The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

12. IDEOLOGY OF THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT: DISMANTLING THE COLOR LINE AND DISGUISING WHITE SUPREMACY?

TWELVE IDEOLOGY OF THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT: DISMANTLING THE COLOR LINE AND DISGUISING WHITE SUPREMACY? EILEEN T. WALSH THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT stands at the crossroads: will its identity politics take the path that encourages individuation to the exclusion of collective political action? Will it seek refuge in the promotion of hybrid identities that distance mixed-race persons from forging political alliances with blacks and other disenfranchised groups? Alternatively, will it coalesce around a group identity that challenges whiteness as the quintessential trope of privilege? Despite the significant gains of the civil rights movement, racial disparities exist today in every major arena: criminal justice, education, health care, housing, and wealth accumulation.1 The dismantling of these racial hierarchies cannot be accomplished by intellectually agreeing that social constructions of race are fiction; nor can that dismantling be accomplished by the promotion of individual rights. It is worth noting, however, that all of the rationales put forth by the following agents of change have been rooted in the rhetoric of individual rights. Jurisprudence depended on arguments regarding an individual’s right to choose a partner in decriminalization of marriages across the color line.2 Proponents of transracial adoption depended on arguments about the child’s right for a loving home.3 Multiracial 219 220 EILEEN T. WALSH people have argued for a bill of rights and recognition of microdiversity and diverse heritage.4 These hard-won battles that focused on individual rights, however significant, cannot achieve the systemic elimination of racial hierarchies . An elimination of those inequalities requires a focus both on group rights as well as on the complex connections between racial hierarchies, gender , and social class structures. The Multiracial Movement’s goal to redefine racial identity is quite likely to change not only the nature of racial classifications but also the identities and group allegiances of those who identify as multiracial . Unless the Multiracial Movement shifts its attention away from asserting the rights of individuals, however, its enduring legacy will be to sustain existing hierarchies, albeit along a color continuum instead of through a fictional racial dichotomy. If the Multiracial Movement is to succeed in eliminating race and the racial hierarchy, it must adopt and promote an antiracist, social justice agenda. Disappearing race from the vocabularies and consciousness of academics, policy makers, and the citizenry prior to dismantling the structures of inequality that persist not only puts the cart before the horse, it also serves to render white privilege invisible—a most dangerous proposition with a long legacy. Ignoring the ways in which race has been constructed as an essence, as well as marker for white group privilege, allows the mischief of race to remain hidden insidiously in our institutions while individuals, distracted from ferreting out injustice, delight in the belief that color no longer matters. CONSTRUCTING A CATEGORY FOR HYBRID IDENTITIES CAMOUFLAGES MULTIRACIAL HERITAGE The last decade has seen the coming of age of the first generation of children born after the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized marriages across the color line.5 Although such crossings have been present since colonial times, the one-drop rule of hypodescent has masked their prevalence. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the one-drop rule of the United States is being questioned . Not only have children and parents of racially mixed families asserted their voices, but they also have created social pressure to rethink multiracial heritage.6 Volumes documenting the alleged increasing number of racially mixed youngsters challenge notions about marriage and family formation across the color line.7 Danzy Senna has declared the onset of the “Mulatto Millennium” in which “Pure breeds (at least the black ones) are out and hybridity is in. America loves us.”8 Struggling against monoracial categories, the Multiracial Movement has staked out important territory and demanded recognition of multiracial heritages and diverse racial/ethnic identities.9 The Multiracial Movement sought to reject the rigid racial categories that have been constructed over time to simultaneously create the fiction of both race and its corollary, racial IDEOLOGY OF THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT 221 purity, which form the basis of white supremacy. It demanded acknowledgment of hybrid identity and questioned the commonsense understandings of race in the twentieth century. Although the movement successfully has brought attention to the fiction that created existing racial categories, there is an ominous potential for the Multiracial Movement to become a pawn of the policy agendas on both sides of...