The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

1. ALL IN THE FAMILY: THE FAMILIAL ROOTS OF RACIAL DIVISION

ONE ALL IN THE FAMILY: THE FAMILIAL ROOTS OF RACIAL DIVISION KIMBERLY MCCLAIN DACOSTA [Incest] even combines in some countries with its direct opposite, interracial sexual relations, an extreme form of exogamy, as the two most powerful inducements to horror and collective vengeance. —Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structure of Kinship To pass out of a race always requires one to pass out of a family. —Shelby Steele and Thomas Lennon, “Jefferson’s Blood” DEBATES ABOUT MULTIRACIAL POLITICS have tended to focus on the most obviously “racial” nature of the issues at stake (Will a multiracial category alter race-based social policies? Will such a category reify a biological notion of race? Do multiracials seek to escape a stigmatized status?). Yet even a brief glance at the forms of collective organization, goals, and activities of persons of mixed descent make it clear that the Multiracial Movement is as much a politicization of kinship as it is one of racial identity—one in which multiracial families1 are emerging as families. Most of the more than sixty local community groups formed in the last twenty years were formed by interracial couples and multiracial people to meet others like them and share experiences. Through the formation of groups and the attempt to name their 19 20 KIMBERLY McCLAIN DaCOSTA experience (“multiracial”), interracial families try to make visible and normalize that which is conventionally invisible and pathologized (given that the family is usually thought of as a monoracial institution and interracial sex is taboo). The attempt to create a new multiracial label is partly an attempt to make visible relationships that are often not assumed by others— that between parents and children who appear racially different.2 While the familial roots of multiracial politics have been largely ignored, this case offers a chance to see quite clearly the very real connections between concepts and histories of race and family in the United States. In this chapter I demonstrate the importance of the family as both a structure and strategy in the creation and maintenance of racial division in the United States. Through the family, individual and group aspirations for economic and social advancement or maintenance (or the frustration of such ends) are realized. The family is fundamentally connected to the system of stratification since nearly all families ascribe their economic and social status to their children. Much of U.S. social policy has been designed to distribute resources through families, and the unequal treatment of families according to race has resulted in large and persistent inequalities between blacks and whites. This relationship between family and race is the implicit basis of social stratification research, but it has been explicitly studied only recently, and most vividly in studies examining the gap in wealth between blacks and whites.3 My analysis begins with what the social stratification literature takes largely for granted—namely, why distributing resources through the family so effectively creates and reproduces racial inequality. That it does so suggests that the legitimate and socially recognized family was itself constituted with race in mind. In this chapter I show that American notions of race and family are mutually constituted and that understanding this relationship makes clear why multiracial activism necessarily concerns the family. The notion of a “multiracial family” has, until very recently, been an oxymoron in American cultural consciousness. As such, the emergence of multiracial families as families represents a significant cultural shift in American conceptions of family and race. Paradoxically, the invisibility (and rarity) of multiracial families, which essentially reflects a breaking of family bonds across racial categories, owes its genesis to the very tight relatedness between American notions of race and family. This tight relationship is born of two processes— what I call “the racialization of the family” (how racial premises came to be buried in our understanding of family, in which genetic/phenotypic sharing is coded to signify cultural sharing, intimacy, and caring) and “the familization of race” (how it came to be that members of the same racial group feel a kinlike connection and how that familial understanding is used politically). These two processes form the context in which “multiracial” becomes a distinctive social identity in the United States, and are the subtext of mul- ALL IN THE FAMILY 21 tiracial politics. I show how the concept of family became racialized, and in turn, how notions of race are constructed through kinship practices...