Mixed Race Studies

What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

Princeton University Press
June 2013
296 pages
6 x 9; 5 line illus. 3 tables.
Cloth ISBN: 9780691157030
eBook ISBN: 9781400846795

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University
Also former director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001

America is preoccupied with race statistics–perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different “race” line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government’s “statistical races.” Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed.

Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical “Asian race.” One that once tried to divide the “white race” into “good whites” and “bad whites,” and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?

What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It’s not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today’s race question from the census—but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Part I What Are Statistical Races?
  • Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview
  • Chapter 2 Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races
• Part II Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces
  • Chapter 3 The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation’s First Statistical Race
  • Chapter 4 Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census
  • Chapter 5 How Many White Races Are There?
• Part III When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
  • Chapter 6 Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool
  • Chapter 7 When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused
• Part IV The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale
  • Chapter 8 Pressures Mount
  • Chapter 9 The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line
• Part V What We Have Is Not What We Need
  • Chapter 10 Where Are We Exactly?
  • Chapter 11 Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be
• Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad–Brazil, France, Israel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

How to update census’ race question

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-05

Clarence Page

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page prefers an America where diversity and unique ethnicities are celebrated, not homogenized.

A notable example of how Americans fall through the cracks in census data-gathering caught my eye recently. It appeared on the black-oriented TheRoot.com website under this intriguing headline: “I found one drop; can I be black now?”

The “one drop” is a reference to the old oddly American racial rule that one drop of “black blood” in your veins makes you black. As a full-fledged black American, I wondered who is so eager to join the club?

The answer turned out to be a white woman who had written to The Root’s “Race Manners” advice column. Through genealogical records she uncovered an African-American ancestor who long ago had passed for white. Now faced with census forms, among other documents that ask us Americans for our race, she was wondering which box to check.

“Do I check both, and come across as a liar to those who don’t know my history?” she asked. “Or do I check just white, and feel like a self-loathing racist?”

I sympathize with the woman’s confusion. In changing times, government forms are often the last to catch up.

It has only been since 2000, for example, that mixed-race people are allowed to check more than one racial box on the U.S. census. And that’s just one area of government forms not keeping up with America’s changing demographics…

…More extensive questions of ethnicity and ancestry have been asked since 2000 by another set of longer forms, the American Community Survey. Unlike the 10-year census, the survey is conducted among a sample of 250,000 people every month.

That’s a good model, some experts, say, for how the 10-year census could give a more complete and realistic picture of America’s changing demographic landscape.

“We shouldn’t be governing in the 21st century by a race classification given us by a German doctor in 1776,” former Census Director Kenneth Prewitt wrote to me in an email…

Read the entire article here.

Solo Show at UCSB’s MultiCultural Center Examines Notions of Racial Identity

Public Affairs & Communications
University of California, Santa Barbara
News Release
2013-05-01

Contact: Andrea Estrada: 805-893-4620; George Foulsham: 805-893-3071

Multimedia performance is produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter

(Santa Barbara, Calif.)—When actress and playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni married the love of her life in 2006, her father did not walk her down the aisle. In fact, he declined to attend the wedding altogether.

Seeking to understand why he chose not to participate, DiGiovanni began a trek through family history—and time and space—that ultimately led to her M.F.A. thesis project: the multimedia one-woman play, “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval.”

DiGiovanni will perform the hour-long show at UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center Theater on Tuesday, May 7. The performance begins at 6 p.m. and will be followed by a question-and-answer session with G. Reginald Daniel, professor of sociology at UCSB. Daniels is a leading expert in the field of critical mixed race studies…

…A leading activist on issues related to mixed race, DiGiovanni is an actor, comedian, producer, and educator. She developed “One Drop of Love” as the thesis project for her Master of Fine Arts degree in film, television, and theater from California State University Los Angeles. She will use footage from her performances—the most recent was at the University of Maryland—to produce a documentary film…

Read the entire news release here.

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval (at University of California, Santa Barbara)

University of California, Santa Barbara
MultiCultural Center Theater [Directions] [Map]
University Center, Room 1504
Tuesday, 2013-05-07, 18:00-20:00 PDT (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Jillian Pagan, Director

Produced by: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter

Q&A afterwards hosted by:

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni returns to the West Coast after a phenomenally successful performance at the University of Maryland.

Incorporating filmed images, photographs and animation, this one-woman show tells the story of how the notion of ‘race’ came to be in the U.S., and its effects on the narrator’s relationship with her father—a journey that will take audiences from the 1600s to the present, to cities all over the U.S. and to West and East Africa, where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. ^©2103, Evan Tamayo

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni is a leading activist concerning mixed race, and is an actor, comedian, producer and educator. One Drop of Love is her MFA thesis, and she will be using footage from her performances to make a documentary.

Fanshen and her father after University of Maryland performance. (2013-03-29). ^©2013, Marvin T. Jones

Ms. Cox DiGiovanni appeared in the 2013 Academy Award and Golden Globe winning film Argo (2012); co-created, co-produced and co-hosted the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat (2007-2012); and co-founded and produced the annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® (2008-20012). For more on Ms. Cox DiGiovanni and One Drop of Love, visit: http://www.onedropoflove.org.

G. Reginald Daniel is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a leading expert in field of critical mixed race studies. He received the 2012 Loving Prize from the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles for his lifelong work as a scholar and participant within the multiracial community. He is the author of More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Temple University Press, 2001) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). He is also the author of over 40 chapters and articles dealing with the topic of multiraciality. His latest book is Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

Fanshen and her parents after University of Maryland performance (2013-03-29). ^©2013, Michael J. Hardy

Admission is free.

For more information, click here.

Contact of Races in Brazil

Social Forces
Volume 19, Number 4 (May, 1941)
pages 533-538
DOI: 10.2307/2571211

Arthur Ramos
University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro

BRAZIL, as well as other American countries, was originally a land of conquests; the growth of its population has developed by the contact or confluence of European settlers with the Indians. In this vast laboratory of races, the New World, Brazil affords a splendid field for investigation of how heterogeneous peoples from many sources have mingled and formed one homogeneous people, one language, and one culture.

When the Portuguese settlers came to Brazil in 1500 with the caravel guided by Pedro Álvatres Cabral, they met an Indian population occupying the Brazilian coast in an extension of about 5,000 miles. With the Portuguese settlers in the six-teenth century came an enormous number of Africans, at first from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as slaves for agricultural work, and afterwards for work in mining and other tasks. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, other European contingents immigrated to Brazil. In addition to the Portuguese there were Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and other European peoples, and also some oriental peoples such as the Japanese.

Because of the heterogeneous sources of its population, Brazil is a splendid field for investigation of human hybridism. Unfortunately the field researches are few and without any definite conclusion. But we have at our disposal several centuries of a vast experience of contact of races, this contact being moulded according to a very old Portuguese tradition, that is, the contact between the Portuguese and the peoples they discovered in their exploration and colonization. In the contact between Portuguese and Negroes, for instance, Brazil never had anything similar to the Black Code and other legal prohibitions of contacts of races by miscegenation and intermarriage such as were very frequent elsewhere in the New World, especially in the English America.

The religious feeling has also favored interbreeding, and it was very common among the colonists. Many have emphasized the action of Catholicism with its doctrine of essential equality of mankind and its estimation of racial scruples. This position of Catholicism has been adopted by many Protestant countries influenced by modern missionaries. Important also is the legislation and the strength of the public opinion in several South American countries with reference to miscegenation and intermarriage. In…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Colorblindness” Overlooks Structural Inequality

Jesus For Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-04-30

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Good morning.  Thanks to all who have been tracking with our multi-part series on Critical Race Theory and Christianity.  It seems like we’ve struck a nerve with this one, so I’m excited to keep sharing ideas—back and forth—between us.

Some very thoughtful comments came in last week from Paul, a teacher, pastor, and doctoral student at my old stomping grounds—U.C. Berkeley.   He raised the important point that the colorblind approach to race ignores not only the cultural diversity which God Himself created, but also the stubborn racism which continues to pervade U.S. socio-economic and political institutions.   It is to this important point that we turn to this week.

Supporters of “colorblindness” say that racism is behind us.  Sure, racism rears its ugly head once in a while in individual encounters between people, but, as a whole, it’s a thing of the past.  As evidence they say, “see, we elected a black, Kenyan president…”

Read the entire article here.

Double-Checking the Race Box: Examining Inconsistency between Survey Measures of Observed and Self-Reported Race

Social Forces
Volume 85, Issue 1
pages 57-74
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2006.0141

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Social constructivist theories of race suggest no two measures of race will capture the same information, but the degree of “error” this creates for quantitative research on inequality is unclear. Using unique data from the General Social Survey, I find observed and self-reported measures of race yield substantively different results when used to explain income inequality in the United States. This occurs because inconsistent racial classification is correlated with other respondent characteristics such as immigrant generation, educational attainment and age.

Read or purchase the article here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego [FitzGerald Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (2013)
pages 1285-1286
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas672

David FitzGerald, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Diego

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. xiv, 239 pp.)

I recently bought a house in San Diego whose records included a 1945 racial covenant stating that houses in the neighborhood would never be sold or occupied to “persons not of the white or Caucasian race.” The original owners would have been distressed to learn that the house was sold to me by a Jewish and Vietnamese American couple and that one of the Mexican kids on the block boasts of learning Amharic from his Ethiopian classmates. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.’s book helped me understand the historical changes on my own street and draw broader lessons about U.S. immigration and ethnicity.

Guevarra, a fourth-generation Mexipino from San Diego, makes major contributions to scholarship on the history of immigration to California and the history of San Diego as he tells the forgotten story of ethnic mixing of thousands at Filipinos and Mexicans. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and public records, he explains how a hostile racial atmosphere anchored in discriminatory law and hiring practices brought these two marginalized populations together. After the U.S. colonization…

Read or purchase the review here.

Excursus on “Hapa”; or the Fate of Identity

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
11 pages

Nicole Myoshi Rabin
University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

When I was growing up the license plate on my mom’s Dodge minivan read: R3HAPAS. My mom explained to my sister, brother, and me that a Hapa was someone like us—part Asian. And, when I was a kid it made me feel special, gave me a sense of pride-in-difference, to be named in that way because in the predominately Jewish part of Los Angeles where I grew up, we were the only three Hapas I knew. In that community, it also offered me a shelter, something “identifiable” and nameable, to combat the questions about my identity. More than twenty years later, from the vantage point of a self-conscious multiracial individual and student of literature and cultural studies at the University of Hawai’i, I have come to separate myself from that license plate. Thinking back to the text of the plate, I see now that the letters—the possessive “R”—were more about my parents than they were about my siblings or me. For my parents, an interracial couple whose own parents refused to attend their wedding, Hapa was a term of empowerment, pride, creation—it embodied their (our) family. For my mother, it also symbolized a link to her memories of summers in Hawai’i. And while my brother and sister still identify as Hapa, and my family and friends identify me that way, I see that hunk of metal on my mother’s car not as my own, but as naming an identity I took on in the past, as her identity for me.

This story of the license plate summarizes some of the contradictions and tensions of the term Hapa. For many people, including my family members and me when I was younger, Hapa is, as Wei Ming Dariotis claims, “a word of power.” It gives individuals a term for a mixed race identity and access to a community of others who claim the same. But Hapa is also a term fraught with contradictions. It is a term that in some ways depends on and produces the very notions it hopes to subvert. It is this space of contradiction that I want to explore through this article. This examination of the term Hapa is crucial at this particular moment in Asian American Literature because there has been a recent rise in the number of conferences, panels, autobiographies, theoretical texts, and various other projects dealing with mixed heritage Asian Americans. May-lee Chai’s Hapa Girl: A Memoir (2007), Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian 100% Hapa (2006), Theresa Williams-Leon and Cynthia L. Nakashima’s The Sum of Our Parts (2001), and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.’s Dissertation Mexipino: A History of Multiethnic Identity and the Formations of the Mexican and Filipino Communities of San Diego, 1900-1965 (2007) [now a published book] are just a few examples of the literary/cultural productions concentrated on mixed heritage Asian Americans. There have been panels focused on mixed heritage Asian Americans at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Asian American Association, and American Studies Association over the past few years. And, in Spring 2012 the Transnational Mixed Asians in Between Spaces (TMABS) hosted a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley. These examples demonstrate the growing interest in the Asian American community with issues of mixed heritage. As this concern continues to manifest within our culture, especially within our literature, examinations of terms like Hapa that are used to identify mixed heritage Asian Americans becomes increasingly important…

…Not only is the (self-) recognition of Hapa, as an identity, a means of reproducing the hegemony of monoraces through language; but it also works to reproduce racial hierarchy and stabilize and limit notions of racial identity. In her discussion on the legalization of gay marriage, Judith Butler makes an interesting point about recognition. She concludes that in the matter of recognition, there exists a sort of dilemma. On the one hand, to be outside the realm of recognition is to be disenfranchised in various ways. On the other hand, to become recognized can “lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy,” foreclosures, and support for the extension of state power (115). Although Butler is making her point about the foreclosure of the sexual field, the definition of the family and kinship, etc., her notion of the dilemma of recognition holds lessons for multiracial activists, scholars, and other individuals in a similar pursuit. In many ways, Hapa offers recognition (perhaps not state sanctioned) that works against a sense of disenfranchisement as a marginal racial identity in a society where racial identity has come to be one of the major ways in which we are identified and participate in public life. But some scholars, like Rainier Spencer in Reproducing Race, argue that some multiracial individuals, like Hapas, in their move for (self-) recognition are moving towards a position of “honorary whiteness” (108), leading to a “new form” of social hierarchy. In this argument (a version of hybrid vigor), the identification as Hapa works to separate the multiracial individual from his/her constituent “parts” and elevate him/her to a place above the lower-caste monoracial group. Although Spencer’s term, “honorary whiteness” suggests the presumption that Hapa refers to individuals of a white-Asian racial mixture who “elevate” above the monoracial category of Asian, his argument can be extended to non-white/Asian mixes as well. Spencer suggests that taking on a multiracial identity in some ways allows an individual to separate/elevate himself/herself from the racial group that he/she considers of lower privilege—whether that is Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American—as he/she moves toward whiteness, which remains positioned at the top. In this way, the term “honorary whiteness” in relation to Hapas can encompass other variations of mixedness beyond the Asian/white dialectic. And, although Spencer argues that the racial hierarchy is firmly rooted with African Americans on the bottom, I would add that the hierarchy might actually shift in specific contexts for particular individuals. In any case, whether or not “racial” elevation is the intention of the Hapa-identifying-individual, it is a concern that should be recognized and understood so that the multiracial individual can avoid becoming complicit in a racial hierarchy that continues to privilege whiteness…

…Finally, Hapa can work to uphold notions of race and racial essentialism. Multiracial scholars, as well as other race theorists, have long argued about the social construction of race and racial identity. In many Mixed Race Studies contexts, multiracial individuals are said to depict the instability of race and racial categories because of their inability, or determination not, to fit into the monoracial categories. By creating Hapaness as an oppositional category/identity, demanding to be recognized as such, or claiming membership to such a group, Hapas are in some ways (re)stabilizing racial identity in an alternate form. Spencer argues against “the [multiracial] movement’s loud proclamations inveighing against biological race while simultaneously and quite explicitly advocating for federal recognition of a new biological racial identity” (102). He goes on to argue that the construction of a multiracial community/identity “creates new racial subjects while conforming to the preexisting U.S. racial order” (239). While not all Hapa, or other multiracial, groups are advocating for state recognition, Spencer makes an interesting point about the reliance on a biological definition of race and the dependence upon the current racial schema. Even as we consciously recognize race as a socio-historic construction, the definition of Hapa as someone of part Asian descent implies its reliance upon a certain form of biological race, or ethnicity, and its adherence to the current racial order (in this case its dependence on the racial category of Asian/Pacific Islander)…

Read the entire article here.

Am I Enough? A Multi-Race Teacher’s Experience In-Between Contested Race, Gender, Class, and Power

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
Volume 28, Number 3, 2012
pages 128-141

Sonia Janis, Lecturer of Social Studies Education
University of Georgia

AM NOT WHITE. I am not Black. I am mixed. I am one half Polish, one quarter Russian, and one-quarter Japanese. I was born, raised, and educated in public schools in the suburbs of Chicago, and then abruptly transitioned to public schools located in north Alabama when I was an adolescent. My inquiry explores my mixed race experience of childhood, adolescence, college years, teaching and administration positions, pursuing curriculum studies, and working as a pre-service teacher educator in a predominantly White institution. My inquiry explores the spaces in-between race and place from my perspective as an educator who is multiracial and/or hapa according to the latest race-based verbiage. I search for language to portray the experience of people of mixed race such as myself and come across a long list of such words as: Afroasian, Ainoko, Ameriasian, biracial, Eurasian, Haafu, half-breed, hapa haole or hapa, griffe, melange, mestizo(a), miscegenation, mixie, mono-racial, mulatto(a), multiracial, octoroon, quadroon, spurious issue, trans-racial, and zebra (Broyard, 2007; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2001; Root, 1996a; Spencer, 1999). I find that most of these words, whether they are verbs, nouns, or adjectives, have negative connotations. I use “multiracial,” “biracial,” and “mixed race” interchangeably throughout my writing.

As I reflect on my experience as a seventh grade student, a public school administrator, and now as a pre-service teacher educator in a predominantly White institution, I explore my rememory (Morrison, 1990) of lives in two distinct regions of the United States: the Midwest and the South. Many of the stories take place in the South, a culturally distinct part of the United States with a unique history of race. This history revolves almost exclusively around the interactions between people described by the simplified racial duality of White and Black. Though other races are recognized in the South, the United States, and the rest of the world, the emphasis on the duality of Black and White relations remains poignantly more significant in the Southeastern region of the United States. These Black and White, inevitably racist, relations are still engulfed in the everyday experience of people living in the South resulting in an unexplainable and immeasurable divide. I feel abandoned in a wedge-shaped space in-between Black and White race. As I cross this divide in my social and political surroundings, I find myself back, forth, and in-between this divide, entrenched in a duality that excludes me on a daily, if not hourly, basis, sometimes by force, and other times by choice. Perpetually tying racial tensions exclusively to Black and White races is only one of the ways malpracticed multicultural education, especially in the South, has exploited a liberating theory of multiculturalism. My experiences challenging this divide, personifies how multiculturalism remains marginalized in a confining Black and White duality of the social construction of race. I constantly imagine the spaces beyond Black and White (Seller & Weis, 1997).

Into which category does my experience fit? Does my experience have a category? Is my experience in many different categories? Or is my experience in-between categories? If my experience is in-between, what categories is it in-between? One’s space in-between can be explored by, from, and through the voices of others who experience contradictory spaces regarding race, gender, sexuality, power, ethnicity, and class (e.g., Anzaldua & Keating, 2002; He, 2003, 2010). Recognizing the fluidity of lived experiences, He (2003) unfolded an inquiry into cross-cultural lives of three women living in-between two continents that tried to “make sense of ‘in-betweenness’” (p. 2). He’s (2010) exploration into in-betweenness continues as she delves into her experience as an academic with cultural, geographical, linguistic, and historical awakening in-between exiled spaces. My inquiry explores my experience in a contested space, in-between race and place, as a multiracial female residing in-between the Midwest and the South. Acknowledging lived experience in-between race and place, I hope that other educators are challenged to explore their own undefined experiences along with those of their students…

…As a multiracial educator, who is a proponent of the ideas and theories supporting multiculturalism, I feel anguished to know that I have not encountered any school that facilitates a multicultural space with an understanding of the liberating goal—cultural emancipation—as the driving force. This idealistic, but unmarked, goal of cultural emancipation is one route to problematize the social construction of race, along with its oppressive counterpart—racism. Rather than believing cultural emancipation is a possibility, my experiences reveal that schools view multicultural education as one more thing on their compliance list that they need to demonstrate evidence of completing by the end of each routine school year. Celebrating cultural signifiers, such as food, clothing, customs, and festivals, is a widely utilized practice for fulfilling this requirement (Loutzenheiser, 2003). Is accomplishing the original reasoning, “educational equity for all,” behind adding “multicultural education” to schools’ lists of compliance even considered? I imagine it is added because a stakeholder with financial and/or political power expects multiculturalism to appear on the “highly effective list” without any rationale, just as a mandate. My inquiry is intended to challenge the shallow multicultural practices by revealing how misconceptions of race and culture have disguised themselves as cultural understanding and competence. These embedded and proliferating misunderstandings influence the daily experiences of young people from all cultural backgrounds to their detriment, and ultimately to our society’s damage…

…I encountered a challenge to my beliefs about multi-race studies when I began to read Rainier Spencer’s (1999) ideas. He is boldly critical of multi-race theory, which pushed me to think critically about my own understandings of multiracialism. In his book, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Spencer (1999) starts: “‘You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter,’ James Baldwin told a White southerner during a television debate. ‘You’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter even since the days of slavery’” (p. 1). This quote re-ignites the reality of White superiority directly into one of society’s most personal, yet significantly political, spaces: marriage. Spencer does not hesitate to be confrontational about how historically oppressive and unreliable notions of multiracialism are, if we are ever to become a society without racism. He discusses how multiracial and antiracial ideologies could disrupt the U.S. racial ordering of society by asking “how can mixed-race or multiracial persons place themselves with consistency and meaning within that system?” (p. 5). The pain and frustration associated with multi-racialism remains as long as the myth of race remains. Spencer believes it is well past time to begin problematizing race categories altogether. He believes we must move away from classifications of people and promotes the ideology that we are all members of the human race…

Read the entire article here.