Reflections on Multiracial Identity on Another Thanksgiving Passed

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2015-12-10 02:47Z by Steven

Reflections on Multiracial Identity on Another Thanksgiving Passed

Black Agenda Report: News, information and analysis from the black left.
2015-12-01

Danny Haiphong

The U.S. imperial domain floats on raw force and fairy tales. One myth “paints the U.S. as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.” Another tale holds that multi-racial identity “carries with it new experiences with racism not yet easily understood or dealt with.” The truth is, the U.S.is racist to the core, and “proponents of multiracial identity possess little interest in solidarity.”

Over the last few years, much discussion has occurred in the US corporate media around the demographic shift in the US. Reports have verified that white Americans will be minorities in the general population after 2042. This impending change has struck fear in the eyes of the racist, rightwing sector of society and romanticism in the minds of the racist, white liberal sector of society. The right has responded with racist terror while self-identified white liberals have found new ways to boast of the so-called “progress” of US capitalist society. Multiracial identity has been a key concept recently devised to sanitize the racial political order of the US.

The politics of multiracial identity are a product of the same liberal mythology so embedded in the Thanksgiving holiday. This ideology, promoted by the liberal sector of the ruling class, celebrates Thanksgiving as proof that the US is a “nation of immigrants.” Thanksgiving positions the US as a cooperative society. The fairy tale paints the US as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.

Similarly, multiracial identity has been featured in corporate media such as the New York Times as a product of an increasingly tolerant, diverse US Empire. The US corporate media is quick to cite how more self-identified “Americans” are marrying between racial groups and how migrations of peoples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have increased as well. These developments are indeed fact. However, the past and present exploitation that underlies their meaning is left out of the discussion in the same manner that the continued plight and resistance of indigenous peoples is left out of the Thanksgiving narrative…

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