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The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

This book takes a critical approach to the analysis of the multiracial movement. The authors investigate the beliefs and collective actions of people devoted to changing how American society conceptualizes and categorizes those who belong to more than one “racial” group. The authors effectively communicate the complexities involved in thinking, talking, and acting around issues of race and multi-raciality. They recognize the current scientific point of view that races as biological facts don’t exist. What does exist in our culture is a set of powerful social conventions about how people should be categorized, with a strong sense that biological heritage is the fundamental essence of who we are and can be. These social conventions have their roots in history, and are supported by enduring social structures and power relations. The authors point out that our ideas of race are inextricably connected to our ideas of what family, marriage, and intimate relationships are and should be. The “multiracial” individual finds him/herself uniquely positioned in this complex racial structure. They must decide whether to identify themselves with their father’s or their mother’s “racial” group, or with both (hence the term “multiracial”). Whatever they decide, society may or may not recognize or support them in their decision. For example, if they have any African heritage, they are assumed to be “black,” and may feel pressure to define themselves as black in order to avoid being seen as abandoning their heritage. The authors refer to this as the hypodescent rule: a common belief in our culture that if you are even partially black this categorization overrides any claims to another identity. The complexities faced by the multiracial individual are even more problematic when viewed in the context of the whole family. How do two parents of “different” races define themselves and their family? Is the child a different race than the father or the mother? Is the child one or the other race, or a combination of both? It is because of these dilemmas that some parents of biracial or multiracial children join or create multiracial organizations or support groups; they hope to create an accepting and understanding community for themselves and their family by linking with others like them, and by working to change society’s rules and laws concerning how people are categorized (for example, the racial categories used in the census). DaCosta’s chapter on the familial roots of racial division does an excellent job of explaining the relationship between the family and the maintenance of racial boundaries in American society. She challenges us to consider why we think of multiracial families as “different” from other families. These racialized notions of family have been enforced and maintained by beliefs and laws. The “one drop rule” (a person with even one drop of African blood is considered African), and antimiscegenation laws (which made it impossible for people of different races to marry and have legitimate children) served to strengthen divisions between blacks and whites. Gallagher’s chapter on “Expanding the Boundaries of Whiteness” shows that changes in racial categorization depend in part on which “racial” groups you’re talking about. Whites were more willing to consider Asians or Latinos as possible family members than Blacks. Gallagher suggests that our society may be moving in a direction in which unions of Asians and whites or (to a lesser extent) Latinos and whites are being subsumed under the “white” umbrella, while black/white unions are still likely to be perceived as multiracial families. The definition of whiteness is expanding to include Asians and Latinos, but the boundaries between blacks and whites are being maintained. One of the ironies of the multiracial debate discussed by Williams in her chapter on the relationship between the civil rights movement and multiracial movements is that “racial categories in this country were originally used to keep track of and augment the number of slaves, yet current-day civil rights groups are ardently defending the practice and logic of racial categorization” (p. 93). Williams argues that this is because of the potential for the loss of political power if the