for disadvantaged minority groups in the 1960s and 1970s, which explains why civil rights organizations have been so adamant in their defense of the status quo regarding the collection of racial statistics since then. Throughout history , racial designations have been employed by the United States as tools of dominance, serving to separate and penalize those not defined as white.1 However, a crucially important shift began to emerge around 1970, when minorities, through the political leadership of civil rights organizations, were able to use racial counts to their material advantage. In the 1960s, the “very classifications that had previously been employed [to deny] civil rights now became useful in enforcing and monitoring these same civil rights.”2 As a result of a number of civil rights successes (i.e., the outcomes of the civil rights movement), racial statistics became valuable to U.S. minority groups in new ways. In this chapter I will address three interrelated points: (1) how the legal, political and cultural outcomes of the U.S. civil rights movement prompted the establishment of a “working definition” of race in the United States over the past thirty to forty years; (2) how and why this working definition is changing; and, (3) the political positioning of Multiracial Movement activists. First, I examine the working definition of race established through the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. RACIAL UNDERSTANDINGS AND CIVIL RIGHTS LEGISLATION: CREATING A WORKING DEFINITION OF RACE The Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, as well as the programs associated with the Great Society spurred the reallocation of millions of dollars and a significant redistribution of political power. First, I will review the ways in which racial data took on new importance as a result of these policy outcomes . Next, I will turn to the problematic definition of race upon which these outcomes were conceptually based. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 dismantled the most egregious of discriminatory mechanisms: black disenfranchisement in the South and various types of public and private discrimination throughout the United States. The new laws required the collection of racial and LINKING THE CIVIL RIGHTS AND MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENTS 79 ethnic data in order to monitor legislative compliance and the delivery of new social services and programs. For example, to implement and...