Amalgamation Schemesoffers a critique of multiracialism in the post–civil rights era United States. “Multiracialism” here is inclusive of the political initiatives of the multiracial movement, the academic field of multiracial studies, and the media discourse about “race mixture” in contemporary culture and society. In this book, I consider both the implications of multiracialism for theorizations of race and its restaging of sexual politics in the name of progressive social change. Against the claims of leading proponents, I find that the principal political effects of multiracialism are neither a fundamental challenge to the living legacies of white supremacy nor...

During the 1990s, the United States was home to an unprecedented national conversation regarding the politics of recognition in the practice of racial demography—not in pursuit of the conventional cordon sanitaire that historically constitutes white communities, but for the express purpose of administering an inclusive, multiracial democracy. For nearly three decades, the various federal agencies responsible for generating and reporting statistical data on race (and ethnicity) had been wrestling with the designation of relevant differences when the belated, and rapidly belabored, question of “diversity” exploded into public discourse, linked mainly to the impact of mass immigration from Asia and...

The questions posed today by the politics of multiracialism in the United States reconfigure what previous generations from Reconstruction onward have known as “social equality,” and this is so to the extent that multiracialism returns the matter of interracial sexuality to the center of public discourse. Yet, it does so obliquely, through disavowal and deflection. In chapter 1, we saw that multiracial advocates consider African Americans in the post–civil rights era, particularly the native-born black population, to have become, by strange twist of fate, a community of latter-day segregationists prey to a retrograde, separatist nationalism that has allowed them...

In the previous chapter, we explored the assertion within multiracial discourse that consensual sexual relations between white male slaveholders and enslaved black females allowed genuine interracial intimacy to flourish under the regime of chattel slavery in the antebellum United States. We found the assertion to be not only unsupported on its own terms but also entirely misplaced given the questions at hand—an ethical evasion of the foreclosure of black female consent under the conditions of enslavement, as detailed by a number of noted black feminist scholars. Further, the peculiar historical demand for black femalesexualconsent in relations with...

The epigraphs for this chapter dispute the multiracial project by remarking the destabilization of political criticism by the temporal force of historicity and the peculiar display of desire revealed by the structural dynamics of psychoanalytic experience. Insofar as multiracialism speaks of “the end of race,” the multiracial personality prides itself on causing trouble for the white supremacist rage for order, an ostensible violation of racial discipline, a threat to enshrined notions of racial purity. Multiracial identity is elusive and cannot be fixed, captured, or tethered. However, a troublesome, fugitive presence has its consequences. For Linda Alcoff (1995), “A self that...

If the discourse of multiracialism is troubled by its disavowal of interracial sexuality and that disavowal’s origination is in a protective concession to negrophobia, then the global cultural imaginary, or ratherthe cultural imaginary of the global, is no less interrupted by a figure of race mixture, a scandal at the heart of the cultures of globalization. If the overlapping conceptions of “globalization,” “globalism,” and “globality” articulate a vast array of transformations and restructuring in political economy, social organization, cultural production, and law (Lechner and Boli 2003), they betray nonetheless a curious inability to formulate a coherent position regarding the...