In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“Claiming”: White Ambition, Multiracial Identity, and the New American Racial Passing Meredith McCarroll In The Chronicles of Riddick, protagonist Richard Riddick, played by multiracialactorVinDiesel,roamshissciencefictionuniverseasacultural anomaly. He does not belong to any of the stable ethnic communities in which individual inclusion is based upon a shared geography, physicality, and belief. His own mysterious background enables him to move through existent groups to fight the powerful Necromongers who threaten to homogenize and control the once diverse universe. In a climactic scene, one of the Necromongers asks in frustration, “Who are his people? Where does he come from?” There is no clear answer. Because of his fluid identity, Riddick eventually prevails and becomes the new lord marshal, the spiritual leader of the Necromongers. The film ends ambiguously, leaving Riddick with the potential to restore diversity to the universe or to continue the push toward homogeneity. In the reality of the United States in the twenty-first century, as claims to multiracial identity increase and racial categories are questioned , the outcome of racial integration and hybridity is less cinematically nuanced. The multiracial is not endowed with the power to unite peacefully different races. Rather, categorical distinctions are upheld while those whose bodies are not easily read are reimagined and made to fit into one of two distinct binaries, black or white. In an American culture of unequal racial binaries, historical precedents Meredith McCarroll 198 documenting the social imbalance between these oppositions creates a desire to move out of the impotent and oppressed position into the powerful, dominant position. Historically, the desire to effect a power migration translates as a move toward whiteness. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes wrote that when he heard a Negro poet say, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” he understood the poet to say, “‘I want to write like a white poet,’ meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white’” (1311). Claiming multiraciality often turns on a similar syllogistic reasoning terminating in the denial of race—most often the denial or invalidation of the darker one. Black to white passing, especially prevalent during the early twentieth century, allowed individuals of African ancestry who could perform and appear as Anglo or European to escape from blackness in order to gain access to white spaces and privileges. Claiming multiracial identity, like black to white passing, has been read as a politically viable way to destabilize race. Maria P. P. Root, a scholar and advocate for mixed-race identity writes, “Clinging to a mixed-race identity in racialized ethnic groups, particularly if the other race is European derived, challenges the foundations on which perceived solidarity was constructed” (7). Not all see claims of multiraciality as a means to deconstruct racial hierarchy. Mary Thierry Texeira argues that “we cannot understand the movement unless it is placed in the context of white supremacy,” a system in which “divisions, including racial labels and categories among people of color in the United States, have always benefited a white power structure that has often endorsed attempts to disunite nonwhites” (22). Rather than disrupting a constructed but considerable racial dichotomy of white and nonwhite, Texeira sees this multiracial identity movement developing in terms of “who is white(r) and who is not white” (33), sustaining rather than weakening racial identity. Texeira cites historical and cultural sociologist and the father of mixed-raced children Orlando Patterson as having naïve optimism about multiracial identity. Patterson states that “[racial] mixing is the best thing that could happen because . . . a middle group [makes] people feel an investment on both sides” (29). Texeira is quick to point out that Patterson fails to recognize that the “‘middle races’ have always identified more with the dominant group” (29). At the “Claiming” 199 heart of the debate among those like Root, Texeira, and Patterson is the issue of agency and the question of sustaining an existence in the “third race” in order to challenge the racial dichotomy long in place in the United States. Advocatesofmultiracialidentityoftenenvisionatransgressiveliminal space opening up between black and white, bridging the two while empowering the racial “other” to exist outside of racial expectations and limitations. While theories range from a liberating and fluid transnational identity that Paul Gilroy imagines in The Black Atlantic to an envisioned embodiment of the marginal space as a means of “recoupling ” two sides of a contentious dichotomy that Gloria Anzaldúa in “Borderlands/La Frontera” and Donna...

Share