Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line - Softcover

DaCosta, Kimberly McClain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804755469 ISBN 13: 9780804755467

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Making Multiracials explains how a social movement emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s and how it made "multiracial" a recognizable racial category in the United States.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kimberly McClain DaCosta is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University.

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When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods described his racial identity on Oprah as "cablinasian," it struck many as idiosyncratic. But by 2003, a New York Times article declared the arrival of "Generation E.A."—the ethnically ambiguous. Multiracial had become a recognizable social category for a large group of Americans.
Making Multiracials tells the story of the social movement that emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s. Organizations for interracial families and mixed race people—groups once loosely organized and only partially aware of each other—proliferated. What was once ignored, treated as taboo, or just thought not to exist quickly became part of the cultural mainstream.
How did this category of people come together? Why did the movement develop when it did? What is it about “being mixed” that constitutes a compelling basis for activism? Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the author answers these questions to show how multiracials have been “made” through state policy, family organizations, and market forces.

Aus dem Klappentext

When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods described his racial identity on Oprah as "cablinasian," it struck many as idiosyncratic. But by 2003, a New York Times article declared the arrival of "Generation E.A." the ethnically ambiguous. Multiracial had become a recognizable social category for a large group of Americans.
Making Multiracials tells the story of the social movement that emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s. Organizations for interracial families and mixed race people groups once loosely organized and only partially aware of each other proliferated. What was once ignored, treated as taboo, or just thought not to exist quickly became part of the cultural mainstream.
How did this category of people come together? Why did the movement develop when it did? What is it about being mixed that constitutes a compelling basis for activism? Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the author answers these questions to show how multiracials have been made through state policy, family organizations, and market forces.

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Making Multiracials

State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color LineBy Kimberly McClain DaCosta

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5546-7

Contents

Tables, Figures, and Photos....................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments................................................................................................................................xi1 Introduction.................................................................................................................................12 The Making of a Category.....................................................................................................................213 Becoming a Multiracial Entrepreneur: Four Stories............................................................................................474 Making Multiracial Families..................................................................................................................865 Creating Multiracial Identity and Community..................................................................................................1256 Consuming Multiracials.......................................................................................................................1547 Redrawing the Color Line?: The Problems and Possibilities of Multiracial Families and Group Making...........................................173Appendix A List of Respondents.................................................................................................................193Appendix B Methodology.........................................................................................................................196Appendix C Situating Multiracial Group Making in the Literature on Social Movements, Race, and the Work of Pierre Bourdieu.....................207Notes..........................................................................................................................................217Bibliography...................................................................................................................................231Index..........................................................................................................................................251

Chapter One

Introduction

IN 1993 THE U.S. HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel held hearings to discuss the racial and ethnic categories to be used in the 2000 census. Committee members were concerned with whether the racial and ethnic classifications established in 1977 were still adequate for counting America's population. At these hearings, many groups challenged the ways the state classified them. The National Council of La Raza, for example, proposed including Hispanic/Latino as a racial designation while Native Hawaiians proposed being counted as Native Americans. Yet the most explosive challenge came from a putatively new contender in America's ongoing racial debate: the multiracial community.

In 1993 the federal racial classification system reflected a uniquely American understanding of race in which individuals were allowed to choose one and only one race. The only choice available to those who did not feel the available categories described them was "other," a catch-all category that critics said conveyed little meaning. Multiracial representatives argued for a mode of categorization that acknowledged multiple ancestry-either a simple "multiracial" check box or the possibility of checking all applicable racial categories. Unlike groups requesting a shuffling of their placement within the existing racial framework, self-identified multiracials claimed to be a formerly unrecognized group challenging the framework itself.

From the vantage point of 2007, it is perhaps difficult to recapture the novelty of multiracial activists' claims. When representatives of the Association of Multiethnic Americans made their claims for official enumeration of mixed race people in 1993, "multiracial" as a basis of collective identification did not exist outside of a few local community groups. Before those hearings there was virtually no broad public awareness of multiracial collective organizing, even among the people multiracial organizers claimed to represent. With a few notable exceptions, scholars were unaware of or uninterested in such organizing, perhaps best exemplified in F. James Davis's contention (as late as 1991) that the so-called one-drop rule (the practice of defining as black persons with any known African ancestry, no matter how little) would remain unchallenged for the foreseeable future. Much has changed since then.

Despite Davis's prediction, the one-drop rule has been challenged. Largely due to the efforts of multiracial activists, in 1997 the U.S. Census Bureau changed its racial enumeration policy to allow individuals to "mark one or more" racial categories. With that decision, the federal government (hereafter referred to as the state) resumed counting mixed race populations in Census 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau 2002), something it had not done in nearly eighty years.

When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods told Oprah Winfrey and her television audience of the name he came up with to convey all aspects of his racial identity ("cablinasian" for Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian), it seemed an idiosyncratic and highly individualized identity. By 2003, a Sunday New York Times article declared the arrival of "Generation E. A." (ethnically ambiguous). Whole generations, not just Tiger it would seem, were claiming to be-and being recognized as-mixed race.

Dominant attitudes about racial mixing have shifted as well. Not until 2004 was it widely revealed that Strom Thurmond, the staunch segregationist senator from South Carolina, had fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, with his family's teenage black maid. Ms. Washington-Williams's paternity was kept secret for over seventy-eight years until she revealed it shortly after her father's death. Both father and daughter understood that revealing their relationship would end his political career. In contrast, for Barack Obama-currently the only U.S. senator of African descent-racial mixedness is showcased in the crafting of his public persona, not hidden or downplayed. In his address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama made explicit reference to his biraciality (he is the son of a black Kenyan economist and white mother from Kansas). He has since been touted as a viable future presidential candidate and his biraciality depicted as a key reason why he will heal political division.

In other words, over the last decade multiracialism has emerged as a topic of public discussion, and "multiracial" has become a recognizable social category and mode of identification. In the 1990s, organizations for interracial families and mixed race people were loosely organized, only partially aware of each other, and relatively short-lived. While many remain short-lived, collective organizing by people identifying as multiracial has continued, has become more interconnected, and has entered new institutional domains. What was once largely ignored (how the children of interracial unions identify racially), treated as taboo (interracial sex and intimacy), or thought not to exist (multiracial community) is now receiving considerable attention and becoming part of the cultural mainstream. This book tells the story of how that shift began and how it is proceeding.

When I began my research the census issue intrigued me. Like many social scientists, I was interested in the implications of changing state classification for monitoring racial inequality and enforcing civil rights legislation. Kim Williams (2006) has uncovered the political calculations that led to the change in census classification. Other analysts have focused on the challenges of interpreting the new race data (Farley 2002; Harris 2002), particularly for making comparisons with that collected under the previous race question (Tucker et al. 2002) and the challenges the change poses for civil rights law enforcement (Perlmann and Waters 2002). While I was interested in these questions, what intrigued me much more was that mixed race people were organizing in the first place. As a child raised in an interracial family in metropolitan Boston of the 1970s and 1980s, the only other "mixed" people I knew were my five siblings. Moreover, we identified ourselves and were categorized by others as "black." The emergence of organizations for mixed race people and political activism around issues of mixed race seemed unthinkable to me back then.

While clearly the most visible dimension of an emerging movement around multiracialism, and the event that garnered that movement the most attention, the census issue itself could not explain why mixed race people and families were organizing collectively. Indeed, the census issue emerged several years after organizations for mixed race people formed. At the time of the 1993 hearings, at least sixty such social support organizations existed. Most of these had formed at least five years prior.

While interracial groups have existed in the past, beginning in the late nineteenth century and at various times since, this wave of multiracial organizations was different because of the sheer volume formed simultaneously yet in relative isolation. More importantly, groups that formed independently of one another developed into a network of groups in close communication. While earlier organizations were focused primarily on black/white intermarriage and families, newer organizations were emerging, such as Hapa Issues Forum, that focused on the experiences of Asian multiracials. Still others, like Swirl and Mavin Foundation, sought to develop a "pan" multiracial focus inclusive of all kinds of mixed race experiences.

The expansion of multiracial organizations and political action were important catalysts for the creation of cultural projects as well. Magazines, newsletters, university courses, and Web sites centered on the experiences of mixed race people have emerged, as has a growing body of scholarship, literature, and film with multiracial themes. These organizational, political, and cultural projects reflect a general upsurge in "multiracial" identity as a mode of individual identification, but also as a locus of collective identification.

By 1997 when Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials were deciding the future of census classification, it was clear that mixed race people were organized and aware of each other. That awareness has only increased since then, due in large part to the attention given the fight over census categories. How that awareness has developed is less clear. How, I wanted to know, had a category of people largely invisible to and isolated from one another, with virtually no institutions or symbolic recognition of them as a group, come together? Why had this movement developed when it did? And what was it about "being mixed" that constituted a compelling basis for such activism? In what ways did such an experience cohere across a variety of ethnoracial "mixtures"? Did these new coalitions of mixed race people signal something new about ethnic and racial group formation?

The resurgence of public discussion around racial hybridity is especially notable when we remember that for most of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of racial classification had been particularly rigid, based on a notion of descent, and with few exceptions, admitting of no racial boundary crossing or the possibility of changing one's race. This was not always and everywhere the case in the United States, to be sure. In the antebellum period, particularly in the lower South, hybrid populations were at times officially counted and had social significance. With slavery's demise, other means of controlling African Americans and maintaining white dominance, like Black Codes and eventually the panoply of segregationist policies that would come to be known as Jim Crow, took its place.

By the end of the nineteenth century, in an atmosphere of fear and hysteria over the specter of racial equality, recognition of hybridity was increasingly less tolerated. Landmark cases establishing restrictions on interracial marriage were decided in the post-Reconstruction period along with the Plessy v. Ferguson case that established a legal precedent legitimizing the one-drop rule. The creation of antimiscegenation laws would see their greatest increase in the upcoming decades. Subject to increasingly harsh restrictions imposed under Jim Crow, mulattoes, once careful to assert their difference from "unmixed" blacks, began to form common cause with them, mingling politically, socially, and intimately. By the mid-1920s, the problem of what to do with hybrid populations was largely resolved. The state treated anyone with a known black ancestor as black, a characterization that mulattoes came to accept and even embrace.

The problem of "mixedness" all but disappeared from public debate in the twentieth century through the institutionalization of the one-drop rule and its eventual social acceptance. In the late 1970s when Joel Williamson was writing his history of racial hybridity in the United States, he framed the scope of his project as an answer to this question: "Why is it that American mulattoes of all shades have been brusquely relegated to a single Negro caste along with blacks and, further, have come to eagerly embrace that identity?" (Williamson 1995, 2). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, students of race and ethnicity need to ask a different question. Why is it that American "multiracials" have begun to assert an identity as neither black nor white (nor Asian or Indian), but both or all, and why have they sought official recognition of that identity? The current struggle over multiracial identity owes its genesis to the outcomes of these previous struggles over racial identity and is in part the product of the institutionalization of the one-drop rule and the contradictions to which it gave rise.

In the early stages of this movement, activists seeking federal classification, and some scholars, referred to multiracials as if they were a group constituted as such-conscious of itself, unified, but one that had not received social recognition (Omi and Espiritu 2000; Association of Multiethnic Americans 1997). Multiracials were, they argued, just like other minority groups and had a right to be recognized by the state. Their opponents treated them as if they were not a group at all-merely a statistical population, completely individualized and unaware of each other, and thus not worthy of social classification (J. M. Spencer 1997).

The assumption that mixed race people were merely a statistical population made little sense given the growing number of organizations for them and their remarkable success in garnering public attention. Yet it was unclear in just what ways they were a "group." To uncritically accept multiracial activists' claims to group status seemed to ignore the fact that for most of the twentieth century they were not organized or recognized as such. Moreover, such a claim failed to recognize that the battle over official classification was an important means through which multiracials were making themselves as a group-by getting the government to recognize the group, and in so doing, to help create its existence. So rather than assume that "multiracials" exist as such (or that they do not), I ask why "mixed" persons are now activating these particular ancestries in this way and why they have become salient bases of public and private identification.

I am very much persuaded by the critiques brought by Bourdieu and others on the tendency of social scientists to reify social groups even as we invoke the mantra that they are socially constructed (Bourdieu 1996; Brubaker 2004; Wacquant 1997). Rogers Brubaker, one of the most persistent critics of this tendency, argues that social scientists need to rethink the ways we view such "groups":

Ethnicity, race and nation should be conceptualized not as substances or things or entities or organisms or collective individuals-as the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded and enduring "groups" encourages us to do-but rather in relational, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms. This means thinking of ethnicity not in terms of substantial groups or entities but in terms of practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas,discursiveframes,organizationalroutines,institutionalforms,political projects, and contingent events. It means thinking of ethnicization, racialization, and nationalization as political, social, cultural and psychological processes. And it means taking as a basic analytical category not the "group" as an entity, but groupness as a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable.

The development of "multiracials" as a social category in the United States provides a perfect opportunity to see how such group-making projects proceed. (For an extended discussion situating multiracial mobilization in social theory, see Appendix C).

This approach to studying ethnicity "without groups," however, poses a small linguistic problem, namely how to refer to a group-in-the-making without appearing to presume its existence. The adoption of multiracial by activists is itself a group-building device, a new term activists selected to distance their rendering of mixed identity from previous terms for racial mixedness like mulatto that they deemed derogatory. The creation of the term multiracial is also part of an attempt to persuade others that the group exists in the way activists describe. Throughout this book I use the term multiracial interchangeably with others like persons of mixed descent and mixed race. This is in part to signal a distance between my analysis and the language that movement participants use to advance their cause. I use multiple terms to refer to racial mixedness rather than a single one to avoid giving the impression that multiracials are a group in any fixed sense. My intent is to describe a process of group formation rather than assume its result. Moreover, I use these terms to refer to both persons of mixed descent and to parents of mixed race children, both of whom are key in this group-making process.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804755469
• ISBN 13: 9780804755467
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
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