Mixed Race Studies

The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez

Boston College Third World Law Journal
Volume 20, Number 2 (Spring 2000)
pages 231-290

Reginald L. Robinson, Professor of Law
Howard University

In this article, the author posits that race as an idea begins with consciousness that reinforces that race is real and immutable. The Multiracial Category Movement can shift our race consciousness away from traditional ways of thinking, talking, and using race. The Movement moves us beyond binary race thinking, and this new thinking shifts the extant race consciousness matrix. It also frees our consciousness so that we can personally and politically acknowledge our biracial and multiracial identities, and it perforce alters the traditional political meaning of race. Legal scholars like Professor Tanya Hernandez argue for the political meaning of race against a remediating balm against the color-blind jurisprudence, weakening of civil right protections, and pigmentocracy. While these new identities can promote color-blind jurisprudence by conservatives and pigmentocracy by those fleeing the oppressive constraints of traditional racial categories, the author argues against Hernandez and for the Movement’s paradigm shifting possibilities.

Introduction

Although we socially, historically, and psychologically co-create racism and white supremacy, race is not biologically factual. It is not real. As such, race does not have any meaning that survives its social and historical context. Race exists, if ever, in our individual and cultural consciousness. If we do not constantly and consciously meditate on it, race cannot exist. Unfortunately, we fuel this social construct with our mental kindling and intellectual logs. Race, racism, and white supremacy exist because we—individually and collectively—create it, enforce it, and sustain it. Thus, it is our race consciousness and its attendant behavior that remain the apt locus for racism and white supremacy. We consciously create race by externalizing what we think about, for example, blacks. This race-thinking—or externalizing—constructs our liberal world, and this world in turn constructs us. As Jerome Bruner would perhaps argue, race for all of us is the “out there” that first exists “in here.” In this way, race is not only constructed but is also a consciousness matrix.

Basically, if race arises from a consciousness matrix, does race necessarily have an essential meaning outside of how we think, use and talk about race? I think not! Thinking, talking, and using give race its life force, content, and meaning (e.g., racism). Without our thinking, talking, and using, race loses its practical, social function, and we need never experience the individual and collective pain that follows consciously or otherwise when we force people to separate unnaturally from each other. Unfortunately, if we continue to think, talk, and use race, we—blacks, whites, and others—co-create these venal experiences. And then we become drunk and sickened by the nasty mead we have created, and in this drunken stupor, we forget that we originated race and racism, proclaiming instead that race and racism not only reside in a great unreachable beyond but also remain external, objective, and real.

We rarely ask if race’s meaning exists beyond our consciousness, and we rarely ponder how absolutely central our role is in race’s oppressive meaning. Ultimately, then, it is as if we—blacks, whites, and others—walk into a well-lit room, turn out the lights, forget about the light switch, and then curse the darkness. Because we turned out the light, the idea of darkness must already have existed within our consciousness. By dimming the light, we sought the dark. After we create darkness, then we alienate ourselves from each other by becoming vested in our racialized roles, all the while blaming the liberal state for solely creating race and for deliberately giving race its particularly venal content. Hardly! For dark, fearful reasons, blacks and whites prefer a race consciousness. Why? I think blacks and whites prefer thinking, talking, and using race and race consciousness because each group seeks power, innocence, control, irresponsibility, etc. Worst of all, we foolishly believe that “blackness” or “whiteness” represents our true, spiritual identity and our true beingness.

What nonsense! Again, blacks and whites act as if they cannot respond to how they have allowed themselves to think, talk, and use race. In the end, we become the “blackness” or “whiteness” and its venal content. If we account for a given culture’s collective consciousness, no great, oppressive force exists beyond our own consciousness. Perhaps Pogo was right: we have met the racists, bigots, and fools, and they are us. In this way, race’s meaning is always first “in here” (i.e., matrix consciousness).25

This matrix of race consciousness—race thinking and its meaning—comes under direct attack from the Multiracial Category Movement (MCM). With this MCM, we can weaken our narrow fixation on a singular racial identity, and by broadening our racial lenses, we can achieve at least five goals. First, we can shift our race consciousness. Second, we can destabilize racial categories completely. Third, we can think, talk, and use “race” categories toward a higher, Spiritual end. Fourth, we can eradicate all racial categories. Fifth, we can begin to relate to each other as Spirit beings, despite the different “color” garb we may choose in a given lifetime. In this critical essay, I evaluate Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández’s article, “Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence, and I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly flesh out the problem of a race-consciousness matrix. Then, I argue that the MCM does not in and of itself privilege white over black. Third, the MCM creates a challenge and an opportunity for perhaps yet unimagined social liberty and legal equality. Fourth, the MCM does not perforce invigorate color-blind jurisprudence and thus white supremacy…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Patterns in the United States By State

Public Research Report No. 2001-02
Race Contours 2000 Study: A University of Southern California and University of Michigan Collaborative Project
Released: 2001-04-13

Noel Hacegaba, Adjunct Instructor of Public Administration
University of La Verne, La Verne, California

Dowell Myer, Professor of Public Policy
University of Southern California

• The size of the multiracial population in the United States (2.4%) is roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts.
• The highest prevalence of multiracial residents in a particular race group is generally found in states that have smaller concentrations of that group.
• California departs from the rest of the country in both population size and multiracial prevalence.

INTRODUCTION

In 2000, the Census Bureau allowed multi-racial respondents to identify themselves as such, enabling them to select more than one racial category. This has amplified the opportunities for further research on race.

The number of multiracial persons in the United States amounts to 2.4% of the total population, roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts. Within the different race groups, this prevalence varies considerably. Exhibit 1 is a table showing what percentage of the U.S. population in each racial group is monoracial or multiracial. For this analysis, we define racial groups as all those who selected that race alone or in combination with other races.

The percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders that identify themselves as multiracial, for example, is 54.4%. The same number is 39.9% for American Indians and Alaska Natives and 13.9% for Asians. Blacks and whites show a lower multiracial prevalence with 4.8% and 2.5%, respectively.

Among whites, 97.5% identify themselves only as white. Similarly, 95.2% of blacks identify themselves as strictly monoracial. As expected, the number of monoracial respondents is relatively lower across all other race groups with the exception of the Other category, which is largely comprised of Latinos…

Read the entire report here.

DNA Is Only One Way to Spell Identity

The Washington Post
2006-01-01

W. Ralph Eubanks

Every year,” I once overheard my father say jokingly to a friend, “thousands of Negroes disappear.” I remember my 8-year-old imagination going into overdrive, picturing people zapped from their homes in the middle of the night. It was only as I grew older that I realized that the people my father was talking about were choosing to disappear, running away from their families, not being taken from them. They were light-skinned blacks who could move into the white world undetected, denying their blackness and the exclusion they suffered in a white-dominated America.

I’ve been thinking of my father’s joke a lot recently. It came back to me last month when scientists reported the discovery of a genetic mutation that led to the first appearance of white skin in humans. Reading about it, I wondered how it is that a minor mutation—just one letter of DNA code out of 3.1 billion letters in the human genome—is so highly prized that it has led scores of people to turn their backs on their families and has served to divide people for generations. Discovery of this mutation, combined with recent findings that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical, has reinforced my belief that race is almost entirely a social demarcation, not a biological one…

…Although my ethnic identity is strongly African American, I’ve always had an awareness of my mixed racial heritage. I learned as a teenager that my maternal grandfather was white. To build a life with my grandmother, who was black, my grandfather, Jim Richardson, cast his whiteness aside and lived in Prestwick, Ala., an African American community near Mobile, from around 1920 through the 1950s. Even after my grandmother died in 1936, he continued to raise his children with a strong black identity and to live among the black people who accepted him as one of their own. During her short life, my grandmother, Edna Howell Richardson, accepted Jim completely as he was, faults and all. Perhaps that’s why she never even pointed out his whiteness to his children. It wasn’t until my grandfather was hurt in a logging accident and someone called him a white man in the presence of my mother, who was then 6 years old, that she realized he wasn’t black…

Read the entire article here.