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…
