Me-Too Ethnicity and the Whiteness Trap
MULTIRACIALITY STUDIES AND WHITENESS STUDIES
The two most striking themes—some would say movements—in ethnic studies literature of the past quarter century are expressions of multiraciality and studies of Whiteness. There are similarities and perhaps connections between the two themes. Both depend on an understanding that race is a constructed entity rather than a biological essence. Both Whiteness studies and multiracialism have been put forth by their advocates as expressions of antiracism. In addition, both have been accused by their detractors of selling out the interests of people of color. It is true that there are potential dangers for monoracial communities of color in both the Whiteness studies movement and the multiracial movement. It is also true that the multiracial movement has been more concerned with the psychological needs of individuals than with the needs of monoracial communities. However, as we will see, the dangers are greater in Whiteness studies than in the multiracial idea. Critics’ fears to the contrary, the acknowledgment of multiraciality, even the assertion of a multiracial identity, is not necessarily an indicator that one is abandoning one’s community of color and seeking Whiteness.
Whether for good or for ill, the last decade and a half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first saw the rise of a new consciousness of racial multiplicity, both on the part of people who were claiming multiracial identities and in the minds of monoracial observers. The shelf of books on multiraciality has been growing rapidly.1 Ethnic studies departments have begun to recognize this trend. Courses on multiraciality are taught at a steadily growing number of universities across the country.2 Courses and textbooks on race and ethnicity routinely now include units on multiraciality.3 At least one university has hired and tenured a professor whose job is specifically to teach multiracial issues.4 There is even a high school course on multiracial identity, at the Los Angeles School for Global Studies, taught for credit in the spring semester of 2012.5 Multiracial student organizations have sprouted on scores of college campuses.
Alongside the heightened attention to multiraciality, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed a boom in Whiteness studies. Scholars began to examine the experiences of European Americans as a racial group. The impetus came from left-wing White scholars who wanted to examine the bases and processes of White privilege so that they might undermine it. The list of books in this field is just as long as that in multiraciality studies.6 The American Historical Association and the American Studies Association have held sessions on the history and culture of Whiteness. Can the establishment of faculty positions in Whiteness studies be far behind?7
RACIAL CONSTRUCTIONS
The notion of multiraciality and the advocacy of Whiteness studies both depend on a constructivist concept of ethnicity, of the sort I described in chapter 1. In The Sweeter the Juice, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip shows half of her racially mixed family creating themselves as Black people and the other half creating themselves as White.8 In “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” Maria Root argues passionately that people of mixed ancestry ought not be bound by someone else’s notions of racial categories or appropriate racial behavior. She argues that, as a multiracial person,
not to keep the races separate within me
not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity
not to justify my ethnic legitimacy I have the right
to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify
to identify myself differently than how my parents identify me
to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters
to identify myself differently in different situations.9
This is a powerful statement about race as individual choice, as something plastic that may—and perhaps must—be molded by individuals on a daily basis.
In an equally constructivist vein, Matthew Jacobson writes of Whiteness as “alchemy.” He portrays the White group in American history as a coalition with ever-changing boundaries around it and constantly morphing glue holding it together. Karen Brodkin writes (although I believe her argument is overstated) about “how Jews became White folks.” David Roediger, in a much more careful exposition with less sweeping claims, shows how White working people in the nineteenth century gathered in class solidarity, in part on the basis of an increasing sense of racial solidarity. The most boldly constructivist of all the Whiteness studies writers is Noel Ignatiev. He argues that Whiteness itself is not a matter of skin color, ancestry, or anything else that might be attributed to historical or biological background. Rather, he says, Whiteness is defined by the very act of oppressing Black people.10
UNDERMINING RACISM
The main expressions in each literature, Whiteness and multiraciality studies, assert that they are antiracist in intent and impact. Multiracialists contend their work undermines the very categories of racism. Aubyn Fulton says, “I think the existence of [interracial individuals] is corrosive to and undermining of the current racial status quo (in this context I think that ‘corrosive’ and ‘undermining’ are good things, since I think that the current racial status quo is a bad thing and should be corroded and undermined).”11 Ronald Glass and Kendra Wallace insist:
Race cannot be ignored as a conceptual framework because of its theoretical inadequacy for capturing the phenomenon of race, nor because of its simplistic use of reified notions for historically dynamic meanings and practices. Nor can the politics of race be transcended by a mental act of some sort (like a change in belief, or an act of will) nor wished away in a fantasy of color-blindness…. But an even stronger challenge to race can come from people at the margins to all racial centers; that is, from people expressive of multiracial existence and evident human variation, who resist efforts to be subdued and brought within racial orders.12
Reginald Daniel submits that people who maintain multiracial identities are “subverting the racial divide.” I have written that multiracial people, by their very choice to assert a multiracial identity, are “undermining the very basis of racism, its categories.”13
In similar fashion, students of Whiteness say they are interrogating and thereby undermining the processes of White privilege. Some of them call their collective project “critical White studies.” Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey call themselves “race traitors.”14 In addition, some scholars of Whiteness do, in fact, examine their subject in such a way as to critique White privilege. David Roediger, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, writes of “the wages of Whiteness”: “The pleasures of Whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for White workers. That is, status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships, North and South. White workers could, and did, divine and accept their class positions by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and as ‘not Blacks.’”15 George Lipsitz writes of “the possessive investment in Whiteness” and calls into question “the content of [White people’s] character.16
CRITIQUES OF MULTIRACIALITY AND WHITENESS STUDIES
Despite aspirations to undermine racial privilege on the part of scholars and advocates of multiraciality and Whiteness studies, some critics have nonetheless derided each of these modes of study as tending to reinforce racial hierarchy and White privilege. Monoracialist critics say that advocacy of a multiracial interpretation encourages individuals to flee identification with communities of color and seek a middle social position, lightened by recognition of their ancestral multiplicity. Jon Michael Spencer accuses advocates of a multiracial identity of trying to create in America a three-tiered racial hierarchy like the one he perceives to exist in South Africa: White on top, multiracial in the middle, and Black on the bottom.17 In a more sophisticated analysis, Rainier Spencer agrees and argues that asserting multiraciality constitutes a racist embrace of the one-drop rule. Because nearly every person in America who has some African ancestry also has other ancestries, the only logical thing to do would be to call all African Americans multiracial people. To do so, he argues, would be to ignore the real social disabilities suffered by African Americans. He argues that good census data are needed to measure racial progress or the lack thereof, and that monoracial categories are the necessary categories of analysis. “The challenge for America,” he says, “lies in determining how to move away from the fallacy of race while remaining aggressive in the battle against racism.”18
Both of these critics—indeed, most of the criticism of the multiracial movement—have focused on the successful 1990s movement to change the racial categories employed by the US Census. That is curious, for I read the census debate as a significant but ultimately minor issue in a much broader multiracial social movement.19 Nonetheless, their opposition to both commonly espoused options, a multiracial category and multiple box checking, is echoed by some members of the public who identify themselves monoracially despite possessing multiple ancestries. Declaring his intention to eschew the chance to check more than one box on the 2000 census and determined to check the “Black” box only, Michael Gelobter asked, “Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and black? Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black?” For African American leaders such as Du Bois and Douglass to have acknowledged their patent multiracial ancestry, argues Gelobter, would have been for them to have abandoned common cause with other African Americans.20 This is the core of the monoracial argument against the expression of a multiracial identity: claiming a multiracial identity means abandoning Black America.21
Critics of Whiteness studies are equally caustic. The critics complain that, whatever their antiracist intentions may be, the authors of Whiteness studies place White people at the center of attention, thus distracting from the real needs of peoples of color. Noel Ignatiev wrote a book with the title How the Irish Became White and Karen Brodkin followed with How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America.22 Soon scholars and laypeople alike could be heard to remark, “You know, once [X White group] were not White, but then they became White.” This amounted to a kind of me-too ethnicity. White people were saying, “Look at us. We have race, too. We are the ones who merit attention.” Significant energy in ethnic studies began to shift away from examining the lives and experiences of people of color. Instead, that attention began to go to White people, who, I contend, already were the subject of nearly the entire curriculum. Many studies of Whiteness, in this interpretation, amount to little more than me-too ethnic self-absorption on the part of White people.
It is that quality of self-absorption in each movement and a related individualism that are troubling. The central claim of the multiracial movement is that America must recognize the multiplicity in their identities as multiracial individuals. They tend to be opposed by the group claims of monoracially defined communities of color. Marie Hara and Nora Okja Keller have edited a stunning collection of poetry and prose by multiracial women. However, in sixty-three sensitive evocations of the various authors’ life experiences, almost no attention is paid to group needs. It is all about their own individual identity and relationship issues.23 Many multiracial activists are in practical fact committed to the needs of the communities of color to which they have connections, but their multiracial claim is essentially an individualistic concern. Similarly, Whiteness studies have resulted in a significant turning away from the issues of communities of color and redirecting of that scholarly energy toward White people as a group. In addition to individualism and self-concern, both intellectual movements have a trendy quality. As Danzy Senna writes, “Hybridity is in”; the same can be said of Whiteness.24
CONNECTING MULTIRACIALITY AND WHITENESS STUDIES
Whatever the merits of multiraciality and of Whiteness studies, the critics have pointed to at least potentially problematic tendencies in these two intellectual movements. It now remains to be ascertained whether there is a connection between these two fields of concern. From a certain skeptical angle, one may view the assertion of a multiracial identity as a kind of Whiteness experience: centering Whiteness, decentering monoracial oppression, and deemphasizing the needs of communities of color. This we may call the Whiteness trap.
A University of California, Berkeley, student, himself multiracial, complains about his classmates in Hapa Issues Forum, one of the multiracial groups on campus: “They’re all Japanese-White kids from the suburbs who think that because they are part White their shit don’t stink.” Lisa Jones writes:
By marketing themselves as anything but black, do light-complexioned entertainers such as [Mariah] Carey become, in the eyes of most Americans, de facto whites? And do Carey and other people of color who feel more at ease representing themselves by their combination ethnic heritages, and not by race[,] … teach the world how to be “raceless”? Or are they positioning themselves as a separate class along the lines of South African “coloreds”?25
There may be some evidence that the assertion of a multiracial identity is related to middle-class status and experience in White contexts. Kerry Ann Rockquemore surveyed 250 college students, each of whom had one White parent and one Black parent. She found that those raised in middle-class White neighborhoods tended to identify themselves as biracial, whereas those raised in Black communities tended to identity themselves as monoracially Black.26
Jon Michael Spencer suggests that White parents with Black partners who have advocated a multiracial census category have done so partly out of a wish for their children to avoid the disabilities of being Black in American society: “[It] is not all about the self-esteem of their mixed-race children. Some of this behavior has to do with the self-esteem of these interracially married White parents who have difficulty accepting their mixed-race children choosing black as an identity.” The most insistent advocate of a multiracial census option, Susan Graham of Project RACE, lends some support to such a suggestion when she says, “Nobody can tell me my children are more black than white.”27
The conservative activist Charles Byrd, who is also a multiracialist, says, “What we need to do as a country is get rid of these stupid [racial] boxes altogether.” Royce Van Tassell echoes this opinion, setting forth multiraciality as a station on the way to getting rid of talking about race entirely. Van Tassel, affiliated with a right-wing action group that sponsors the Race Has No Place Project, wants to drum any consideration of race—of the causes, patterns, and consequences of racial discrimination—out of American public life. As evidence to support his claim that Americans do not want to think about race, talk about race, or collect data about the status of America’s various racial communities, he cites a survey his group sponsored that claims that a large majority of Americans would describe a person of a Black parent and a White parent as multiracial. He skips several logical steps to the conclusion that “Americans want to reclaim their racial privacy, and they are tired of the government’s intrusive race questions.”28
There are considerable grounds, then, to make the argument that multiraciality lightens. At the very least, the multiracial idea can give support to the position that the most important thing is an individual’s self-identity. As in the cases of Van Tassel and Byrd, the concept of multiraciality may be used by people with malign motives to attack communities of color.
DOES MULTIRACIALITY LIGHTEN? EVIDENCE FROM HISTORY
One may grant that there may be some measure of evidence for Rainier Spencer’s fears. Some people who are not persons of goodwilll—who do not support the interests of communities of color in the United States and who do not want White Americans to have to take race seriously—may welcome the multiracial movement. They may try to turn it to their ends, as a way station on the path to ignoring race (and, therefore, their own guilt) entirely. Yet does that mean that the critics’ contention is true? Does multiraciality necessarily lighten? Contrary to the contentions of Spencer, Gelobter, and others, there is not much historical evidence that it does.
Consider the cases of several prominent Americans who acknowledged multiracial ancestry. Frederick Douglass was the most widely known African American of the nineteenth century. He was the son of a slave woman and a White man, although his features were such that he could not easily have passed for White. There was no fiercer advocate of the rights of African Americans, yet throughout his life Douglass acknowledged his White ancestry along with the Black. He insisted on traveling in an interracial social world and in his later years married a White woman. Douglass acknowledged his multiraciality, even as he embraced Black America fully.29
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a turn-of-the-century African American writer and the wife of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. She was Black in her writing and in her political commitments. However, her social world was racially mixed, and she passed for White frequently in her private life, for instance, to shop in segregated White stores or to attend the theater. Reading out from Dunbar-Nelson’s life to those of several of her contemporaries and successors in African American letters, Hanna Wallinger concludes that “although racial thinking determined the public utterances and creative writing of many prominent African Americans— … Charles Chesnutt, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Hallie E. Queen, and Josephine and Senator Blanche Bruce—it did not determine their personal lives to an exclusive degree.”30
Edith Maude Eaton was another of that same generation that spanned the turn of the twentieth century. She has widely been honored as the fore-mother of Asian American fiction. The child of English and Chinese parents, she lived in North America, took the pen name Sui Sin Far, and wrote in humane and sympathetic tones about the plight of Chinese Americans. Nonetheless, although she has been honored for her public persona as a Chinese American, she lived her personal life as a White woman.31
Perhaps there is no more revered figure in African American history than W. E. B. Du Bois—historian, sociologist, journalist, cofounder of the NAACP, pan-Africanist. Indeed, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author subtitled Du Bois’s story Biography of a Race. Du Bois was fervently committed to his identity as an African American, to the African American people, and later to the entire African diaspora. Yet in Dusk of Dawn, one of several autobiographies, Du Bois discusses at great length the various strands of his European ancestry, some of it quite recent, and the degrees of his affinity with those strands. Du Bois was light of skin and European of feature, and he could easily have passed for White had he chosen to do so. He consistently recognized his multiraciality. However, that did not mitigate his embrace of Blackness or his effectiveness in serving the cause of African Americans.32
Similar stories could be told of other important figures of African American history: Mary Church Terrell, first president of the National Association of Colored Women; Mordecai Johnson, first African American president of Howard University; Walter White, novelist and longtime executive secretary of the NAACP; Jean Toomer, herald of the Harlem Renaissance; Adam Clayton Powell Jr., flamboyant congressmember from Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s. All these were multiracial people who acknowledged, even embraced, their multiraciality and who nonetheless were leaders in one way or another of communities of color. Even Wallace D. Fard, the mysterious figure behind the founding of the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X, the Black Muslims’ fiery leader, were multiracial men who acknowledged their multiraciality, although they were less sanguine about it than Douglass or Du Bois.
Earlier in this chapter, I reported that Michael Gelobter asked, “Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and black? Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black?” I think it is possible, given the shape of those men’s careers and the contents of their public utterances, that they might well have chosen to check both “Black” and “White” boxes if they had lived to the time of the 2000 and 2010 census. Both they, and all the other individuals to whom I have just referred, identified themselves emphatically with communities of color (Black and Chinese in these cases). Yet they all also acknowledged their multiplicity and did not try to mask it. Some, like Dunbar-Nelson and Sui Sin Far, lived part of the time on the White side of the line. Some, like Du Bois, gloried in their multiraciality even as they chose monoracial lives. Some, like Malcolm X, hated their White ancestry. However, all recognized their multiplicity even as they chose to serve communities of color. There is just not adequate historical evidence to conclude that acknowledgment or embrace of a multiracial identity necessarily lightens. The important issue for monoracial communities of color is not whether multiracial people claim their multiraciality but whether, having done so, they continue to serve the needs of those communities of color.
The criticism of the multiracial movement—that it is a form of seeking after Whiteness—has theoretical validity. It points to a real danger. There are those who advocate a multiracial identity who also would like to do away with consideration of race in American society, who in effect would abandon the needs of communities of color. However, examining the actual lives of several multiracial people in historical context suggests that recognition, even embrace, of a multiracial identity does not mean that multiracial people fall into the Whiteness trap.
NOTES
A quite different version of this essay appeared in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 289–300. I have updated many references and clarified some language but preserved the original argument.
1. Places to begin on the multiracial phenomenon include G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); Maria P. P. Root, ed., The Multiracial Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ed., “Mixed Race” Studies (New York: Routledge, 2004); Teresa Williams León and Cynthia L. Nakashima, eds., The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); and Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Other prominent writings on multiracial people and the movement include Suki Ali, Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities, and Cultural Practices (New York: Berg, 2003); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1987); Katya Gibel Azoulay, Black, Jewish, and Interracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); David L. Brunsma, ed., Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind”Era (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006); David Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Carol Camper, ed., Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1994), Greg Carter, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Kip Fulbeck, Paper Bullets (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Kip Fulbeck, Part Asian–100% Hapa (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006); Lise Funderburg, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity (New York: Morrow, 1994); Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Patricia Penn Hilden, When Nickels Were Indians: An Urban, Mixed-Blood Story (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Gerald Horne, The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Margaret L. Hunter, Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone (New York: Routledge, 2005); Kevin R. Johnson, How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Kevin R. Johnson, ed., Mixed Race America and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Ralina L. Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Yelena Khanga, Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family, 1865–1992 (New York: Norton, 1992); Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Stephen Small, Minelle Mahtani, Miri Song, and Paul Spickard, eds., Global Mixed Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Kathleen Odell Korgen, ed., Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity (New York: Routledge, 2010); Karen Isaaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: Punjabi-Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (New York: Riverhead, 1996); Robert S. McKelvey, Dust of Life: America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Kien Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002); Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995); Jill Olumide, Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race (London: Polity Press, 2002); David Parker and Miri Song, eds., Rethinking “Mixed Race” (London: Pluto Press, 2001); Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Joanne L. Rondilla and Paul Spickard, Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Maria P. P. Root and Matt Kelley, eds., Multiracial Child Resource Book (Seattle: Mavin Foundation, 2003); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (New York: Penguin, 2011); Miri Song, Choosing Ethnic Identity (London: Polity, 2003); Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Spickard and Daniel, Racial Thinking; Cathy J. Tashiro, Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed Race Americans (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix, Black, White, or Mixed Race? (New York: Routledge, 1993); Dorothy West, The Wedding (New York: Doubleday, 1995); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 1995); Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980); Winters and DeBose, New Faces in a Changing America; Marguerite Wright, I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
2. In recent years, they have included the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara; California State University campuses at Northridge, Pomona, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Jose; Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i; University of Hawai‘i; Brown University; Portland State University; University of Illinois; University of Texas at Austin; Golden Gate University Law School; Mills College; Oregon State University; Dartmouth College; Scripps College; University of Vermont; University of Oregon; University of Southern California; New York University; Stanford University; Saint Louis University; Simmons College; University of Washington; Pomona College; University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; and Berklee College of Music. This list came from the author’s personal knowledge and from a Google survey of courses in credible online listings conducted on August 11, 2013. It is likely that there are others I have missed.
3. E.g., Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi, eds., Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996); Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2007).
4. San Francisco State University, in the College of Ethnic Studies.
5. www.mascsite.org/programs/multiracialstudies/ (retrieved August 11, 2013).
6. A sampling: Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994, 1997); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Walter Bronwen, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place, and Irish Women (New York: Routledge, 2001); Christine Clark and James O’Donnell, eds., Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1999); Dalton Conley, Honky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Kalpana Seshari Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (New York: Routledge, 2000); Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall, eds., Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Renee R. Curry, White Women Writing White (New York: Greenwood, 2000); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997); Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong, eds., Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Ruth Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); John Gabriel, Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1998); Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (New York: Touchstone, 1998); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998); Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); John Hartigan, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Joe Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ronald E. Chennault, eds., White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Maureen Reddy, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Nelson M. Rodriguez and Leila E. Villaverde, eds., Dismantling White Privilege: Pedagogy, Politics, and Whiteness (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994); David Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990); Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York: Continuum, 1999); Transition: The White Issue, no. 73 (1996); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997). For further examples, see the notes to chapter 3.
7. Some would argue that the majority of faculty positions in the humanities and social sciences are, in fact, already dedicated to Whiteness studies: European philosophy, English literature, Western Civilization, European art, etc.
8. Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
9. Maria P. P. Root, “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, 3–14.
10. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. For a more careful exposition of racial construction on the part of African Americans in the same period, see Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For theoretical formulations of racial construction, see Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, eds., We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
11. Aubyn Fulton, message posted to interracial individuals discussion list, ii-list@hcs.Harvard.edu (May 30, 1997); quoted in Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: West-view, 1999), 197.
12. Ronald David Glass and Kendra R. Wallace, “Challenging Race and Racism: A Framework for Educators,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, 341–58.
13. G. Reginald Daniel, “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” in Root, Racially Mixed People, 91–107; Paul Spickard, Rowena Fong, and Patricia Ewalt, “Undermining the Very Basis of Racism, Its Categories,” Social Work 40.6 (1995): 725–28.
14. Delgado and Stefancic, Critical White Studies; Ignatiev and Garvey, Race Traitor.
15. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.
16. Lipsitz, Possessive Investment.
17. In this early work, Spencer sees only two races in America: Black and White. He offers essentially no evidence for his South African analogy; Spencer, New Colored People.
18. Spencer, Spurious Issues, 167. Rainier Spencer’s critique has become somewhat more subtle and discerning in subsequent volumes; see Challenging Multiracial Identity (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006) and Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011).
19. See my review of Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both, and Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America, in the Journal of American Ethnic History 18.2 (1999): 153–56.
20. Diana Jean Schemo, “Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only,” New York Times, February 12, 2000, A1, A9.
21. Two other outstanding examples of critiques of the multiracial idea and movement are Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). For analysis of Sexton’s unfortunate book, see my review in American Studies 50.1–2 (Summer 2009): 125–27. Elam’s is much more nuanced in its analysis, though it is marred by sloppy research.
22. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks.
23. Marie Hara and Nora Okja Keller, eds., Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry and Prose (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1999).
24. Danzy Senna, “The Mulatto Millennium,” in Half + Half, ed. C. C. O’Hearn (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 12–27.
25. Lisa Jones, Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
26. Kerry Ann Rockquemore, “Between Black and White: Exploring the Bi-racial Experience,” Race and Society 1.2 (1998), 197–212; Brunsma and Rockquemore, Beyond Black.
27. Spencer, Colored People, 87; Schemo, “Despite Option.”
28. Schemo, “Despite Option”; M. Royce Van Tassell, “Americans Are Tired of Racial Boxes: Vast Majority Want Government to ‘Leave My Race Alone!,’” The Egalitarian 3.2 (2000): 1, 5.
29. Gregory Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
30. Hanna Wallinger, “Not Color but Character: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Uncompleted Argument,” in Racial Thinking in the United States, ed. Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
31. Paul Spickard and Laurie Mengel, “Deconstructing Race: The Multiethnicity of Sui Sin Far,” Books and Culture (November 1997): 4–5; Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
32. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Holt, 1993); W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984; orig. 1940).