The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice (Suny Series, Philosophy and Race)

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The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice


SUNY series, Philosophy and Race Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors


RONALD R. SUNDSTROM

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sundstrom, Ronald. The browning of America and the evasion of social justice / Ronald Sundstrom. p. cm.—(SUNY series, philosophy and race) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7585-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7914-7586-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Race relations. 2. United States—Ethnic relations. 3. Racism—United States. 4. Race awareness—United States. 5. Social justice—United States. 6. Pluralism (Social sciences)—United States. 7. Multiculturalism—United States. 8. African Americans—Civil rights. 9. United States—Race relations—Political aspects. I. Title. E184.A1S963 2008 305.800973—dc22

2007049895 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Nathan and Ronnie

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, Beauty so sudden for that time of year. —Jean Toomer


Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

Chapter 1

Frederick Douglass’s Political Apostasy

11

Chapter 2

Color Blindness and the Browning of America

37

Chapter 3

The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice

65

Interracial Intimacies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America

93

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Responsible Multiracial Politics

109

Conclusion

133

Notes

139

Bibliography

173

Index

185


Acknowledgments

The final form of this book owes much to the time I was a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Memphis. The countless discussions I had with my colleagues and the graduate students formed my analysis of these issues in numerous ways. I am grateful for the support and criticism that my work received from Sara Beardsworth, Tina Chanter, David Henderson, Kyoo Lee, and Mary Beth Mader, as well as from Robert Bernasconi, the editor for the series of which this book is a part, who contributed invaluable feedback and encouragement as the manuscript took form over the years. I completed this book after I joined the philosophy faculty at the University of San Francisco (USF) in 2003. The comments and criticism on the various chapters that I received from my colleagues in the history, philosophy, politics, and psychology departments and in the African American, Asian American, and ethnic studies programs at USF helped me complete the book. Rebecca Gordon, Tony Fells, David Kim, Jeff Paris, Ruth Starkman, James Taylor, and Manuel Vargas generously gave of their time to read some of the chapters, to listen to my presentations, and to offer corrections and criticisms. My manuscript was significantly improved because of their reviews, and for that I am deeply grateful. I also would like to thank Pamela Balls Organista and Brian Wiener for their support and mentorship during my first years at USF. Likewise, the support that I received from the Minority Writing Retreats at USF, sponsored by the Irvine Foundation and the USF College of Arts and Sciences, was invaluable. Further, the help I received from research assistants Chambord Benton-Hayes and George Fourlas was essential as I finished my manuscript. For the opportunity to present the work that formed the chapters in this book, I thank the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis, the philosophy departments at Washington University in St. Louis, Vanderbilt University, Emory University, the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Humanities Center at Stanford University, and the School of ix

x

Acknowledgments

Social Science at Hampshire College, the Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, and the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race. Additionally, portions of my manuscript benefited from the criticisms and reviews by Linda Martín Alcoff, Lawrence Blum, J. Angelo Corlett, Emily Lee, Robert Gooding-Williams, Howard McGary, Eduardo Mendieta, Paula Moya, and Mariana Ortega. Finally, I thank the anonymous readers for State University of New York Press for their extremely helpful suggestions and corrections. My greatest thanks and appreciation go to my spouse, Nathan Hobbs, and my son, Ronald Sundstrom Jr., for their encouragement and, importantly, patience, as I labored on this manuscript. Moreover, Nathan went above and beyond the call of duty and generously gave his time to edit several chapters. This book is the result of the support I received from a community of friends, colleagues, and family; its errors, however, are mine alone.

Introduction

The demographic change that is sometimes called “the browning of America” promises to transform not only the population of the United States but also the meaning of race and ethnicity within the nation.1 In more than a few imaginings, the browning of America seemly and radically challenges old racial categories and identities in the United States, and the patterns of division and disparity based on them. This hope is a hope for the nation’s future beyond, at the very least, its anachronistic and deeply inaccurate racial and ethnic categories; at most, it is a hope that all such categories are swept away by socially and politically cleansing waves of new immigrants who refuse those old categories and multiracial children for whom those categories do not fit and so they refuse them. The browning of America, in this grand vision, is a social revolution that will extend to our society’s political and social practices. This cleansing vision has caught the imaginations of four groups, the first two of which are not mutually exclusive camps. First, it appeals to those who are tired of racial divisions and who desire a “colorblind” society and connects to the popular interest to end so-called reverse discrimination in race-based public policy; Richard Rodriguez has been a poetic voice for this popular impulse.2 Second, it appeals to liberal nationalists, such as Michael Lind, who regard the legacy of racial oppression and the rise of identity politics as corrosive to national unity; thus, for the liberal intellectual elite concerned with national cohesion and reviving the idea of the common good, the browning of America is a movement that will take the nation beyond a narrow and factional politics of difference.3 The browning of America, however, also has caught the attention of nationalists and xenophobes in the United States, and the idea of the browning of America has likely inhabited their nightmares rather than excited their political imaginations. They regard the transformation of the browning of America as a threat to long-established racial and ethnic demographic patterns and associated patterns of the 1

2


distribution of resources and powers. The browning of America, from their perspective, is the result of generations of chain immigration, illegal immigration, and the lax enforcement of present immigration laws. The browning of America for such citizens is making the United States unrecognizable, and it is undermining Western “civilization” in the United States; Samuel Huntington is a representative figure of this position and nicely demonstrates how the geopolitical anxieties of these nationalists are connected to their concerns about the browning of America.4 In addition to these three camps, there is a fourth that has quietly stated its lukewarm position on the browning of America, and it has only been recognized as a minor note in public discussions of the United State’s demographic shift. This camp is composed of African American intellectual elites and public figures, as well as other liberals and progressives who perceive the browning of America to be a threat to long-existing, or even traditional, claims of social justice by Native Americans and especially African Americans. Moreover, not only are their claims somehow threatened, but the very meaning of the legal principles, such as “civil rights,” upon which their claims are based, is also experiencing transformation. For those who harbor such fears, the browning of America brings with it yet another opportunity for the nation to evade social justice. Mary Frances Berry has delivered the sharpest version of this worry.5 Which position best captures the social and political meaning of the browning of America? The truth of the matter, as I argue later, lies in between these positions. However, to confront these issues means reflecting on the unrequited American desire to escape the encompassing burden of race. The American desire to be rid of race is unrequited not least because that desire is ambivalent. The history of race in America is replete with political and social condemnations of race, while the immoral fruits of racism are justified and exploited through stratagems ranging from scientific racism to sociobiology to the racially coded language of color blindness. We do not want the burden of our crimes, but we want to innocently enjoy the aftermath of our history, tinged as it is with racial oppression and sluggish reform. As a nation, we have taken constant refuge in clichéd evasions of the central demands of social justice that have arisen from the history of race in this country. All is done to regenerate our collective sense of innocence: we revel in the Reaganite slogan “It is morning in America.” This America, forever young, escapes history and its crimes, as well as the difficult and expensive work of economic and

Introduction

3

political justice, and moral reconciliation. We shamelessly indulge ourselves in cheap redemption. Unfortunately, in the celebrations of the browning of America, there is the presence of yet another possible attempt to evade the issues of race and social justice. Just as color blindness is occasionally asserted as the remedy for all of our racial ills, some find hope that new demographic realities in America will solve our old and rancorous racial problems simply by making them irrelevant in a majority Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race America. The browning of America will, in their eyes, “overwhelm” our history and render pointless “old” black and Native American claims for social justice. As Richard Rodriguez commented in his manifesto, Brown, “What I want for African Americans is white freedom. The same as I wanted for myself. . . . The last white freedom in America will be the freedom of the African American to admit brown. Miscegenation. To speak the truth of themselves.”6 The goals of color blindness are reached by, if you will, color saturation. Again, America has found a new morning, a new youth, and it need not struggle with the demands of justice for African Americans or Native Americans. Yet social justice is not to be found in the questionable safety of nostalgia for the traditional racial and ethnic patterns of the United States. Nostalgia for what could be called traditional racial and ethnic patterns leads too easily to nativism and isolationism. Although demographic changes do not erase the nation’s obligations to address long-existing claims for social justice, neither do those obligations give the nation reasons to ignore its moral and political obligations to other groups, such as immigrants and refugees. It would be odd and troubling for the nation to merrily work toward justice at “home,” all the while neglecting the demands of those whom the nation regarded as perpetual foreigners (and not really being at “home” in the nation) and the demands of global justice. Such a vision of justice is self-serving and morally hollow. Long-existing civil rights claims should not delimit the nation’s moral boundaries and its conception of civil rights, thus ipso facto severing them from internationally determined human rights. The reactions of some citizens to the browning of America, unfortunately, open up this possibility, which is yet another evasion of social justice.7 When I broach these issues, or any of the particular issues discussed in this book, the response I frequently receive is that these issues are red herrings that divert our attention away from the real enemy, that of white supremacy.8 I am dubious about this complaint;

4


after all, focusing on “white supremacy” does not directly address the particulars of the interethnic conflicts that arise from the browning of America. Perhaps, though, these critics mean that we should focus on how “white supremacy,” in the form of institutionalized racism or white power, divides minority groups, so as to conquer them and leave them to fight over a limited set of resources. Alternatively, these critiques would have us focus on how Latinos, Asian Americans, Americans who identify as multiracial, and immigrants adopt anti-black racism and the privileges of whiteness as they assimilate into American society. I think the latter argument is bogus, and chapter 3 is devoted in part to explaining why. As for the former, I think “white supremacy” is too broad and vague a category to be helpful, and that focusing on such a flawed category of power can be positively harmful. Such moves simply sidestep the particular issues that are raised in interethnic conflicts and may even contribute to the evasions I outlined earlier. The people of the United States, as they experience and participate in the browning of America, should resist both types of evasions. The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice argues, in contrast, that the people of the United States should see in its demographic change the transformation of social justice. They should welcome that transformation and view it as an opportunity to satisfy old debts and expand in a cosmopolitan direction the very idea of social justice. This book is about these issues—the challenges, threats, and transformations to race, ethnicity, and social justice—that the browning of America brings. The challenge of the browning of America has been barely considered in the philosophy about race and social justice. Within African American philosophy discussions have long existed about the future or “conservation” of racial identities and race as a social category as well as abundant discussions about race and social justice.9 Similarly, there is a growing body of Latino/a philosophy that addresses questions about the ontology of race and identity and questions of social justice that apply to the Latino/a experience.10 Outside of assertions of African American-Latino solidarity over affirmative action, there has been little reflection on how the rapid increase in the Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race populations affects the historical demands for justice made by Native Americans and African Americans. Naomi Zack’s Race and Mixed Race and Angelo Corlett’s Race, Racism, and Reparations are exceptions to this lack of cross-reflection, yet they too do not seriously consider the challenge that the browning of America poses for any discussion of the future of race and social justice.11 It is time for the nation to take up Cornel

Introduction

5

West’s challenge to reflect about what it evades in its philosophy; for West, what philosophy in America evaded was the development of an American philosophy that took U.S. history seriously, and although that project must still be pursued, it must be transformed by an honest consideration of the ethnoracial pluralism that has always been a part of this nation and how the fact of its pluralism, and the meanings it is given, is intimately connected to the global reach of the United States.12 The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice contains five chapters that concentrate on overlapping issues concerning race and social justice and the United States’ demographic transformation. All the same, each chapter is a self-contained work that can be read apart from the rest of the book. The book begins with “Frederick Douglass’s Political Apostasy,” which describes the return to the assimilationist and amalgamationist ideals of Frederick Douglass by anti-racialist politicians and academics. It begins with a critique of the misappropriations of Douglass by contemporary figures within the Republican Party, in particular, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Despite those misappropriations, many elements of Douglass’s legacy attract and are useful to those who are committed to color-blind social policy and law, or who find hope and inspiration in his vision of an amalgamated American people. This chapter explores those continuing appeals, but it also reveals the shortcomings of Douglass’s policies and how those who see themselves continuing his anti-racialist legacy repeat some of his errors. To elucidate Douglass’s ideals and errors, the chapter analyzes his religious and political ideals, his application of them to the issues of race, black American identity, and constitutional interpretation, and how his ideals and positions developed into his projection about the future of race in the United States. All of these matters are guiding features of the anti-race and racial nominalist positions in the contemporary conservation of race debate. Thus we must begin with Douglass. His ideal of a color-blind society that eventually evolves through assimilation and amalgamation into a society beyond race remains a guiding pole in the discussions and debates analyzed in the following chapters—all of them struggle with Douglass’s attractive yet difficult legacy. Chapter 2, “Color Blindness and the Browning of America,” explains the meaning of color blindness and the debates over colorconscious public policy and follows because it is precisely the dream of color blindness and frustration with race divisions in the United States and its categories that drives celebrations of the browning

6


of America and the return to the inspiring legacy of Douglass. The chapter investigates the problems that result from the convergence of the phenomenon of the browning of America with the ideas of color blindness. Color blindness, once an idea full of progressive potential, has been transformed into a legal, political, and social ideal that color, race, or ethnicity should be irrelevant in all matters public and private. Its great failing as an ideal has been due to its rash desire to eliminate race without eliminating racism or rectifying its past harms. In this chapter I consider how the browning of America as an idea can support and even be a version of color blindness. Putting the browning of America side by side with color blindness is jarring because of all the obvious contrasts between the two ideas. The counterintuitive nature of the comparison, however, melts away after an examination of the effects of the browning of America on traditional conceptions and projects of racial justice. The browning of America on the face of it is a descriptive phrase concerning the demographic growth of Latinos, Asian Americans, and those claiming multiracial identity. Nonetheless, there are overlapping ideas, consequences, and constituencies between color blindness and popular conceptions of the browning of America. In this chapter I identify several ways that the browning of America colludes with color blindness and threatens the traditional black-white baseline of racial justice. I argue that the browning of America should be conceptualized and advocated in a manner that does not support color-based racisms, or reverse progress on vital civil rights issues for African Americans and sovereignty claims for Native Americans. The groups that make up the browning of America have before them a moral and political decision of national importance. They can seriously embrace antiracism, or they can fail in their moral obligations by transforming the monster of racism in the United States from a single black-white beast into a brown multiheaded hydra. I also argue that proponents of traditional civil rights claims should not mourn or fear the browning of America. Instead, the browning of America offers important challenges to traditional conceptions of racial justice and ethnoracial patterns that expose assumptions based on nativism, xenophobia, and American nationalism predicated on the black-white binary. The third chapter, “The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice,” takes a hard look at both the complaints and defenses of the “black-white binary,” which is a vague idea that often is accused of dominating discussions of race in America. In this chapter I build on Linda Martín Alcoff’s analysis of the black-white binary in her book Visible Identities.13 I clarify the idea of the black-

Introduction

7

white binary by identifying several competing conceptions of it, and I analyze their relative merits and failures. I also consider and defend the primary complaint against the binary—that it does not engender accurate descriptions of the role and history of race in America, and that it skews discussions of racial justice toward the interests of blacks and whites. The black-white binary is frequently complained about in discussions of civil rights, and it is now being raised in national discussions of immigration and immigration policy, and to what extent immigrants are due civil rights. Clarifying the role of the black-white binary in our conception of civil rights, then, will aid in the transformation of civil rights to meet the challenges of transnational justice. Despite my support of the criticisms of the black-white binary, I take it seriously and consider why the traditional American conversation about race and social justice is threatened by the dismissal of the binary. I conclude that the black-white binary should not simply be dismissed, for incautious dismissals of it end up casting off the demands of justice that are motivated by long-existing civil rights claims of African Americans and Native Americans. Chapter 4, “Interracial Intimacies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America,” discuss the core issue within the browning of America, interracial intimacy, what was once called “amalgamation.” I argue that the process of browning may be a demographic fact, but that it is not by itself politically or morally significant. Interracial love does not replace justice; interracial intimacy does not answer the call for greater distributive justice, nor does it necessarily result in the equal recognition of a common humanity between racial and ethnic groups. The political-theological romance of interracial intimacy, which is associated with the browning of America, is mythology or, worse, infantile magical thinking that confuses the gritty realities of politics with soft-focused romantic fantasies. Those who see hope for racial justice in a brown America—for example, Richard Rodriguez, Michael Lind, and even Gloria Anzaldua—are, therefore, delusional.14 They need only to awake and read a contemporary history of Brazil to see the lies and wishful thinking behind their fantasies of the achievement of multiracial democracy brought about through the simple magic of racial and ethnic intermarriage. Despite my fantasy-ruining argument, I argue that the browning of America does offer one important transformation: it forces the nation to reconsider what it means by “racial harmony” or even “diversity.” The conceptions of “racial harmony” that have been popular in the United States since the heyday of the civil rights movement are sloppy and evasive of the issue of interracial intimacy. The value

8


of “racial harmony” is popularly thought to be consistent with the conservation of traditional communities and identities; unfortunately, however, such conceptions are out of touch with the sheer demographic power of the browning of America. The growth of a multiracial society has implications for the private sphere—for families and communities—as much as it does for the public sphere. Racial harmony, in the shadow of the browning of America, does not mean separate communities living in “harmony” with each other and conserving their communities and cultures. It means the continued production of Thomas Jefferson’s worst nightmare (as well as a reflection of his private reality): a mixed-blood nation. The fifth and concluding chapter, “Responsible Multiracial Politics,” concerns the moral and political legitimacy of multiracial identity and politics. The moral legitimacy of multiracial or mixed-race identity is questioned because of its historical, and sometimes parasitic, relationship to anti-black racism. The harshest critics of “mixed race” have claimed that the identity is self-indulgent and irresponsible, because it evades or, worse, is complicit in racism. Such strident condemnations of multiracial identity are dogmatic and uncharitable. In “Being and Being Mixed Race,” I argued that multiracial identity is a real social identity, and that it need not be morally illegitimate.15 In this chapter I return to the topic of the relationship between multiracial identity and politics and the dynamics of racism. There are disturbing trends in multiracial literature and organizations that precisely are irresponsible in the way critics of the multiracial movement have asserted. Further, the growth of the multiracial population, and associated special interest groups, amplifies the urgency of this concern. The multiracial population is a component of the browning of America, and if multiracial politics is indicative of the racial politics that will emerge from this demographic shift, then we have good reason to question the rhetoric of racial harmony that is indulged in by the proponents of the browning of America. Although all persons have a moral obligation to reject and resist racism, I argue that multiracial individuals have a special responsibility to resist racism. This special obligation is based on their own experience of race and racism, and their place in the history and experience of race and racism in America. Just as mixed-race persons argue that they are morally obligated to remember and affirm their complex family histories—to not forget their mothers—they have an equal obligation to remember the significance of their personal history in the history of race in America. The comic, sometime cynical, Cuban and Puerto Rican saying about family racial identity and the

Introduction

9

hidden grandmother contains the essence of my argument: “Where did you hide your grandmother?”16 To those who claim no African lineage, the questioner in essence asks, “Where is your past?” and “Why do you not honor your obligations to those who gave you life?” The wonderful point of these questions, which should infuse multiracial politics, is that we have an obligation to the memories of our grandmothers—and, transitively, to the political memories of our pluralist society. I criticize the romantic political visions of the browning of America in this book, but my own history with such visions has not been so straightforward. Although I now argue that there is no political magic in the browning of America, it took some time to convince me of this. For most of my life, I held the opposite view, in part because I have a multiracial identity, and I have experienced a transnational life as my military family traveled and lived between the Philippines, Guam, Japan, and the United States. On U.S. military installations in Asia, I experienced an America outside of America. As soon as I grew old enough to understand what I saw, I had a direct view of the aftermath of its imperialism and the consequences of its geopolitical policies during the Carter and Reagan administrations.17 As a result of my experience, I came to develop what is now called a “mestizo consciousness” and judged the racial categories of the Americans around me to be superficial. Added to that, I internalized the value of racial equality that was seemingly honored and extended to U.S. citizens on those bases. My transnational and mestizo experiences, and my early internalization of the principle that race was morally irrelevant, resulted in my skepticism of racial categories that my youthful mind saw as entirely American creations. I qualified my recognition of the racial equality recognized on U.S. military installations as being extended largely to other U.S. citizens, because all around me I witnessed how this egalitarian spirit was limited by nationality. Especially in the Philippines I witnessed plenty of antipathy for Filipinos expressed by Americans, which often was mixed with their assumptions of superiority and expectation that they could have whatever and whoever they wanted to satisfy whichever of their desires. Witnessing the vulgarity of American colonial and military excess taught me about the insatiable greed of U.S. nationalism and its brutal consequences in the lives of ordinary Filipinos, and that American attitudes about peoples in what was then called the Third World functioned to limit their normative reflections about international justice. Hence, I returned to the United States mistrustful of

10


both nationalism and race, especially the way racism was used to bolster its chauvinist nationalism and imperial enterprises. My suspicions of American racial mores fed within me the romantic ideas that “mixed-race” individuals or a “mixed-race” people could somehow see through and rise above these superficial categories. I carried this romantic vision with me even as I learned more about the particular history of race in the United States and of each of this nation’s major ethnoracial categories. It was a judgment that made me an easy ally of the position that all racial categories should be eliminated, and that color blindness, even with its practical shortcomings, should be this nation’s long-term sociopolitical goal. I was quick to revel in the theoretical delights of talk of double consciousness, hybridity, world traveling, cosmic races, and mestizaje. What ended my romance with the political visions of mestizaje was a career in race and political theory, African American philosophy, and an attentiveness to geopolitics—doubtless the lively discussions with my colleagues and students at the University of Memphis, not to mention their prodding and good-natured criticisms being of great aid. Of course, the obvious and much celebrated counterexamples of Brazil and apartheid South Africa to the utopian excesses of mestizaje political thought influenced me, but also the disappointing history of assimilation and amalgamation in the United States offered similar lessons. In short, I came to appreciate that the multicultural, transnational, and translinguistic changes the civil rights movement paved the way for did not necessarily serve to secure the original demands of that movement. To celebrate the mere browning of America was to celebrate a superficial change that was not by itself a political solution to the aftermath of racial oppression and its colonial territories. Although I worked to shrug off all of the remnants of that romance—and I am not sure that they are completely removed—I certainly retained my suspicions about U.S. racial formations and their relationship to global injustice. These suspicions are evident in several parts of this book, and they are behind my arguments that discussions of race and social justice must not be bounded by morally irrelevant national boundaries, and that a newly brown America has a political responsibility to address the long-standing claims of social justice made by, in particular, African Americans and Native Americans.

Chapter 1


A Return to Douglass The majority of the citizens of the United States, since the end of the civil rights movement and the popularization of the idea of color blindness, have publicly espoused the desire to live in a society without race. What a “color-blind society” means varies among its proponents, but generally it includes the desiderata that the concept, the idea, of race be completely exposed as a tragic illusion and be expunged from our public and private vocabularies, that people will no longer be sorted into racial categories, and that racial divisiveness and inequities cease. This desire for a color-blind society has been recently demonstrated through the widespread unpopularity of color-conscious social programs, affirmative action being the epitome of those, and the equally widespread popularity of initiatives, such as in Texas, California, and Michigan, designed to bring an end to those programs.1 Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) has long been the icon of color blindness and a raceless society, but largely for the political Left. Recently, he has been adopted by the political Right and cited in support of anti-affirmative action arguments. He has been held up as a figure that reflects the anti-racialist and individualist values of the neoliberal wing of the Republican Party. His iconic status is due to his role in the abolition movement, the international appeal of his autobiographies, and the breadth of his career that brought him national and international renown. As a leading black activist and journalist Parts of chapter 1 of the present work appeared in a slightly different version in Philosophia Africana 8:2 (2001): 143–70.

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of the late nineteenth century, he was widely acknowledged as the de facto leader of the black community, and as such he presented a vision of a raceless nation that, though controversial and flawed, has continued to attract support. In his multiple capacities he argued that the long-term solution to racial division in the United States, known then as the “race problem,” or tellingly as the “Negro problem,” was the end of racial separation through assimilation and amalgamation. He held that newly emancipated black Americans should assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture. Social assimilation would then lead to the entire physical amalgamation of the two groups and the emergence of a new intermediate group that would be fully American. He was driven by a vision of universal human fraternity in light of which the varieties of human difference were incidental and far less important than the ethical, religious, and political idea of personhood. His vision of human brotherhood and his policy of assimilation and amalgamation have made him amenable to appropriation by a broad range of anti-racialists. Douglass’s arguments against color consciousness are repeated and his vision of a raceless nation is referenced although, and unfortunately, his place in the historic and national debate over race is not always acknowledged. Such ignorance of Douglass in conversations about race, as well as the rich tradition of thought about race and ethnicity in the United States—located in African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latino arts and letters—is a gross error. Just as those who argue that race ought to be conserved turn to the figure of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), those who disagree with the conservation of race stand in a historical relationship to Douglass. Douglass serves as a landmark in this debate, and appropriately he will be the starting point in this examination of the longing for the end of race. In the following pages Douglass’s religious and political ideals, his conception of race, and his dual policy of assimilation and amalgamation are critiqued. Further, the relation of anti-racialist positions to Douglass’s legacy is discussed. Through this return to Douglass I expose erroneous appropriations of his legacy by conservative figures in the anti-racialist cause, and I argue that prominent anti-racialist theories, especially in philosophy, reiterate not only Douglass’s vision of human brotherhood but his fatal errors as well. This return to Douglass examines, and affirms, his compelling anti-racial social vision, yet it also unearths the deep disquietudes of his legacy and thus those that linger in the social visions of his heirs.


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Before but between Du Bois and Washington Along with the history of references to Douglass in discussions about race in the United States there has been contention over his image and the interpretation of his legacy.2 W. E. B. Du Bois’s elegiac poem The Passing of Douglass and his analysis of Douglass’s role in the movement for black emancipation and enfranchisement of the late nineteenth century in The Souls of Black Folk, John Brown, and Black Reconstruction in America forward an image of Douglass as the leader of an activist community that sought liberty and inclusion primarily through self-assertion: Here, led by Redmond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of its logic. After the war and emancipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of American Negro leaders, still led the host.3 Du Bois’s review of Douglass strikes the note of self-assertion and raises the militant specter of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Douglass was close to Brown, supported Brown’s plan to create an armed passageway from the South to Canada for escaping slaves, and even humored Brown’s dream of creating a free black state in the Appalachian Mountains. Brown personally invited Douglass to join the raid on Harper’s Ferry, and although Douglass turned down the invitation, and had to flee the country because of his complicity, he, along with the abolition movement, reveled in Brown’s martyrdom and ex post facto gave the insurrection unconditional support. Despite Douglass’s reticence to join the raid, his rhetoric of “manly” struggle against prejudice and slavery was consistent with the spirit of the insurrection. Brown’s raid repeated the founding violence of the American Revolution, sought to extend the revolutionary ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and signified the divine retributive violence that Douglass, and many others, prophesied would befall the United States if it remained an unrepentant slave state. Du Bois was correct to draw a direct line between Douglass’s fierce rhetoric and ideas to Brown’s raid—an event that anticipated the coming Civil War, which Douglass also supported.4 Du Bois firmly

14


places Douglass and himself as uncompromising partisans of full black citizenship and self-respect, values that Booker T. Washington’s rhetoric and compromises undermine. Du Bois, however, disagreed with Douglass’s policy of assimilation and amalgamation. Instead, Du Bois argued in The Souls of Black Folk, and more fully in the earlier “The Conservation of Races,” that the races ought to be conserved and the black race, through racial organization, uplifted.5 Booker T. Washington’s (1856–1915) The Life of Frederick Douglass presents an image of Douglass that is contrary to Du Bois’s, and through his analysis he gives indirect responses to Du Bois’s criticisms. Washington accurately points out parallels between himself and Douglass: they shared the experience of slavery, understood the North’s complicity in slavery and the continuation of racism, and valued industrial education.6 In large part, though, his biography of Douglass is pedestrian and merely repeats the main story lines of Douglass’s autobiographies. Washington’s writing becomes interesting, and his intent clear, in the sections where he interprets and appropriates Douglass’s legacy. Washington argued that Douglass’s nativity and experience as a slave in the South supported his legitimacy as a national black leader. Of course, he was making a point about his own political legitimacy, for he shared Douglass’s origins. Likewise, his accusation that Douglass’s critics were driven by envy rather than concern for black Americans is less an element of biography and more about his troubles with Du Bois.7 Beyond these self-serving associations, though, Washington’s depiction of the personality, and his analysis of the policies, of Douglass directly contradicted the image of the militantly self-assertive and self-determined Douglass. Although Washington made much of the fact that Douglass was “self-made,” because it fit well with his support of industrial education, he argued that Douglass’s militancy was ephemeral and due to the bad influence of John Brown. Indeed, Washington distanced Douglass from what he called the “Harper’s Ferry tragedy.” Further, he distanced Douglass from Brown’s vision and goal: that human equality before God ought to be actualized in society and the law. Washington, ignoring every word and action of Douglass’s, claimed that Douglass, like himself, advocated for economic freedom but disavowed social equality.8 In short, Washington, contra Du Bois, placed Douglass as the ancestor of his politics of black accommodation to white demands for segregation and superiority for the sake of some promise of economic independence. Washington’s treatment of Douglass does not take up the issue of the conservation of race, because to do so would mean to discuss


15

amalgamation, and any mention of that would contradict his revision of Douglass’s legacy. Nothing goes to the heart of this controversy quicker than interracial friendship, love, and sex, and Douglass certainly enjoyed all three and wished the rest of the nation would too. Washington’s contemporary ideological progenies, however, do not shy away from the controversy over the conservation of race. In their fight for the end of race-based social programs there is a coalescence of Douglass’s theory of social assimilation and Washington’s theory of economic and industrial assimilation. Nonetheless, these antiracialist conservatives, such as Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly, and George Will, do demur, as did Washington, from the topic of amalgamation in white family lines, although they are quite happy to remark, as was Washington, that African Americans are not really or purely black.9

The Party of Douglass The Republican Party, eager to reclaim its identity as the Party of Lincoln, is quick to reference Frederick Douglass’s association with it. In contrast, though, with the radical and abolitionist wing of Douglass’s party, the neoconservative Republicans who evoke Douglass’s name are the ideological descendents of the Blue Dog Democrats of the Old South. The comments of these Republicans do uncover some interesting parallels, however, their comments are largely borne of political opportunism and simplify Douglass’s long life engaged in mighty struggle against slavery, racism, and black disenfranchisement. The erstwhile party of Lincoln’s references to Douglass’s legacy reached its climax on May 9, 2003, when the congressional Republican leadership pledged funding to complete the restoration of Cedar Hill, the Frederick Douglass National Historical Site in Washington, D.C. Representative Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Speaker of the House, and Senator Bill Frist, senator from Tennessee and majority leader, led the event. Representative Hastert’s speech did not address the contradiction between this event and the Republican Party’s recent history opposing or slowing down civil rights reforms, affirmative action, and other policies aimed at eliminating racial inequality, and its dependence on the racial fears and resentments of white folks. Instead, Hastert said: As one of America’s first Republicans, Frederick Douglass worked with President Abraham Lincoln to abolish slavery. While Mr. Lincoln is known as “the father of the Republican

16

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice Party,” Mr. Douglass is internationally recognized as “the father of the civil rights movement.” Frederick Douglass pledged his life’s work to fight for justice and equal opportunity. He fought for women’s rights; he fought for civil rights; he fought for human rights. The values and principles that Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln worked so hard for in the 1800s are the same values and principles that we are fighting for as a Republican Party today. . . . We are proud to be here today to help fulfill America’s promise with an agenda to empower African Americans to achieve the American Dream. As Frederick Douglass remarked in the late 1800s on his lifetime of achievements: “What is possible for me is possible for you.” His life of honor, respect, and success is a testament that each of us can make the United States of America a better place for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.10

Speaker Hastert, in the passage just quoted, presents a sanitized summation of Douglass’s legacy and a juvenile reduction of Douglass’s principles; his speech then culminates with a tired neoconservative cliché. All the same, Speaker Hastert’s words are consistent with the tone Douglass struck in many of his speeches. Douglass, as Washington noted, made frequent use of self-made-man rhetoric. His 1860 speech “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men” is an example of that rhetoric, and, of course, the language of “manly independence” is used in the 1865 speech “What the Black Man Wants.” What Speaker Hastert left out, however, was Douglass’s fierce criticisms of Lincoln and the slow realization that ascendancy of racial prejudice, Jim Crow, the Lynch Law, the enervation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, and the betrayal of the goals of the Reconstruction by the Republican Party meant that, to paraphrase his words, the emancipation was a stupendous fraud.11 Justice Clarence Thomas, in his dissent from the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, made use of Douglass’s “What the Black Man Wants” as part of his argument that the use of race in law school admission violates the equal protection clause of the constitution. Justice Thomas, to bolster his argument and to stress that “blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators,” cited Douglass’s assertion that the only thing the black man wants is justice and to be left alone.12 During Reconstruction and the years that followed, Douglass too easily brushed aside or underestimated the social and institutional obstacles to African Americans and indulged in “self-made man” clichés.


17

Booker T. Washington, in his biography of Douglass, made much of these assertions, and, at least on the surface of things, there are strong ties between Douglass’s rhetoric and the policy positions of current black neoconservatives and libertarians. However, Douglass’s position on what African Americans needed ran deeper than those clichés.13 After his break with Garrison, Douglass called upon the Union to “meddle” for the interests of black Americans. He outright demanded that the U.S. government end slavery in the South, that it should meddle with the “property rights” of the South, that it should allow runaway slaves their freedom, celebrated the meddling of John Brown, advocated that the abolition movement not disband after the Civil War—so that it could again meddle in the affairs of states with newly emancipated blacks—that women and blacks be given the right to vote, and that the federal government force states to end lynching. Further, and more to the point, Douglass was a faithful defender of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The Freedmen’s Bureau, as it was called, was commissioned to care for emancipated slaves, and as such it was a massive and positive government undertaking. Douglass knew that the Fourteenth Amendment, and its promise of equal protection, could only be ensured if “special efforts” were used to “guard” and “advance” the interests of African Americans “as a class.”14 Indeed, he was in favor of direct federal assistance in the form of land, capital, and jobs for the freed. Douglass’s remarks that the black man be left alone were not aimed at stopping federal intervention. He wanted quite the contrary; his comments were aimed at the efforts of Christian charities to help emancipated black Americans. Douglass believed that their charitable provision of such things as all-black schools encouraged segregation and detracted from the black demand for equal citizenship.15 Beyond Thomas’s claim about meddling, though, he also argued that the majority was mistaken in its judgment that “student body diversity is a compelling state interest” and seemed to imply agreement with Douglass on this point. Douglass, however, in 1872, supported federal intervention for the integration of schools in the District of Columbia and throughout the South16: Throughout the South all the schools should be mixed. From our observations during a trip to the South we are convinced that the interests of the poor whites and the colored people are identical. . . . In that section everything that will bring the poor white man and the colored man together should be done; they should be taught to make common cause against the rich land-holders of the South who never regarded a

18

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice poor white man of as much importance as they did slaves. Educate the poor white children and the colored children together; let them grow up to know that color makes no difference as to the rights of a man; that both the black man and the white man are at home; that the country is as much the country of one as of the other, and that both together must make it a valuable country.17

Thomas’s claim, then, that Douglass would be an enemy of affirmative action, is unsupportable conjecture, and his claim that Douglass was opposed to federal meddling on behalf of African Americans is absolutely wrong, especially given his recognition that race needed to be used for political ends, and his reiterated condemnation of the United States, and the Republican Party, for failing to live up to its own principles.18 Thomas, like Washington, for his own ends, ignored the meaning of Douglass’s words and actions. Although Speaker Hastert and Justice Thomas are not wrong to see concordance between their conservative positions and Douglass’s writings, they demonstrate an embarrassingly puerile understanding of his legacy. Absent from their appropriations of Douglass are his ceaseless criticisms of anti-black personal and institutional racism, his advocacy of resistance of all sorts, including violent insurrection against slaveholders, his laments over this nation’s repeated failures to deliver racial justice, his prophecy of racial amalgamation, and his “scorching irony” that blasted the hypocrisy and failure of U.S. Republicanism and Christianity.19 The inclusion of an awareness of Douglass’s complexities would have seriously challenged or exposed as a lie Hastert’s attempt to draw a direct line from Douglass to his party’s policies, as well as Thomas’s assumption that excerpted remarks from an 1865 speech would be at all useful for his anti-affirmative action arguments. Embarrassing as this misreading is, I now turn to an inconvenience of a higher degree that affects all of the political children of Douglass. This inconvenience is Douglass’s moral and political ambiguity toward his own ideals, an ambiguity that foresaw the failures of the policies he supported. Even if this ambiguity is not fatal to his project or legacy, we are dishonest when we ignore the deep disquietudes of Douglass’s legacy.

Human Brotherhood Douglass, like many white and black intellectuals of his time, was an Enlightenment thinker, a nineteenth-century modernist.20 He believed


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in progress and the advance and mission of Western civilization. Douglass’s modernism, additionally, was marked by a steadfast, individualistic belief in the inevitability of Western Christendom’s advance toward justice and human brotherhood, although given his traumatic experiences at the hands of Christian slaveholders, Douglass’s personal faith waned. It is clear from his autobiographies that his personal faith waned after experiencing the evil of American Christian slaveholders. In his writings he repeatedly claims that the worst slaveholders were those who professed faith, because they coated their psychological, physical, and sexual violence with Christian nostrums and, feeling justified, they then increased their crimes. It was due to the lack of ethical action on the part of American Christians that he denounces the practice of the U.S. church at every opportunity.21 Douglass’s faith was troubled, yet it had evolved into a stubborn belief that the world would realize justice: There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.22 Humans, as evidenced by slavery, resist providential justice; thus, according to Douglass, the “downfall of slavery” required agitation and political (even military) intervention. There was much in the language of providence that Douglass had to be cynical about, yet because of its rhetorical weight, he held on to the term, with its divine connotations, to label what he thought were the progressive tendencies of the age. The age, that of the 1850s, for him and his allies was on a trajectory toward an “all-pervading light.” For Douglass, that light was not the rapture; rather, it was the light of the trinity of truth, liberty, and equality. His conception of providence is most distinctly on display at the end of his famous 4th of July oration of 1852. Douglass uses Psalm 68:31 and pairs the idea of God’s fiat with the image of Africa and Asia rising: The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,”

20

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China, must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.”23

Douglass’s conception of providence, with its individualism, anti-supernaturalism, and activism, led directly to his conception of universal human brotherhood. The biblical doctrine of human brotherhood was held dearly by Douglass, and he believed in it more thoroughly that many of his white abolitionist colleagues. Human brotherhood, for Douglass, was a Christian doctrine that asserted that God created all the peoples of the earth out of “one blood.” According to Douglass, this matter was unequivocally supported by biblical text, and a rejection of it amounted to a rejection of the credibility of the Good Book. Obviously, for his audience and the time, such an argument challenged and contradicted U.S. polygenists (who were claiming that blacks were a separate and an inferior species) and presented a powerful dilemma: The unity of the human race—the brotherhood of man—the reciprocal duties of all to each, and of each to all, are too plainly taught in the Bible to admit of cavil.—The credit of the Bible is at stake—and if it be too much to say, that it must stand or fall, by the decision of this question, it is proper to say, that the value of that sacred Book—as a record of the early history of mankind—must be materially affected, by the decision of the question.24 This doctrine, as used by Douglass and the abolitionist movement, was based on the Bible’s creation story and Acts 17:26: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth (King James Edition).” Beyond an account of origins and unity, the doctrine of human brotherhood carried with it the moral injunction that since we are all equally human we are all equally deserving of human rights. Although he believed that the biblical account was correct, for Douglass the doctrine was an essentially religious and moral one that held no matter what the biological facts about race were. Given this position, he had little patience for the U.S. school of polygeny, and its argument—a non sequitur that commits the naturalistic fallacy—that the biological inferiority of blacks justifies their being


21

denied human rights. Thus Douglass takes special aim at the work of U.S. polygenists Josiah Nott, George Gliddon, Louis Agassiz, and Samuel Morton.25 In addition to taking issue with their science, he argued that even if blacks were a distinct species, and even if they were inferior, they were, as a part of humanity and children of God, entitled to full human rights. Douglass, obviously from his amalgamationist position, accepted the existence of biologically distinct races.26 He accepted a climatist monogenism, which asserted the unity of the human species, and that human diversity was due to the climates of the lands in which the races were isolated for centuries. His acceptance of races needs to be qualified, however, because he did not put great weight on what he characterized as merely “technical” distinctions in the brotherhood of humanity. Although he did not deny these “technical distinctions,” he believed that the existence of these distinctions ebbed and flowed and were overshadowed by human fraternity. Douglass supported the amalgamation of the biological races and the assimilation of black and white Americans into what he imagined as a new sort of American. The distinction between assimilation and amalgamation must be noted to understand Douglass’s project. Assimilation and amalgamation are separate doctrines. Amalgamation does not follow by itself from assimilation, or vice versa. Early black nationalists, such as Edward Blyden, Martin Delany, and Alexander Crummell, were separatists, but they also thought that blacks needed to assimilate by accepting Christianity and Western civilization.27 Booker T. Washington, while not a black nationalist, also accepted an assimilationist-separatist strategy. Douglass’s position, since he held that blacks and whites would not only assimilate to each other but also amalgamate into an intermediate race, supported a program of assimilation and amalgamation. Douglass began to advocate the controversial position of amalgamation during the 1860s. More than a strategy, he thought it was a process that would naturally occur in the United States over time, eventually creating an intermediate race. He believed that amalgamation, combined with assimilation, would be the “only solid, and final solution” of race prejudice and division in this nation.28 As he remarked to a reporter the day after his controversial second marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman: . . . there is no division of races. God Almighty made but one race. I adopt the theory that in time the varieties of races will be blended into one. Let us look back when the black and the white people were distinct in this country. In

22

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice two hundred and fifty years there has grown up a million of intermediate. And this will continue. You may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race which exists.29

Douglass’s stance on assimilation and amalgamation speaks volumes about his stance on the conservation of race. He equated the preservation of racial distinctiveness to the preservation of racial prejudice. The positions he took on many topics were informed by his stance against racial separatism and the conservation of the races in the United States. Douglass reproved attempts to build separate “negro pews, negro berths in steamboats, negro cars, Sabbath or week-day schools, . . . churches,” and so on.30 He argued that attempts to separate blacks were in the interests of pro-slavery and would hinder black uplift. It is for these reasons that he stood against the separatist, emigrationist visions of the American Colonization Society, founded by whites, and the African Civilization Society, founded by blacks. Although Douglass disfavored racial organizations, he thought it was necessary for African Americans to organize and unify to fight against slavery and racial prejudice, and to struggle for justice.31 Nonetheless, for Douglass, this political organizing and unification was not to be for reasons of race or culture but strictly for political reasons. While he expected blacks to unify to fight for the end of slavery and for justice, he railed against separatist accommodations, institutions, and organizations, and he urged blacks to act “without distinction of color.”32 Douglass’s “final solution” was the complete assimilation, dispersal, and amalgamation of blacks into the white population. To this end Douglass vigorously rejected notions of race pride, racial union, and black nationalism.33 To those who argued that black race pride had to be cultivated to oppose oppression, he responded: But it may be said that we shall put down race pride in the white people by cultivating race pride among ourselves. The answer to this is that the devils are not cast out by Beelzebub, the prince of devils.34 Race pride, according to Douglass, could not be used to fight racism; likewise, self-segregation could not be used to fight segregation. Such tactics undermined the possibility of the “final solution” and, worse, denied the interrelatedness of black and white American


23

identity that drove him to affirm amalgamation and assimilation as solutions in the first place. For Douglass, the emergence of a new, brown America identified them as true children of the United States, and thus citizens. Black American identity, according to him, was profoundly American. Black Americans were the product of amalgamation with white Americans, and due to this ancestry they were native by being born in the United States. Because of the particular ancestry of black Americans, they also were Americans by culture.35 As Douglass argued, black Americans are native to America, were products of U.S. history, and belonged in no other land: The native land of the American Negro is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American. His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived and laboured and died, on American soil, and millions of his posterity have inherited Caucasian blood. It is pertinent, therefore, to ask, in view of this admixture, as well as in view of other facts, where the people of this mixed race are to go, for their ancestors are white and black, and it will be difficult to find their native land anywhere outside of the United States.36 Black Americans, along with native-born whites, and Native Americans (though Douglass held the popular belief that they were headed toward extinction) were uniquely American in this regard. The uniqueness of being American was important to Douglass, because the emergence of this new group, through birth and the comingling of culture and lineage, was providence in action, it was the coming into being of the brotherhood of man in the United States. Black and white U.S. citizens are bound together; as such, their identities, histories, and destinies are likewise bound. This is Douglass at his most progressive point, but it is also his most enduring gift to black American conservatism.37 Although some of the particulars of Douglass’s arguments have been rejected, his idealistic vision of human brotherhood, his skepticism about the political and moral value of race pride and self-segregation, his rejection of race as a political or social category, and his hope that assimilation and racial amalgamation will bring an end to racial oppression and result in a stronger America, more consistent with its founding liberal principles, remain influential in contemporary U.S. racial politics. Douglass’s conceptions of justice and human brotherhood resulted in his conceptions of race and the black American. With

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this background, he headed toward a reading of the U.S. Constitution that required the realization of the ideals ensconced within its texts and progress toward their actualization.

Wicked Intentions After escaping from slavery and joining with William Loyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass took up the party’s position that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document.38 In 1851, in a letter to Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist opposed to the political and legal positions of the Garrisonians, Douglass announced his change of opinion about the intentions of the Constitution, but not the intentions of the framers, on the matter of slavery.39 Douglass, in 1847, had conceded that a “strict reading” of the Constitution did not evince a pro-slavery stance, and after much thought he conceded to Smith’s argument that not only is the Constitution an anti-slavery document, but that the abolition of slavery can be accomplished by working through the legal and political means determined by the Constitution.40 Douglass no longer wanted to leave the Constitution and political institutions, such as voting or holding political offices, as tools for the slaveholder. Why Douglass changed his opinion about the proper interpretation of the Constitution has been the subject of a fair amount of literature.41 The reasons for his change of opinion were interpretative and practical, but they also were remarkably personal. These three facets of his shift should be attributed to the conceptions of providence and human brotherhood that composed his moral universe. Doing so makes his change far less puzzling and less like mere political opportunism, although it does not necessarily redeem his vision of liberation through assimilation and amalgamation. Understanding Douglass’s change begins with considering three interrelated personal factors that had an immense effect on his intellectual and political development: (1) Douglass’s break with Garrison and his followers over his (2) decision to start and edit his own paper, (3) and his growing friendship with Gerrit Smith. In his second and third autobiographies, he discussed his change of opinion always in relationship to his assertion of independence from Garrison and the founding of the North Star in 1847: I can easily pardon those who have denounced me as ambitious and presumptuous, in view of my persistence in this enterprise. I was but nine years from slavery. In


25

point of mental experience, I was but nine years old. That one, in such circumstances, should aspire to establish a printing press among an educated people, might well be considered, if not ambitious, quite silly. My American friends looked at me with astonishment! “A wood-sawyer” offering himself to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity! The thing looked absurd. Nevertheless, I persevered.42 He established his paper in Rochester, New York, and during that same year he and Smith developed their friendship.43 Douglass grew more confident, and more independent from the Garrisonians, and he began to reconsider his position. Again, as with his account of the founding of the North Star, he represented his change of opinion as part of his intellectual emancipation from slavery and his old patrons.44 One is tempted to imagine that their warm and equitable friendship worked hand in hand with Smith’s arguments about constitutional interpretation to ultimately change Douglass’s mind. What is so interesting about the personal reasons behind his change of opinion is that they are illustrative of Douglass’s conceptions of freedom and human brotherhood. The stories, in Douglass’s second autobiography, of the founding of the North Star, his friendship with Smith, and his change of opinion, were iterations of the story of his self-emancipation, the story of his first autobiography. All of these stories are tales that demand absolute equality and independence of body and mind. His friendship with Smith exposed him to the anti-slavery constitutional interpretation of the Liberty Party, which led him to consider the role of natural law in the Constitution and the importance of understanding the document according to a strict reading of its text.45 In 1849, Douglass admitted that “ ‘the Constitution, if strictly construed according to its reading,’ is not a pro-slavery instrument,” but he disagreed with Smith that such a strict and charitable reading of the document was correct.46 However, Douglass began to change his mind as he grew more independent from the Garrisonians, as he realized the imprudence of Garrisonian isolation, and as he grew in his understanding of natural law theory and the subtlety of constitutional interpretation. David Schrader, in his paper “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass,” argued that Douglass held, at the

26


time of his change of opinion, that the United States was founded on principles of natural law. The evidence for this position, as Douglass argued in his 1857 speech “The Dred Scott Decision,” lies in three sources: “the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders.”47 For Douglass, the Declaration of Independence contained the intention of founding a state on principles of natural law. Those intentions were repeated in the preamble of the Constitution and were evident in the sentiments of the founders. Douglass was well aware of the duplicity of the founders’ sentiments, the race-conscious intentions and connotations of the Constitution.48 Nonetheless, he differentiated between the original intentions of “We, the people” and the wicked intentions of a few: It is clearly not because of the peculiar character of our Constitution that we have slavery, but the wicked pride, love of power, and selfish perverseness of the American people. Slavery lives in this county not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people. . . .49 This distinction is repeated in his criticism of Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott case: The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. It is very great, but the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater. Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities. He cannot bale out the ocean, annihilate the firm old earth, or pluck the silvery star of liberty from our Northern sky. He may decide, and decide again; but he cannot reverse the decision of the Most High. He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil.50 Further, as Schrader argues, Douglass perceived that the founders were aware of their conflicts and sought to conceal their divided intentions under unfortunate ambiguities. Given these very ambiguities, Douglass argues in his 1860 speech “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?,” which was delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, that is was “folly” and “absurd” to get a clear determination from the conflicted and contradictory intentions of the American people—for it is they as a whole who contracted—at the time of the original contract.51


27

Douglass’s priority in his abolition activities was the nation’s moral, political, and religious responsibility to end American slavery for the sake of American slaves. The nation’s responsibility, according to Douglass, was primarily to the enslaved. Douglass’s orientation on this matter was clearly not shared by many of his white abolitionist contemporaries. Some of them, perhaps John Brown, shared Douglass’s black reasons, because they saw beyond self-interested white reasons or engaged a black perspective: slavery was an evil committed against black persons.52 Others, in the movement and the population at large, had white interests in mind, such as the stability of the nation, nonparticipation in evil, or the state of white souls.53 With black reasons for ending slavery as the background for his deliberations, he reconsidered the role of the Constitution and the value of maintaining the Union with the slaveholding states. After coming to the conclusion that the Constitution was not necessarily a pro-slavery document, he then determined that, given the moral imperative to end slavery, it was prudent to engage political and legal means as well as moral suasion: The dissolution of the Union is not only an unwise but a cowardly measure—15 millions running away from three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders. Mr. Garrison and his friends tell us that while in the Union we are responsible for slavery. He and they sing out “No Union with slaveholders,” and refuse to vote. I admit our responsibility for slavery while in the Union, but I deny that going out of the Union would free us from that responsibility. . . . The American people have gone quite too far in this slaveholding business now to sum up their whole business of slavery by singing out the cant phrase, “No union with slaveholders.” To desert the family hearth may place the recreant husband out of the presence of his starving children, but this does not free him from responsibility. If a man were on board of a pirate ship, and in company with others had robbed and plundered, his whole duty would not be performed simply by taking the longboat and singing out “No union with Pirates.”54 The image of the isolated rower proud in his noncomplicity, but impotent, is a devastating critique of Garrison and other transcendentalist political recluses. American transcendentalist isolation was no neutrality but an ignoble cowardice, and its immorality was

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deepened because it was also terribly vain: it was based on the love of the white self rather than the black other. Beyond Douglass’s demands for political engagement, his arguments for an anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution are defensible. Douglass was not a fool, as he certainly understood the power of the arguments for the other position—he vigorously defended that position through 1850. He changed his position because he became convinced that the Constitution was a vehicle for natural law, and despite the wicked intentions of some of the framers, the spirit of the document declared universal liberty and equality.55 Additionally, the role of friendship in Douglass’s interpretation of the Constitution elucidates his staying power as a point of reference in race debates. Douglass’s legacy is a witness to the presence and possibility of interracial philia and eros in American life. Douglass’s personal story, although it was filled with many disappointments, affirms his own conception of human brotherhood and the ideals ensconced in the preamble of the Constitution.

Between Madness and Reconciliation Booker T. Washington was quick to align himself with Douglass’s legacy, while Du Bois offered careful criticism and claimed that his own call for social and political equality was a continuation of the best of Douglass’s policies. Others through the decades claimed Douglass as an ally, such as Martin Luther King Jr., or they rejected him, such as Malcolm X. Most of the public intellectuals and activists, such as Ralph Ellison, in his novel, Invisible Man, followed Du Bois’s lead to simultaneously embrace and push Douglass away. Douglass throws his shadow across many contemporary academics and public figures who have participated in the debate on the future of race and racial categories. Principally, conservatives, some of whom are black and brown as well as white, who defend assimilation and demand that race be abandoned, follow, to a degree, Douglass’s legacy. Justice Clarence Thomas obviously is an example of this group, as are Shelby Steele, Yehudi Webster, Richard Rodriguez, and Ward Connerly. Among the social theorists and philosophers who have offered anti-racial theories, there are many parallels to Douglass. Most notable among this group are Anthony Appiah, Naomi Zack, Orlando Patterson, and Paul Gilroy. These social theorists and philosophers tend


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to pair anti-racial metaphysical arguments with anti-racial ethical or political arguments. Typically, they reason that since race is not biologically real, then it is a morally illegitimate social category. For them it is simple: race is a tragic social illusion that we are better off without. These theorists, though, are not to be confused with the conservatives, for they largely support race-based initiatives that, in their minds, bring about the racial justice that is a prerequisite for living in a raceless society. These broad groups of anti-racialist theorists reiterate the policies and ideals of Douglass that I reviewed in the last two sections: providence, human brotherhood, and the color-blind Constitution. Douglass’s dream of American providence through enlightened progress reverberates in the confident cosmopolitanism of these critics and philosophers. Likewise, they are equally convinced, with Douglass, that racial categories are simply inessential and noxious qualities that obscure a more important common humanity. Further, although the anti-racial philosophers do not, as a group, embrace Douglass’s color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, they with the conservatives exhibit a hope that American liberalism, through procedural and distributive justice, can deliver racial justice. These reiterations of Douglass’s policies and ideals, whether they realize they are reiterations or not, carry with them some of the shortcomings and shortsightedness that haunted Douglass’s policies and ideals. Douglass always remained committed to his ideals, yet he was never naïve about the capacity of the United States to disappoint. He was aware that the sun was setting on his hopes for the nation. Indeed, in the 1890s and the decades that followed his death, the early 1900s, the decades of the Lynch mobs, and the U.S. resistance to racial justice reached murderous heights. “What of the Night?” In 1889, Douglass posed this rhetorical question as part of his “The Nation’s Problem” speech, in which he confronts America’s failure to deliver social justice despite its political and religious ideals. His message was that there is no such thing as a “Negro problem.” Instead, Douglass claimed, the real question is whether America will ever live up to its promises and ideals.56 Douglass’s solution to the nation’s problem is standard: to live up to our religious and political ideals, to pursue cultural and political assimilation, and in time the population of America will amalgamate. He had a set of special messages for African Americans, messages that black conservatives are fond of repeating. According to Douglass, African Americans must work harder and be representative of the

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best values, they should strive to live among whites, they should not cultivate race pride, and they should be enterprising and industrious as to appeal to the economic interests of white men. The question “What of the Night?” came from his reading of Hamlet and his perception of America’s moral, political, and religious failures. It was a powerful question that arose from his critical vision, but he could do no better than appeal to enterprise, assimilation, and the obliterating dream of amalgamation. So, “what of the night”? Douglass’s program of assimilation and amalgamation was predicated on the positive valuation of European culture and Western progress, and it invited a destructive cultural and political paternalism. Although Douglass did not specifically negatively value people of color—he never indulged in the internalized racism that endeared Washington to white audiences—his policies devalued their racial and ethnic difference. His vision of human brotherhood specifically set the eradication of difference as its utopian goal. It is not clear at all how democratic, equal, and extensive was his program of assimilation and amalgamation. From what we know of the history of the U.S. racial politic after the Civil War and Reconstruction, it is evident that the policies of assimilation and amalgamation would have resulted, as Du Bois said, in “self-obliteration” without delivering to this “intermediate race” the promise of human brotherhood. As can be seen in the racial politics of nations such as Brazil and South Africa, where intermediate races were legally, and are still socially and politically, recognized, amalgamation and mixture do not necessarily bring an end to race or racial oppression. His demand for human brotherhood gave him, as it continues to give our contemporaries, a tunnel vision that led him to ignore the history of patriarchy that accompanied the political conception of “fraternity,” and to obsess on homogeneity as a universal political and ethical solution.57 Moreover, Douglass’s troubled faith in natural law and the U.S. social contract left him with a disenchanting struggle with those political shadows. As he evolved, he only occasionally confronted and apprehended the awful truth of the sexual and racial contracts, the systematic denial of equality of liberty and equality for people of color and women of all colors in American liberalism, that, like the roiling “turbid waters” of his youth, separated him and his from deliverance.58 Despite his capacity to expose and criticize the immorality, damage, and pathology of racism, he underestimated the persistence of racism, its pervasiveness, and the advantageousness of white privilege. Thus he put too much faith in his interpretation of the Constitution,


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which then set him up for near-constant betrayal and led him to underestimate the racist and destructive forces behind lynching, the myth of the black rapist, the convict-lease system, and the growing system of black peonage of the post-Reconstruction years.59 His comfort with the “tendencies of the age” and the westward spread of modernity also is a matter of concern. His representation of the displacement of Native Americans, and his acceptance of the popular opinion of their inevitable extinction, is troubling when compared to his conception of providence.60 This also was the case with his celebration of the illumination of Africa and Asia by Western civilization. He simply did not address in strong enough terms the genocide of Native Americans and the nation’s imperialist aspirations.61 To his critics, Douglass’s ideals were not suited to the postReconstructions challenges that faced African Americans. However, he did not limit himself to just rhapsodies on providence, human brotherhood, and natural law. He constantly demanded the actualization of justice. He did so because racial injustice was what he largely witnessed in his personal relations with whites, and in national and international political arenas.62 Although he experienced amazing moments of relief from racism after escaping slavery and joining the abolition movement, those moments were fleeting. Despite the flights of ideals in his rhetoric, a consciousness of loss and glimpses of despair appeared in his writings; from his first autobiography, published in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, through his 1894 pamphlet The Lesson of the Hour, which answers the question “Why is the Negro Lynched?” Throughout his life as a journalist and an activist, the contradiction between American ideals and practices fed his rage and was the source of the scorching irony that he sent out to America. The conflict between the putative political and religious ideals of this nation and its contrary practices had visited itself upon the body and mind of Douglass and his fellow bondsmen and women in the form of the sadism and gross injustices of Christian slavers. Further, behind the evolution of his political and quasitheological concepts of providence and human brotherhood was his struggle with the Christian faith—Methodism—of his youth. Douglass desperately desired that God’s judgment would be visited on the heads of those who so blatantly and cruelly broke God’s law, and when thunderbolts did not descend, he was pushed to the brink of apostasy.63 The starkest, most referenced example of this conflict is in his Narrative in the scene where he longed to be on one of the tall ships sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. He gave us what he called his

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“soul’s complaint” with an “apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:” You are loosed from your mooring, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave?64 Douglass presents in his “soul’s complaint” a personal and political account of the problem of evil. He goes on to state that he will find the internal resources to free himself. However, this passage is remarkable not only for its pathos and for what it records, but because it displays that in addition to the torture of his enslavement, he felt mocked by the rhetoric of political and religious ideals that surrounded him and offered him hope. He wrote in a passage that immediately follows the aforementioned, “Thus I used to think, and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to my wretched lot.”65 Madness brushed up against Douglass, as the impossibility associated with his delusions of miraculous escape was transferred to his politico-religious ideals. As his queries about theodicy and natality display, he confronted his abandonment by his white father, God, and his nation.66 What resulted was the collapse of his moral universe, an experience from which he never fully recovered and which haunted, to the chagrin of his orthodox and pious allies, his writings and public statements. Sigmund Freud’s theory of religion, from Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion, elucidates that severity of Douglass’s crisis and how it relates to his lifelong flirtation with religious and political apostasy. Freud theorized that the concepts of fatherhood, God, and justice are developmentally and functionally interrelated. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud wrote that religious ideas were


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. . . illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout like made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of early existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place.67 According to Freud, the individual overcomes this “father complex,” but not completely, through the use of a variety of mechanisms, such as religious practices and ideas (that are ultimately poorly suited for the future of civilization as the theory asserts).68 Douglass was abandoned by his father and nation, and he felt abandoned by God; where was the possibility of justice? Who would grant his urgent wish to fly? He found himself between madness and reconciliation to misery; yet he refused both, because the disappearance of father, God, and nation left open resources he was certain of: his body, self, and will. Nonetheless, Douglass never overcame his father complex, and the shaking of the foundations of his faith reverberated through his critiques of U.S. Republicanism. After escaping from slavery and joining the abolition movement, Douglass worked for a greater reconciliation, yet again, and again he was disappointed and was left between madness and a lesser form of reconciliation. Although he never fully admitted a similar break with Republicanism, there were clear and thrilling moments when his religious disquiet was transferred to the political, and, as with the “soul’s complaint” passage, he was led to the brink of political apostasy.69 It is a curious thing to find in the icon of human brotherhood statements of near-apostasy from the religious and political ideals of unity and equality. These statements, however, are not out of place, because they accompany his disappointment and disenchantment with the very political and religious ideals he upholds. There is a history of

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near-apostasy that accompanies the development of his assimilationist and amalgamationist program. First, there are his statements in the Narrative and its appendix, in which he answers the charge of being an “opponent of religion.” In the Narrative he draws our attention to the contradictions between Christian ideals and practice and asserts that Christian slaveholders were the cruelest because they saw their faith as justificatory. A controversy surrounded him over his refusal to thank only the actions of men, and to never thank God for the deliverance of black people.70 Then there are his speeches and editorials in which he challenged the political efficacy of Christianity for black liberation. At various times and places he condemned U.S. Christianity and proclaimed that atheism would be better than a hypocritical Christianity, and given this hypocrisy, he said that it is not surprising that black Americans had come to loathe the Church. He goes so far as to publicly wonder what use Christianity is to black Americans in the climate of U.S. hypocrisy.71 Douglass consistently tied together his disappointment with U.S. political and religious ideals. In both, he saw a political and an ethical void that haunted him. For example, in his 1894 pamphlet The Lesson of the Hour, he wrote: When the Negro looked for his body, that belonged to his earthly master; when he looked for his soul, that had been appropriated by his heavenly Master; and when he looked around for something that really belonged to himself, he found nothing but his shadow, and that vanished into the air, when he might most want it.72 A year before his death, although he stubbornly hung on to his political and religious principles, he paused and recognized that those ideals left black America with nothing but their vanishing shadows—caught again between madness and reconciliation to misery. This alienation is radical, because it recognizes an unethical anti-black world that is unrelenting in its cruelty and hypocrisy. Further, this version of alienation is amazing in its depth, because as Bernard Boxill has claimed, Douglass’s conception of interdependent U.S. identity leaves no choice for the black American but to be an American, and if being American proves impossible, then the black American is left without even an identity. Or, as Douglass stated, black Americans are left with “shadows” that vanish in the air—illusions upon illusions.73 Notwithstanding the shortcomings of Douglass’s vision of the racial future of the United States, we must not lose sight of Douglass’s


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ideals nor his radical alienation. His consciousness of political and ethical failure, his mourning of that failure, and the resulting rage that expressed itself with scorching irony are equally constituents of his legacy. His radical alienation marked the limit, which he did not squarely face, of his vision, but that limit tells us as much about ourselves as it does about him. At the limit of his vision—of human brotherhood and American providence and justice—we get a sense of what James Baldwin called “the price of the ticket.” Douglass’s flirtation with religious and political apostasy, his radical alienation, was brought about by his occasional moments of brutal self-honesty that this nation was unwilling to pay the price of the ticket. His turmoil, a reaction of moral indignation and disorientation, a reaction to bondage in the putative land of liberty, is ours as well. We too are caught between madness and reconciliation.


Chapter 2


Introduction Frederick Douglass was struck with a deep and vicious disappointment with the United States because of its reluctance to end slavery, and its failure to fully extend rights and protections to all blacks in America, both of which meant that the nation, in Douglass’s estimation, was in profound contradiction with its Republican and Christian ideals. I argued, in the first chapter, that Douglass’s alienation took the form of political apostasy and often left him despairing about the future of blacks in the United States, as well as the future of the Republic. During his moments of despair, Douglass must have recognized that there were many practical reasons to just be done with the ideals he had defended, and if he did not see those reasons then those who came after him, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, most certainly did.1 Despite, however, the repeated failures of the United States to realize a color-blind society or rule of law—at the heart of his ideals of brotherhood, assimilation, and amalgamation—Douglass persistently put faith in color blindness. Likewise, despite strenuous objections from various political, legal, and academic quarters, dreamers of a unified multiracial society have returned to the ideal of color blindness and vested Douglass as its icon. In this chapter I turn to that ideal and explore its convergence with the browning of America. My thesis is that popular conceptions of the browning of America support naïve conceptions of color blindness, threaten progressive color-conscious policies, and thus aid in the evasion of righting past racial wrongs. Conceptions of the browning of 37

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America that involve such evasions of American national responsibilities only serve to extend the United State’s amnesia about its complex racial history; such visions of a brown America are not the romantic political visions they are passed off as; instead, they are dangerous ideologies that only serve the cause of injustice. To establish this claim, the first part of the chapter reviews the principal elements of the debate over color blindness, while the second part identifies the overlap between color blindness and the browning of America and identifies five problems that emerge from their convergence. Although my thesis has an urgent tone, it does not categorically condemn all conceptions of color blindness. The basic idea of color blindness contains normative insights that are reflected in liberal forms of color consciousness that are worth serious reconsideration, because they point to reasonable moral, political, and social ideals, and because of the practical concern that the demographic phenomenon of the browning of America is transforming the nation’s traditional racial categories and its post-civil rights movement conceptions of social justice to such an extent that color consciousness may become unfeasible or even irrelevant. The first part of the chapter explores these normative insights, and the second part argues that the browning of America need not result in any of the problems that I identify, and that it can even serve to support the just ends of color consciousness in public policy.

Part 1 Ideological Bookends In 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented from the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson and declared that the Constitution was color blind and that African Americans should be granted their rights as citizens.2 According to the law of the United States, there is no superior or inferior racial class or caste; all are equal. Harlan’s words are well known, but due to their historical importance, they deserve to be quoted at length: But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The hum-


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blest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is, therefore, to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a State to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.3 Harlan’s remarkable words set out the legal ideal of color blindness, and they echo a greater moral value: the “law regards man as man,” and it ought to do so because color is a morally irrelevant characteristic. Following from Harlan’s view of the color-blind Constitution is the grand political implication that race should have no bearing on the civil rights of its citizens. However, just as the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were besmirched with racial hypocrisy, so was Harlan’s soaring statement. Harlan, within his dissent, went on to affirm white superiority over blacks, and he even argued that the Chinese were too alien to be admitted as citizens and to be granted civil rights.4 Despite Harlan’s performative contradictions of his own principle, supporters of color blindness drew on his statement and either held that Harlan’s ideal was separable from his racism, or they simply passed over his contradictions as inconvenient and embarrassing. Thus Harlan’s ideal determined the meaning of color blindness and influenced the overturning of Plessy in the Brown v. the Board of Education decision, which then extended the concept of color blindness in the law.5 A few years after Brown, at the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. gave voice to the principle of color blindness when he invoked the dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”6 Just as there was more to Harlan’s view of color blindness than the narrow ideal that he is celebrated for authoring, so there was more to King’s rhetoric that also was passed over by supporters of color blindness. Although King believed color was morally irrelevant, he too accepted as morally permissible color consciousness. Unlike Harlan’s version of color consciousness, though, King supported it in an effort to identify racist oppression (such as U.S. segregation or the U.S. policy to deny the Vietnamese people the right to their own democratically elected Communist government) and establish and support social, economic, political, and legal equality.7

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The ideals within Harlan’s dissenting opinion and King’s “I Have A Dream” speech are the ideological bookends of color blindness. As with the conceptualization of color blindness by Harlan before him, King’s invocation of a standard of interpersonal judgment beyond color had immense effects on the way that Americans think about race, even if it has had too little influence on their conduct or character. And there is the rub. The idea of color blindness has failed to gain traction among the supporters of compensatory justice for groups harmed by racial oppression, in part because the state and so many Americans have failed to live up to the basic ideal. Because of that failure, and the open double standards that characterize American color blindness, such as in Harlan’s case, the back story of Harlan’s and King’s ideal of color blindness forms contrasting ideological bookends of color consciousness.8

Definition But what is the ideal of color blindness that Americans may have fallen short of? Before that question can be answered, it should be noted that the scope of color blindness, evident in King’s remark, has experienced a broad expansion. For Justice Harlan, the U.S. Constitution was color blind, and American law should have been too. But for those who proposed versions of color blindness that preceded Harlan’s, such as Frederick Douglass, the obligation to be color blind reached into personal and political spheres—an extension that Harlan found repellent. King’s vision of a standard of individual judgment that transcended color was based on the Christian doctrine of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ, and it, like Douglass, reached into many spheres. Debates about color blindness take up the narrow question of the role of race or ethnicity in the formation and administration of public policy, but it is the more ambitious form of color blindness, represented by Douglass and King, that is on the minds of Americans, and that absolutely terrified the opponents of racial equality and the desegregation of public spaces.9 The ambitious ideal of color blindness can be reduced to the proposition that morally irrelevant or illegitimate social identities should make no moral, social, political, or legal difference in a person’s life. Such social identities should have the relevance of eye color. Or, in formal terms, Agent X, in context C, should be blind to social identity R.


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The relevant agent, X, could be either an individual or institution, and the context, C, is some legal, moral, social, or political context.

Objections to Color Consciousness Advocates of color blindness have focused their ire on those Xs most guilty of being race or color conscious, namely, governmental institutions, particular agents working in those institutions, people of color who are hypersensitive to racial and ethnic difference—especially African Americans—and left-wing and liberal academics and lawyers who are seemingly obsessed about race and ethnicity. The critics of color consciousness derisively refer to the latter two groups as constituting the civil rights and affirmative action “industry,” which profits from nurturing an ideology of victimhood.10 The Cs critics are primarily concerned with the places and situations where colorconscious public policies apply, such as on university campuses and in workplaces. A few critics are equally concerned about those social and public situations where people of color—again, mainly African Americans—draw attention to color and insist on color consciousness.11 The Rs critics are concerned with the racial and ethnic categories the government created and maintains for managing color-conscious programs. Seemingly, they are less concerned about the applications of Rs in Cs outside of public policy, law, and law enforcement; racial categories are, from their perspective, justifiably used by ordinary folks to keep themselves safe, and, of course, the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other Homeland Security agents to maintain public safety.12 There are many criticisms of color consciousness, too many in fact to cover here, but they typically boil down to ethical, political, and practical claims about recognizing and utilizing racial or ethnic categories in public policy. First, there is the ethical claim that racial categories are morally irrelevant and dangerous, lessons that we should have learned from our long and ugly history with race, and using those categories in the law or for public policy purposes simply continues a morally wrong and harmful practice. Racial categories, according to this criticism, are racist per se, and to use them to favor minorities, even as a part of rectificatory justice, is to engage in reverse discrimination against whites. Moreover, using racial categories serves to preserve the idea of race and, ipso facto, racism, which hurts all groups. In support of this ethical objection, the opponents of color consciousness in public policy argue that such programs in fact continue

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the harms of past injustices against nonwhites because they deepen racist beliefs. They claim that offering minorities “special rights” reinforces perceptions of their inferiority and exacerbates the stigma of having a nonwhite racial identity. To make matters worse, these racial stigmas are then internalized by nonwhites, especially at those work and academic sites where the specter of affirmative action hangs over them, which then has the effect of worsening the performance of nonwhites and again reinforcing nonwhite racial stigma. These dynamics harm national political life by widening the social and ideological gulf between racially identified groups. The very use of race in public policy contradicts our fundamental political ideals of fairness and equality under the law, and in practical political terms, the conservation of our racial categories only serves to conserve our racial divisions. In short, racial identities, along with color-conscious programs, lead to what Schlesinger called the “disuniting of America.”13 The practical problems with color conscious have been highlighted in recent years and are concerned with the incoherence of the idea of race and its apparent lack of a biological foundation. Since racial categories are not facts, then racial groups and identities are as equally illusory as the idea of race. Now that we understand that there are serious problems with identifying the races and individuating their members, it makes no sense to maintain a practice rooted in bad science; after all, there is no way to determine who is white and who is not, and thus there is no way to pick out blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and so on for the purposes of doling out benefits of color-conscious programs.14 The result will be abuse and fraud, which will only worsen the harm of reserve racism against whites: whites will be passed over for people who are undeserving. There are, of course, many more technical legal and ethical objections to specific color-conscious programs, such as busing and affirmative action, but they are beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze.

Objections to Color Blindness The tremendous negative response to color blindness has focused on the proposition that the United States is not yet done with the idea of race, and that it is a cruel irony that—after creating, maintaining, and enforcing racial categories for hundreds of years in the service of white power—it declares itself finished with the idea of race while


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the effects of the racial states abound in all corners of the nation. That sort of color blindness, which supports a “cold turkey” approach to bring about a world without race, precisely does not usher in any such world; instead, because it offers no prescriptions about racism, the lingering effects of racial oppression, and the need for distributive justice to rectify past racial harms, it leaves communities of color vulnerable to discrimination and leaves injustice unresolved. The idea of quitting race “cold turkey” summons up the other fowl-related cliché of sticking one’s own head in the sand. The demand for color blindness, according to the proponents of color consciousness, is an evasion of reality because color blindness is a myth. Thus proponents have sought to expose this myth in all of the domains that the color blindness has been asserted. Starting by controverting Harlan’s assertion that the U.S. Constitution is color blind, critical race theorists in legal studies, historians, and sociologists have traced the formative role of race in the U.S. Constitution, law, public policy, the governance of the United States, the criminal justice system, and in all of the public sectors of society.15 Sociologists have illuminated the role of race and racism throughout American life at all levels, psychologists have documented the stress associated with racism and racial stereotypes and its effect on the mental health of individuals, and biomedical researchers have likewise measured racial disparities in health and health care and debated the role of race in diagnosis and medicine.16 Racial categories and identities are present in the social world and have tremendous effects. They are, in terms of social worlds and human experience, very much real.17 Further, racial categories are fundamental for understanding the disparities and divisions that exist in our society. Race is a dominant organizing principle of American society. To ignore the fact that we sort people into races, to stop using the word, will not make our practices and the divisions and disparities that occur because of race go away. Such a position is plainly naïve. For the social sciences to stop using race in a society where race is dominant would be like chemistry without the elements. Likewise, governance and public policy would be equally and dramatically limited without recourse to race. Thus to account for the role of race in society and to work to rectify past racial harms, individuals and institutions must be color conscious.18 To forgo the use of racial categories in governance, law, public policy, social science, and community organizing for the ends of social justice would result in disastrous consequences for the United States and would only exacerbate its failure to meet its

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obligations to rectify past racial harms. Hence, using racial categories for those ends—albeit with many constraints and with a consciousness of other resulting problems—is ethically justifiable.19 What is more, color consciousness is not per se racist. Certainly racism requires color consciousness; or, rather, consciousness of society’s racial categories, as well as the mores, roles, and systems for individuating individuals into those categories. Racism, however, requires specific judgments, which are usually negative, of inferiority or antipathy about some target races.20 Policies, laws, institutions, and social organizations that are color conscious for the purpose of ameliorating past racial harms do come with social, political, and economic costs that affect individuals and groups—all of which should be the subject of democratic deliberation—are not necessarily racist. To feature this separation between racism and color blindness Amy Gutmann has suggested that “color consciousness,” which is concerned with socially determined racial identification and the history of racism, and racial disparity and oppression, is conceptually distinct from “race consciousness,” which is too wrapped up in erroneous biological and cultural conceptions of race and racial belonging.21 For Gutmann and other liberals who have taken seriously the lessons of the civil rights and feminist movements, instead of disuniting the nation color consciousness serves the common good when it is used to ensure fairness in the distribution of rights and duties and social goods. In addition to the responses outlined earlier, further problems with color blindness are revealed by returning to the general definition of R-blindness. The general definition has amazing reach, because X could be any agent or social or governmental institution: it could apply to individuals as they scan personal advertisements, or to a county’s department of child protective services as it hires new social workers. Likewise, R could be any social identity that critics have suspected of being morally or politically illegitimate or irrelevant; these could span from folk categories to those generated by the government (most racial categories have aspects of both, e.g., “white” is both a folk and U.S. Census category). Likewise, R could be “gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,” “citizen,” “class,” “disability,” and so on in addition to race and ethnic categories. Contexts are equally expansive. What context is not in some portion either a moral, political, or legal context? Does this general ideal mean that sex-segregated restrooms should be abolished? Or that individuals should be blind to any number of Rs in determining with whom they want to form intimate relationships?22 Those questions are too broad for The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice to answer, but even restricting our reflections


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to race and ethnicity produces no clear answers. The reason for this is that it is unclear who the relevant Xs are and what the relevant Cs are. The questions surrounding color blindness and consciousness are still too broad. Outside of strictly self-regarding contexts, such as selecting peppers at a market (but not interacting with vendors, employees, or other shoppers), it is difficult to sort out agents or contexts where the principles of color blindness may not apply. While a definitive answer (and there is not one) about the morality of imposing or having a racial identity would potentially affect the practice of all Xs, such an answer would not definitively determine to what degree those Xs should be color blind in their particular Cs. Unfortunately, discussions about color blindness, or the conservation versus elimination of race, frequently conflate the distinctions between the domains of social life, assuming that one answer will satisfy all of the normative and practical requirements of all contexts—or they leave unstated exceptions for some Cs, such as the biological or biomedical sciences or the formation of families. Thus arguments for and against color blindness are largely concerned with law and public policy and say little about the appropriate level of color consciousness in other domains. This lack of thoroughness invites, and leaves untouched, hypocritical and rank self-interested employments of color blindness. The Xs, Cs, and even Rs (it is not clear which racial categories are of concern) of the aforementioned formula are determined by the group interests of the the various advocates of color blindness. Hence, objections against color consciousness lack objectivity, and to the proponents of color consciousness, the advocates of color blindness seem really interested in defending and maintaining white privileges. White parents and students who object to affirmative action in college admissions that favor African Americans, yet are perfectly color conscious when they bemoan having to compete with better-prepared Asian American students for admission, are an example of this problem.23 Even worse, there is the silence about, or support for, racist pseudoscience, such as in the Bell Curve, by some of the advocates of color blindness.24 In addition to the problem of double standards, and the failure to think about “blindness” or “consciousness” across domains of social activity, other discussions of color blindness suffer from forms of narrowness that are due to methodology. This is the case of the “conservation of race” discussion within philosophy in the United States. The American philosophical discussion about the “conservation of race” has approached the topic through general analyses of the semantics and metaphysics of biological and social categories and has

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applied lessons from those areas to questions about race and ethnicity. Hence, leading concerns about race have been whether it is a real biological category and has a material referent, and, if not, whether and how it is a social category and whether it has some social referent.25 The operative supposition behind this method is that “blindness” or “consciousness” concerning some R will be determined by whether it exists or is illusory, and if it is said to exist is able to account for its existence, for example, as some thing according to the standards of the biological or social sciences. The essential idea here is that normative questions about Rs are determined by its ontological status. Typically, those who offer such arguments are racial eliminativists who hold that what really matters is that race is not a real biological category, and since race does not seem to qualify as a real biological category, then it is an an illegitimate social category.26 That move, however, would doom a great many social categories if they were held to the same standards. What matters is the moral status of race, but that issue is evaded in the eliminativist strategy. Moreover, those who hold that race is a social construction have made an end run around the eliminativist strategy by granting that while race is not a real biological category, it is a real social category.27 While useful, the social constructivist strategy does not answer the normative questions either: just because social conditions give racial categories presence and effect in human society, this does not make the idea of race, and racial categories, legitimate.28 Metaphysics matters, but it cannot by itself answer normative questions.

The Normative Insights of Color Blindness The social reality of race and the need for color consciousness in public policy do not offer refuge from the nagging worries about the moral status of the idea of race and the role of racial and ethnic categories in liberal political theories. Race is deemed an illegitimate human category for a variety of well-known and valid reasons, and it is for those reasons, in part, that the people of the United States continue to return to it as a basic ethical ideal, as the North Star—also the moniker of Douglass’s paper—that points in the direction of the type of nation they want the United States to be, this despite the fact that color blindness in law and government failed to materialize during the post-Reconstruction years and again in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and bitterly let down those Americans who were hoping for, though it was vaguely conceived, racial harmony.29 Fred-


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erick Douglass personifies both the American sorrow of the failure of the United States to create a color-blind society and the impulse to return to the normative insights—moral, social, and political—of color blindness. Of course, one of the chief motivations for popular interest in color blindness is a growing awareness that the idea of race is illegitimate, that it is a morally irrelevant and dangerous category. This belief often is paired with the general idea that racial identity should not function as a qualification in the spheres of the market, employment, or perhaps political service, and thus drives mass opposition to color-conscious policies, policies defended in the last section. Although I disagree with such broad rejections of color consciousness, the nagging worries about the moral status of race lead me to sympathize with those who defend color blindness. Behind these nagging worries is the well-known fact that race is not a legitimate biological category; it is at best a heuristic tool within population genetics and other biomedical sciences, with some limited applications in the diagnosis of disease.30 Further, the races cannot be accounted for through culture, and certainly U.S. racial categories do not correspond to distinctive cultures.31 Likewise, the races do not correspond to natural or “national” political groupings.32 Therefore, from a liberal perspective, there are no legitimate uses of “race” outside of the narrow political purposes outlined in the previous section. Indeed, that is the point of Gutmann’s division of “color” from “race” consciousness.33 These and other nagging worries about the idea of race lead my liberal conscience to conclude that the less race is around, the better off the nation will be. In response to such musings about the moral value of color blindness and problems with race, some critics expand on the claim that color blindness is a myth by arguing that it is impossible. According to philosophers, such as Iris Marion Young and Linda Martín Alcoff, color blindness is an epistemological impossibility.34 In Alcoff’s analysis, the social identities of race, ethnicity, and gender function as interpretative horizons. They are the “situations” from which we come to know, understand, and reason about the world. Since our identities so strongly affect our interaction with the world, they cannot be so easily transcended in the way liberals typically demand. Second, for Alcoff, the identities of race and gender are embodied and visible to the world. Our experience of our identities is not as a mere concept or category but as an experience of our bodies in our social world, of our embodied visibility. Furthermore, not only do our bodies affect our experience of the world but they, as marked by race

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and gender, also enter into the experience of others. Individuals are not interacted with merely as interlocutor, citizen, person, or human; within our social world, persons engage others as gendered and raced beings. Located as we are within our embodied identities, it is naïve for liberals to insist that individuals who recognize and seek recognition of their embodied identities are “reifying” those identities. It is worse than naïve, moreover, for liberals to insist that individuals can adorn themselves with a mantle of citizenship that would cover up their embodied and visible differences. This insistence is malicious and exclusionary when it is put forward by a society that cultivates what Charles Mills called an epistemology of ignorance about the social role and presence of gender and race, and the historical place of those categories in the formation of modern liberal democracies.35 Alcoff’s criticisms, similar to those of Young, of color blindness are larger than critiques of it as method in law, public policy, or personal interrelations; rather, they critique its utopian vision, basic moral value, and philosophical underpinnings. For Young and Alcoff, color blindness is hostile to the very idea of difference and perpetuates the assumption that ethics and politics require unity. Clearly, that assumption does humanity no good in a world filled with differences of all sorts. They are correct to argue that the peoples of the world should quit indulging in ethical and political fantasies that depend on an ephemeral and unachievable unity, and they are correct to reject versions of color blindness that simply evade the social facts about race. The real moral and political work involves reconciling the fact of differences, whether these differences are socially or biologically generated, and building moral communities within and between just and stable political societies. Yet to do that reverts at least in regard to race and ethnicity, to the basic value of fairness, which is at the heart of color blindness. Hence, Young’s and Alcoff’s critiques miss the moral insight of color-blindness. The basic moral insight of color blindness, according to Gutmann, is that justice as fairness is ultimately color blind. Unfortunately, though, color blindness ultimately impedes the realization of fairness, because it refuses to deal with the legacy of racial oppression. Hence, as Gutmann argued in “Responding to Racial Injustice,” the basic moral insight of color blindness is contained within liberal conceptions of color consciousness, and it is best expressed through color consciousness. This moral insight is captured in Gutmann’s attempt to sever color consciousness from race consciousness, and Anthony Appiah’s recognition that while racial identities exist and should be


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the subject of law, policy, and the social sciences, race, as a biological or cultural idea, does not exist.36 According to Gutmann: Race consciousness assumes that racial identity is a scientifically based fact of differentiation among individuals that has morally relevant implications for public policy. Color consciousness recognizes the ways in which skin color and other superficial features of individuals adversely and unfairly affect their life chances. What’s right about color consciousness . . . is also the partial truth in color blindness: all human beings regardless of their color should be treated as free and equal beings, worthy of the same set of basic liberties and opportunities.37 At this point it is important to admit that the sort of color consciousness that Gutmann and Appiah defend is at heart “color consciousness for the ends of color blindness,” where the end of color blindness is, as Gutmann argued, fairness. “Liberal,” then, is an accurate characterization of this conception of color consciousness; it demands race blindness in all public contexts and looks forward to the day when the public sphere is fair enough that it can be color blind as well; indeed, it is the sort of color consciousness that is supported by scores of liberal theorists who have written about race, such as Boxill, Blum, Corlett, Dworkin, and Wasserstrom.38 Further, there is little difference between careful, in contrast to naïve, articulations of color blindness and liberal color consciousness—the only difference is one of tone, with the latter signaling that it takes into consideration the social presence and effects of race and racism. The value of the ideal of this sort of color consciousness grows out of the moral insight of color consciousness but is itself a political insight. An important but perhaps often underemphasized implication of liberal color consciousness is that it also is committed to the eventual elimination of racial categories. The presence of racial categories, around which racial identities and scripts form, will be a consistent source of friction for the public goal of achieving color blindness in the public sphere. Thus we find in the liberal defenses of color consciousness parallel proposals to shift racial categories into ethnic ones, the constant undermining of “race,” “racial identities,” and “race consciousness,” and other calls for contingency and irony regarding race, extending even to the recommendation that “race” be set apart with quotation marks to properly signal that we are using the term cautiously and are

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desirous to avoid supporting the very idea of “race.” The eliminativist stance of liberal color consciousness, however, is not properly based on the metaphysical arguments against race; rather, it is necessitated by the public goals of liberalism. The eliminativist stance of liberal color consciousness is evident in Appiah’s argument that we should talk of “racial identies” instead of “races,” and his proposal that the ascriptions that the public makes about racial identities be reduced and scripts based on them loosened. An implication of this eliminativist stance is that it extends into the social and private spheres—precisely what the opponents of integration and social equalization dread. This is another normative insight of color consciousness, and it is distinctly social. Gutmann and Appiah, as well as other liberal political theorists and philosophers committed to liberal anti-racism, are correct to see this moral insight reflected within carefully designed color-conscious policies. But the basic moral insight of color blindness extends beyond the public domains, in which Gutmann and Appiah limit their discussion, to the private domains of the social and personal. The Cs to which the moral insights of color blindness apply are both public and private. The deepening of civic friendship in public domains will result in the deepening of ties in the personal lives of the nation’s citizens and residents—that dialectical process is both promising and threatening and is taken up in the fourth chapter. In brief, the strengthening of civic friendship erodes racial discrimination, but it also erodes forms of social organization and life that the society has come to value, such as group belonging and strong forms of group solidarity, which have resulted from American racial categories.39 Thus critics of color blindness, especially those committed to race-based forms of nationalism or other strong forms of solidarity, are right to think of liberal color consciousness as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.40 From their perspective, there is no substantial difference between “color blindness” and “liberal color consciousness”; they are both naïve, and the difference in tone alluded to earlier makes little difference in that they are both driven toward the goal of eliminating race. Defenders of liberal color consciousness, however, should retort thusly, that in this case there is no confrontation between a wolf and a respectively innocent and defenseless sheep, but, rather, a conflict between the wolf of liberalism and the wolf of racial nationalism or other strong forms of race-based solidarity. In this regard, the latter wolf can be better conceptualized as a wolf in democrat’s clothing and is a distinct threat to a reasonable, just, and pluralist society.


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The transformative ideal of liberal color consciousness invites excitement about the demographic, and perhaps social and political, changes that the browning of America portends. Moreover, the demographic phenomenon of the browning of America provides a practical reason for the nation to reconsider the value of the color blindness that is at the heart of liberal color consciousness. Therefore, the interaction of the ideas of color blindness, color consciousness, and the social phenomenon of the browning of America is worth investigating. Some intellectuals, namely, Richard Rodriguez, have been caught up in the romance of the browning of America, and they carelessly view this as a solution to the racial problems of the United States. However, the browning of America is certainly not a solution or even a palliative for America’s problems with race. Yet it is a moment that invites the nation to consider its future and who it wants to be, and I now turn to these issues.

Part 2 Five Problems with the Browning of America The browning of America promises to overturn centuries of racial and ethnic demographic patterns in the United States. No longer will the United States have a white majority. The browning of the nation graphically describes this shift by putting it in the simplistic terms of color laden with racial meaning. There is much to reject in that phrase. Beside the fear and disdain it creates in the minds of those who desire to preserve a white majority in the United States, the phrase has plenty of, well, “brown” critics. It conflates a wide array of people of color into one threatening force—much like the older idea of “yellow peril” that is being retailored to fit America’s growing suspicions of the promise of China’s and India’s might.41 Likewise, it racially homogenizes all of those it collects into the color “brown.” In short, it is a phrase that is well suited to describe white anxieties about the changing face of America, but it does little to describe those who collectively constitute that change. The “browning of America” as a demographic idea gathers together Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Americans with a multiracial identity, as well as nonwhite immigrants. In popular culture, however, it primarily connotes the expanding population of

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Latinos and Mexican and Latin American immigrants. Secondarily, it includes the growing social and political presence of multiracial Americans, those who claim more than one racial background, and the growth of interracial romantic relationships. And occasionally, it also includes the expanding presence of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants.42 Immediately, the disjointedness between the demographic and popular conceptions of the browning of America reveals that major segments of the population, namely, African Americans and Native Americans, that are included in it at the same time may feel alienated from the phenomenon. This alienation results from five problems with the browning of America: 1. It is used to support color blindness, especially in public policy. 2. It engenders a hierarchy of skin colors. 3. It conflicts with long-existing civil rights claims. 4. It forebodes the nation’s failure to remember its racial history. 5. It conflicts with “traditional” conceptions of American racial and ethnic patterns of population and power. These problems may seem counterintuitive. After all, the “browning of America” is about the increase in the numbers, status, and power of nonwhite Americans. That assumption, however, depends on naïve conceptions of race and racism that conflate the experiences and interests of those communities and ignore intergroup conflicts. Each of these problems arises from intergroup conflict, and some name serious ethical and political problems, while others, especially the latter two, are so not so much problems as they are reasonable challenges to American racial concepts, categories, and nationalist assumptions, formed by the black-white binary, about the place and power of each race in the United States and its history. Again, my thesis is that some popular conceptions of the browning of America support naïve conceptions of color blindness, threaten progressive color-conscious policies, and thus aid in the evasion of righting past racial wrongs. The demographic phenomenon of the browning of America, however, need not perform any of these roles and can even support the just ends of liberal color consciousness in


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public policy. Therefore, it is important to counter the utopian and politically harmful conceptions of the browning of America and offer a conception of the phenomenon that supports enduring liberal projects of social justice. All the same, what cannot nor should not be avoided is that the browning of America is transforming the meaning of “race” to such an extent that dominant conceptions of “racial” equality, justice, and harmony will also inevitably shift toward a cosmopolitan direction.

Browning as a Form of Color-Blindness When “brown” is used to describe someone’s “looks,” it refers to an array of skin types too dark to be white and too light to be black. It has a long history of being used to describe the skin tones of some subset of nearly every racial and ethnic group in the United States. The one exception are those whites who are brown and are occasionally described as “dark” (as in tall, dark, and handsome), “tan,” or “swarthy,” the latter of which may be an anachronism in contemporary America. It has, though, a specific reference in the United States to Mexicans, Chicanos, and Latinos or Hispanics generally, and it is one element of America’s palette of racial primary colors, along with “black,” “red,” “white,” and “yellow.” And as with “black power” and “red power,” “brown power” is a form of U.S.-born racial and ethnic nationalism opposed to the supremacy of “white power.” Moreover, the reference of “brown” to Hispanics and Latinos is a reference to an American-made racial category that gathered together a variety of nationalities and ethnic groups whose origins are in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, with substantial and ongoing political, social, economic, and linguistic contact in those places.43 As a group, Latinos (or, if you prefer, Hispanics) maintain ethnic and linguistic distinctions, and their process of racialization has not been as extensive as, say, white Americans. The result has been that many Latinos do not think, and rightly so, of “Latino” as naming a race, nor a single ethnic group. Therefore, “Latino,” “Hispanic,” and “brown” do not simply refer to either a race or an ethnic group and may be better described as what David Theo Goldberg calls an “ethnorace.”44 “Brown” has a place in American fears of being “overrun,” “flooded,” or, worse, “drowned” by the “rising tide” of nonwhite immigration. This fear is perfectly encapsulated by the metaphoric phrase “awash under a brown tide,” which is the centerpiece in Otto

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Santa Ana’s study of metaphors that Americans use to describe immigration and immigrants.45 This fear of being drowned in a rising sea of brown folk is, as well, a perfect complement—in the logic of racism—to “yellow peril,” the European-derived fear and fascination of all things “Oriental.”46 In the fear of both the brown and yellow perils is the fear of swarming, and Hegel has the distinction of contextualizing that fear in his theory of the development of the Western European geist: The Mongols, on the other hand, rise above this childish naïveté; they reveal as their characteristic feature a restless mobility which comes to no fixed result and impels them to spread like monstrous locust swarms over other countries and then to sink back again in to the thoughtless indifference and dull inertia which preceded this outburst.47 The fear of “swarming,” and the implied destruction of agricultural fields, has a consonance with the parallel use of the phrase “the browning of America” as a description of increasing drought in America and the drying up of suburban America’s verdant lawns. The droughtrelated reference is entirely distinct from the demographic one as facts, yet as metaphors they couple and allude to a fear that goes the beyond the worry over demographic change, to a nationalistic terror of the loss of the nation and its “culture.” As Santa Ana claims, the threatening metaphor of a “rising brown tide” conflates the individual lives and circumstances of Latino citizens, residents, and immigrants into a dangerous and an unpredictable force that threatens to wash “away something basic to America,” and that which is threatened is not strictly economic but cultural.48 “Brown,” then, is a word for the color conscious. It is, therefore, at least initially, anti-intuitive to pair the seemingly incompatible concepts of color blindness and the browning of America. Context, though, is everything, and browning cannot only operate to aid color blindness, it can transform the meaning of color blindness and create a whole new form of it.

It Is Used to Support Color Blindness, Especially in Public Policy The idea of the browning of America is used by proponents of color blindness in their endeavors to argue against and end color-conscious programs and policies. For example, the comments of officials and


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figures against affirmative action and preferential hiring based on race or ethnicity, especially in states, such as California, with high rates of Mexican and Latin American immigration, are littered with references to how browning somehow further invalidates color-conscious policies. Pete Wilson, while governor of California, put it this way: We live in the most diverse society the world has ever known. In Los Angeles alone, our schools teach children who speak more than eighty different languages. Early in the next century, no single ethnic group will constitute a majority of California’s population. We’ll be the nation’s first minoritymajority states. So we don’t need sermons about tolerance and diversity. We’re practicing it every day. . . . But we can’t ignore that diversity also poses serious challenges. For our state and nation to succeed and prosper, we must treat every citizen as an individual—acknowledging our differences, but cherishing above all else what unites us as Americans. . . . But today, that fundamental American principle of equality is being eroded, eroded by a system of preferential treatment that awards public jobs, public contracts, and seats in our public universities, not based on merit and achievement but on membership in a group defined by race, ethnicity, or gender. That’s not right. It’s not fair. It is, by definition, discrimination. It’s exactly what the civil rights movement sought to end.49 This strategic use of browning has two approaches, both of which are apparent in Governor Wilson’s statement; the first is concerned with the disutility of color-conscious programs and policies in a brown America, while the second highlights how browning increases the unfairness of such policies. The first approach presents an argument from disulitity and rests on the claim that the demographic fact of the browning of America further undermines the utility of color-conscious programs to rectify racial disparities in the domains in which they were employed. Unfortunately, these disutility arguments concerning browning and color consciousness are not carefully laid out; all the same, they tend to imply that there are three reasons for this disutility. First, in a brown majority nation, racism, as performed by whites against nonwhites, would become rare and its effects irrelevant in the life chances of individuals. Second, the mere fact of browning demonstrates that nonwhite racial oppression or even institutional racism has been overcome, and thus

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programs to rectify racism have outlived their usefulness. Finally, in a brown America, the lines between the races are increasingly blurred due to increases in interracial professional and private relationships and multiracial persons. Thus it is impossible to pick out individuals, families, groups, and even companies who do or do not qualify for color-conscious policies. The result is a host of unforeseen harmful consequences that contradict the purposes of color consciousness. For example, do nonwhite immigrants or multiracial individuals, with partial white parentage, qualify for color-conscious programs originally intended to rectify the effects of anti-black racial oppression? According to this first approach, these problems transcend the technicalities of individuals’ qualifications and extend to interracial families and businesses. Consider Governor Wilson’s following example: . . . defenders of affirmative action say we don’t need to end preferential treatment, because it only expands opportunity; it never limits it. There are no victims of reverse discrimination, they say. . . . [Tell that] to the employees of Fontana Steel in California. Almost half of them are minorities, but the firm doesn’t qualify as a minority contractor. As a result, they’ve lost contracts, even when they were the low bidder, to firms that were given preferential treatment. . . . The apologists for racial and gender preferences claim that it’s only “angry white men” who oppose preferential treatment—that this is backlash against the success of minorities and women in modern America. Well, they’re misreading America.50 The second approach, which focuses on the unfairness of reverse discrimination, builds on the first. Given the demographic shifts of the browning of America and increases in the disutility of color consciousness that it portends, the discrimination against whites that color-conscious policies necessitate is thrown into high relief, and—since whites will soon be a minority—is even more unjustified than it was in the first place.51 Governor Wilson’s words get to the heart of this complaint: And whatever justification existed for this system [affirmative action] in the 1960s and 1970s isn’t there more than thirty years after the civil rights movement succeeded in outlawing discrimination. Don’t get me wrong: the fight against racism hasn’t entirely been won. But the demagogues who compare California of the 1990s to Selma, Alabama, of the 1960s are


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lost in a time warp. The chief of police in Los Angeles isn’t Bull Connor—it’s Willie Williams, an African-American. Our state capitol’s most enduring figure hasn’t been George Wallace—it’s been Willie Brown, an African-American. . . . And the people from Washington telling us what to do aren’t the FBI coming to enforce the law. They’re the Rainbow Coalition coming to disrupt it.52 These two approaches assist naïve arguments for color blindness in public policy, but beyond that convergence, the browning of America presents an enormous challenge to the idea and practice of color consciousness. This challenge is revealed in the logic of the first approach: browning inundates the nation with “color,” thus making people of color omnipresent in American life and purportedly making skin color, and therefore racial and ethnic identifications, banal and inconsequential—like eye color. Browning purports to wash away color consciousness of all sorts with color, hence, it accomplishes the ends of the ambitious conception of color blindness through hypercolor consciousness. In short, since color is to be everywhere, it will be nowhere. Whether for good or ill, the browning of America will thus transform the meaning of color blindness and invest it with a new life in the popular imagination.

It Engenders a Hierarchy of Skin Colors The arguments from disutility and unfairness assume that the demographic shifts represented by the browning of America bring with them shifts in racial patterns of economic and political power. But a shift in the former does not necessitate a shift in the latter; a brown-majority America is completely consistent with America’s historical racial disparities and divisions. Moreover, because this sort of thinking takes the “brown” category in the browning of America as monolithic, it is blind to the differences among the groups inside the category. Again, there is no reason to assume that all of the groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, will equally profit from browning, or that browning will seriously address their traditional concerns. Moreover, there are reasons to think otherwise, that groups who presently suffer the greatest racial disparities and that are most frequently the victims of racism will be made worse off by browning. Browning could bring superficial demographic changes without seriously addressing these concerns, and concurrently provide society with

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an easy excuse (the increase of diversity) to abandon efforts at racial justice. Thus it could mask patterns of racism and racial disparities and permit them to fester and worsen—the hyper-color consciousness of the browning of America may make America blind to the relevant socioeconomic differences between the groups that constitute its diversity and thus reproduce the faults of color blindness. Worse, browning could add to these problems by engendering racism based on gradations of skin color. The advocates of the browning of America simply assume that the demographic shift of browning will minimize the prevalence and consequences of racism and racial hierarchies, and they also assume the nonexistence or irrelevancy of racism between nonwhite groups. This, of course, is another facet of the way the “brown” category in the browning of America is taken as a monolithic group. Critics, especially of multiracial, mixed-race, and mestizo identity, point to forms of racism in Latin American nations and the Republic of South Africa to demonstrate that anti-black and anti-indigenous forms of racism can thrive in brown-majority settings. Their concern is that browning, in addition to hiding and failing to seriously address racism, will develop Latin American-style racial practices in the United States. Racial categories and color distinctions will proliferate, and race in America will be “transformed” from a two-headed beast to a multiheaded hydra.53

It Conflicts with Long-Existing Civil Rights Claims Obviously, it is not a political interest of African Americans and Native Americans to have society ignore or easily dismiss their claims for social justice, nor is it in their political interests to have new forms of racism flourish in the United States. Along with these, there are other conflicts between the browning of America and “long-existing” conceptions of race and social justice. The conflicts between the browning of America and long-existing civil rights claims are over political power and representation, education policies, employment, neighborhoods, and so on, even extending to the very meaning of civil rights.54 The so-called long-existing or “traditional” claims were determined by the American historical focus on the African American freedom and civil rights movement and the Native American movement to reclaim and preserve tribal government sovereignty. The claims that make up the long-existing claims are largely legitimate, but their status as “traditional,” as somehow being authentically American, is due to


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a particular U.S. nationalist conception of America as being a white, black, and Native American land, while Latinos and Asian Americans are historical outsiders and, in a sense, perpetual foreigners.55 The conflict between the browning of America and long-existing claims goes back, perhaps, to the rise of the “model minority” idea and its employment as a counteridea in a counternarrative to the civil rights movement. Further, this conflict extends to the inclusion of Asian Americans, Latinos, and other nonwhite immigrants in affirmative action programs. Indeed, the browning of America’s effect on affirmative action is the best example of the threat of browning to the long-standing civil rights claims of African Americans; it transforms the purpose and meaning of such programs in a way that may prove detrimental to African Americans. This process is demonstrated by the quadruple effect of browning on affirmative action. First, affirmative action programs were expanded to include Asian Americans, Latinos, and other nonwhite immigrants and thus diluted the positive effect of civil rights programs for African Americans by diminishing the number of African Americans served.56 Second, the expansion of affirmative action has been fueled by liberal immigration laws, and the convergence of the two has contributed to the mass unpopularity of the program, thereby weakening its political support. Third, the perception of growing competition between African Americans and Asian Americans over access to educational resources has led to significant Asian American and Asian immigrant opposition to affirmative action, which adds rhetorical weight and political power to the movement for color blindness in education.57 Fourth, as discussed in the earlier subsections, browning provides an array of support for color blindness.58 Related to the conflicts that result between browning and longexisting claims are other larger conflicts over political representation, access to public resources, such as hospitals (e.g., the conflicts concerning the city of Los Angeles’ King/Drew Hospital Medical Center) and public schools, and patterns of ethnic succession in formerly black neighborhoods.59 The raw edges of these conflicts were displayed during the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of the four police officers who were accused of brutalizing Rodney King. In the African American and Latino neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles were widespread perceptions that in their own neighborhoods they were subject to price gouging and racist treatment by Korean American and Asian American owners of shops and other businesses. Then, in the days before the riot, tensions were raised by the shooting

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and death of Latasha Harlins by a Korean store owner.60 During the riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers, African American and Latinos male youths took out their rage and resentment by targeting Korean American and Asian American businesses. These tensions have not dissipated, and after the Latino immigration protests of the spring of 2006, similar tensions between African Americans and Latinos and immigrants have only been highlighted.61 These tensions, and the fear and resentment behind them, were encapsulated by Andrew Young, former mayor of the city of Atlanta, and a UN ambassador during the Carter administration, when he made these comments about whether Wal-Mart should run out mom-and-pop stores from urban neighborhoods, and the effect of those businesses, which are largely owned by individuals from nonwhite ethnic groups, in historically black communities: Well, I think they should; they ran the mom-and-pop stores out of my neighborhood. . . . But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.62 Young was hired by Wal-Mart to reach out to minority community groups and to gain support for the corporation’s expansion into urban areas. Instead, he alienated the multicultural communities that make up the city centers of the major U.S. cities and neatly displayed his own fear and resentment of the browning of America—and his Atlanta—and he viewed his mission with the advocacy group Working Families for Wal-Mart in terms of the black-white binary.63 Native American conflicts with the browning of America have been less dramatic than the African American cases. Nonetheless, in their quest to preserve tribal government sovereignty, Native Americans must continue to stress how they are not like other minorities whose claims are encapsulated by the history of civil rights.64 The case John Doe v. Kamehameha Schools, for example, shows the potential for harm against Native American groups.65 Without state or federal recognition, a Native American group is treated as any other minority group according to U.S. civil rights law. In a “brown” state, as Hawaii has long been, the peculiar color blindness that results from the browning of America is a positive hindrance to the indigenous Hawaiians as they seek the federal- and state-sanctioned privileges


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afforded to other American indigenous groups. In this case, the browning of America helps in the process of the elimination of the Native Hawaiian people.

It Forebodes a National Failure to Remember Its Racial History The demographic changes brought on by the browning of America, given the problems outlined earlier, may be seen not as a progressive transformation that heralds the dusk of racial injustice and disparities, but as a great turning away from the history of race in America; further, as discussed earlier, the browning of America may be the excuse for the extension of the already established American practice of disregarding its racial legacy and the obligations that flow from that legacy. It is reasonable for African Americans and Native Americans to be suspicious of the narrative of progressive racial transformation that some of the advocates of browning indulge in. Likewise, it is reasonable for Native Americans and African Americans to suspect that the masses of people who make up the browning of America are not particularly interested in learning about the role of African Americans and Native Americans in U.S. history and do not see themselves in any sense as being responsible for addressing these matters.66 From the perspective of these suspicions, the browning of America is an opportunity for Latinos, Asian Americans, Americans with multiracial backgrounds, and nonwhite immigrants to join with the whites in pursuit of the “American dream” of freedom, work, and opportunity, while engaging in a collective disregard for, and detachment from, the burdens of this nation’s racial history.67 The anxiety that the browning of America forebodes a turning away from the obligations of historical memory is reflected in further, and less defensible, anxieties. African Americans and to some extent Native Americans have a nationalistic interest in keeping their dominant presence in the American popular imagination about race and social justice and harmony. That dominant presence is yet another aspect of American life that the browning of America promises to transform, and in doing so it will complete the process—under way at least since the reformation of U.S. immigration law in 1965—of placing Latinos, Asian Americans, and multiracial Americans as equals next to African Americans and Native Americans in national imaginings and discussions of race. The following chapter names the fear of this transformation as the dual fear of replacement and displacement—both of which were displayed in Andrew Young’s telling comments. The

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fear of displacement is the fear that a group will be displaced from its place in American life, which it feels it has achieved through work and struggle, and thus will lose it prominence and power, and its claims and contributions will be ignored. The fear of replacement is related to the fear of displacement, but it is the fear that some group will have its place, power, and attention, which it may feel it has some historical or property right to, taken by another group, or even offered by some other group, say, the white majority.

It Conflicts with “Traditional” Conceptions of American Racial and Ethnic Patterns of Population and Power The dual fear of displacement and replacement gets to the core of all the problems with the browning of America, representing worries about the failure to recognize long-standing and legitimate concerns about race and social justice, as well as a nostalgic vision for “traditional” racial and ethnic patterns. This vision is not only nostalgic, it also represents a peculiar post-civil rights form of American white-black racial nationalism. This form of racial nationalism is not a full-blown version of racial nationalism, as it is unlike other racial nationalist ideologies that assert that some ethnoracial group forms a nation, and that nation ought to have a state. Yet it is a background premise for the more traditional forms of white and black nationalism, and, as is the case with other forms of nationalism, it makes assumptions about conformity to a national religion (Protestant Christianity), language (English), and rightful claims to the land and resources of the nation, which are based on labor and historical priority. This white-black premise to American nationalism asserts that America is a land in which only whites and blacks are truly native, Native Americans notwithstanding, and they are to be the dominant groups within the United States. The browning of America, therefore, deeply offends this whiteblack premise and the white and black forms of American nationalism that accept it. Through the demographic shift alone, browning is making good on its threat to permanently alter traditional American racial and ethnic patterns. Along with this, it concurrently threatens traditional American racial and ethnic patterns of power and visibility; this extends to the meaning of the terms in national discussions of race. For example, as discussed earlier, browning has helped alter the way individuals understand “color blindness,” and, of course, the very idea of “race.” The influence of the browning of America has even reached into discussions of the meaning of civil rights (do


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immigrants have them?) and racial justice. For those who accept this white-black premise, even among those who are typically advocates of racial justice, the effect of browning on the civil rights claims of African Americans is devastating, because it denies them historical priority and equalizes their claims and places them next to the claims of, well, immigrants. It is like, according to Patricia Hill Collins, “telling African Americans to take a number and wait their turn in a long line of special interest groups.”68

Response The first first four problems listed call for greater moral and political responsibility regarding those issues on the part of the groups that make up and advocate for the browning of America. A commitment to anti-racism against African Americans is an absolute requirement. Likewise, these groups need to think critically about the effect of browning on long-existing civil rights claims of African Americans, and the sovereignty claims of Native Americans, and how their policies affect the realization of social justice for those groups. This may mean endorsing specific policies that rectify past harms against African Americans, especially focusing on the needs of the black urban poor. As the U.S. Supreme Court reconsiders affirmative action in an era marked by the conservative court of Chief Justice Roberts, multicultural coalitions should support the reemergence of backwardlooking, color-conscious social policies that aid the poor. This call for responsibility in the face of the browning of America will be further outlined in chapter 5. As for the fifth problem, as well as aspects of the third and fourth problems, the legitimate, long-existing claims of African Americans and Native Americans should be honored and certainly strived for by multicultural America. The nationalist and nativist ideas with which they are occasionally paired need to be totally and publicly rejected and then expunged from reasonable discussions of civil rights (these issues will be discussed in the following chapter). The five problems are not trivial, and they will likely be the source of future political and social fractures and disappointments. Nonetheless, organizations and institutions that participate in American civil society should and can quite easily address the first three problems and the reasonable facets of the third and fourth problems. Just as importantly, though, the advocates of the browning of America ought to strike against the unreasonable ideas expressed in the fifth problem. In that regard, the browning of America is not

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an evasion of social justice: instead, it advances the cause of social justice, and it does so in a cosmopolitan direction. This occurs in two ways. First, the browning of America is strongly suggestive of a broad integrationist ideal (an ideal that too easily falls into utopian romance, as will be discussed in chapter 4) that connects to the normative insights of liberal color consciousness. If the advocates of the browning of America can resist the temptations of being coopted by political movements and organizations that favor naïve or even malicious versions of color blindness, then they can utilize the browning of America as a backdrop to highlight the virtues of all the normative insights of liberal color consciousness. Such advocates can support traditional color-conscious civil rights public policy, but with the idea of a color-blind public sphere foregrounded in their rhetoric. Likewise, they can go beyond the cautious rhetoric captured by the moral insight of liberal color consciousness and push the people to think about the civic fruits of color blindness across social and private contexts as well. They can insert a clamor that disturbs the hush about the necessary private and social implications of the moral insight of liberal color consciousness. This is a clamor that does not coerce, God forbid, amalgamation; it is a clamor that points out that the racist opponents of integration were right about at least one thing—integration, and the liberal color consciousness upon which it depends, is an enabling condition of burgeoning interracial partnerships, friendships, and intimacies. Second, the browning of America promotes the transformation of traditional nationalistic conceptions of social justice that dominate in American law, political science, and philosophy. For example, the demographic pressures of the browning of America should lead to the expansion of civil rights for immigrants so that they meet the needs of communities and individuals that do not neatly fit into the civil rights mold of the black-white binary. The potential here is enormous, as it touches on a multitude of aspects of American life: drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants, bilingual rights, the right to vote for immigrant parents in local school district elections and access to education, immigration policies for transnational and dual-citizenship families, and so on. Civil rights must be transformed in light of transnational and global justice, and the browning of America is an agent of this change.

Chapter 3

The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice

Introduction The future of race in the United States, or elsewhere, will not be determined solely through the American instinct to return to blackwhite politics—as if the question of the conservation or elimination of race and racial justice is in the hands of whites and blacks who need to hash out their issues for the sake of all of us. That somehow American racial problems are primarily black and white problems is the conceit of too many Americans. This conceit is rooted in an image of an America defined by Protestantism, the English language, and its ties to Europe and populated by fading yet romantic “Indians,” a few Mexicans, and “Orientals” but dominated by whites and blacks. In this fantasy, the racial problems that we have are determined by the painful yet interesting history between whites and blacks. From here, liberals and conservatives part company, but the central vision holds—both sides affirm that black-white division is the United States’ core racial problem, and that solving black-white conflict is the master key to all of its racial problems. The result of this assumption has been that the concerns, problems, and questions, specific to blacks and whites and the relationship between them, have historically dominated discourse over race in the United States. The domination of this focus, often called the blackwhite binary, has colored the U.S. reaction toward, and policies about, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and its colonial subjects, such as Puerto Ricans and Filipinos.1 The color line, which W. E. B. Du Bois 65

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famously claimed marked the twentieth century and spanned the globe, was imagined in the cast of the black-white binary. In the following sections I clarify various conceptions of the black-white binary and consider their relative merits and failings. I then turn to the host of objections against this binary. I support the primary complaint against the binary, that it does not engender accurate descriptions of the United States’ racial past or present, and it skews discussions of the future of race and racial justice toward the perspectives and interests of blacks and whites. Some readers may think that the problems with the black-white binary are so obvious and great that the subject is not worth a chapter-length study. I urge such readers to momentarily suspend their incredulity about the blackwhite binary so that they can consider the demands for justice that motivate its proponents. I argue that the black-white binary should not simply be dismissed, for incautious dismissals of it end up casting off the demands of justice that frequently motivate statements that seemingly support the binary. Nonetheless, there are troubling aspects of the black-white binary that go beyond the usual objections, leading, finally, to its total rejection. The black-white binary is rooted in a peculiar conception of black-white American nationalism and xenophobia that is ultimately hostile to American multiculturalism. Such a view is fundamentally illiberal, and the people of the United States should not capitulate to its desire that the false image of America as black and white not be upset.

The Black-White Binary The historical relationship between white and black racial identity in the United States is the root of all of the other versions of the binary: B-W Binary1 The black-white binary refers to the historical relationship between white and black racial identity in the United States. The relationship is not static, as it is historical and changes through time, and it is site specific, as it takes particular forms in the United States that differ from other such relationships at other sites, say, New Zealand or the United Kingdom.2 Further, “racial identity” in the aforementioned formulation refers broadly to what Omi and Winant call racial formation, and thus it includes the historical political, economic, and social relationships between blacks and whites; likewise,

The Black-White Binary

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it may refer to the phenomenological structure of white and black identity, in the sense of Fanon’s account of the “lived experience of the black” and his famous compartments.3 This root version of the binary refers, then, to an isolated dyad and does not presume to place the position of other racial or ethnic identities in between the black and white poles. There are two problems, one conceptual and the other moral, even with this root definition. First, as soon as other groups are included and thought of in these terms, what results is a great pinwheel of racial hierarchy and valuation that makes it difficult to think about the relationships between the nonwhite racial categories. Is the wheel static or does it spin? What does this image say about hierarchies between the nonwhite categories? Second, making “white” the pin of the wheel interferes with nuanced ethical thought about racism, in particular, the possibility of anti-white racism. But the story does not end with the root version, because the black-white relationship has had a singular influence on shaping widespread understandings of the history of the United States, its cultural productions, and social life. The historical events that define that relationship—slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, and desegregation—have had such a tremendous influence on the events around and after them, as well as all the peoples involved, that the root version of the binary became, in the decades that followed the U.S. Civil War, an absolute reference point for talking about race in the United States and the world. This process started in the years leading up to the Civil War. For example, Frederick Douglass, in his landmark 4th of July address, called for Emancipation and favorably compared it to the “liberalizing” influence of English colonialism in China: The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.”4 There were other similar extensions of the black-white relationship in the writings of Alexander Crummell and Anna Julia Cooper,

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but the best example of this extension comes from W. E. B. Du Bois. Within his 1897 “The Conservation of the Races,” he proclaimed that Africans in North America and the Caribbean represented the “advanced guard” of all blacks, that this avant-garde would provide the leadership for the entire black world, and that the resolution of anti-black racial oppression in the United States would ipso facto provide the answer to uplift all black people. In Du Bois’s hands, the black-white binary dissolved the particularity of black identity and struggles at various sites. Following the Spanish American War, in his essay “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind” (1900), he extended the reach of black avant-gardism to include all nonwhite peoples under the sway of U.S. power: . . . the colored population of our land is, through the new imperial policy, about to be doubled by our own ownership of Porto Rico [sic], and Hawaii, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines. This is for us and for the nation the greatest event since the Civil War and demands attention and action on our part. What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them? Manifestly it must be an attitude of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance. We must stand ready to guard and guide them with our vote and our earnings. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities. We must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty millions of brown and black people under the protection of the American flag, a third of the nation, and that on the success and efficiency of the nine millions of our own number depends the ultimately destiny of Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Indians and Hawaiians, and that on us too depends in a large degree the attitude of Europe toward the teeming millions of Asia and Africa.5 It is important, though, to remember that the emergence of the blackwhite binary in African American social and political thought was in reaction to the support of colonialism and imperialism by white intellectuals and politicians at the turn of the century. Such elites, such as Teddy Roosevelt, saw the relation of the United States to the nonwhite world and the global south in terms of the American color line.6


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This is in part why, as contradictory as it seems, when the blackwhite binary is employed, those who are using it think they are being inclusive. It serves as a sort of master key to all things racial. It can be used to get at the essence of our history, our problems, and any potential solution. In naïve hands, the binary is used to make the absurd claim that it describes the totality of racial diversity, or at least the diversity that matters. This is the second and simplest version of the black-white binary as an empirical claim: B-W Binary2 Racial patterns can be empirically described solely using black and white terms. The films of Michael Moore provide a telling example of this version of the binary at work and its dominance in the rhetoric of the American Left. Within his internationally recognized critical documentaries racial injustice is consistently depicted through blackwhite terms; from Roger & Me to Fahrenheit 9/11, racial injustice takes on the personage of white anti-black racism. In Fahrenheit 9/11, when Moore, for example, wanted to discuss the inequitable burden of military service that falls on the shoulders of young men from the poor through the lower middle classes, he mechanically focused on black men, despite the fact that this problem is shared in great numbers by Latino, Asian American, and immigrant youth.7 The second version of the binary is indefensible as a methodology for describing the social world, because it would obviously fail to capture the full spectrum of ethnic and racial diversity in American society. Another version, however, is evident in projects that methodologically focus on African Americans, white Americans, and their relationship to each other: B-W Binary3 The black-white binary is a methodological focus on blacks, whites, or on their interrelationship, to the exclusion of other ethnic or racial groups. What is so irksome to the critics of the binary about this version is that researchers and theorists will generalize to the rest of society from this narrow focus. This complaint is everywhere and goes back to the first mention of the browning of America. It usually is stated in this form: American ethnic and racial life can no longer be simply described in black and white terms.8 There is something objectionable about social science and theory that excludes consideration of any

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groups outside of white and black Americans yet purports to study American ethnic and racial patterns. Such a problem, however, lies within systems of social analysis and research, primarily the constitution of colleges and universities, and not with the individual researcher. The limitation of individual research to particular groups is the by-product of specialization and can be virtuous, as long as the researcher does not make great generalizations. Yet researchers who claim methodological limitations as the reason for narrowly tailored foci frequently indulge in great generalizations about larger American racial patterns, in particular, about the singular value of the black-white relationship. They do so, in part, because they accept stronger versions of the black-white binary. For example, in their important empirical work on biracial identity, Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma add these claims to their methodological justifications for focusing solely on black-white biracial children: [B]lacks and whites continue to be the two groups with the greatest social distance, the most spatial separation, and the strongest taboos against interracial marriage. . . . In addition, focusing on black/white biracials enables us to engage profound and enduring questions about racial categorization. Specifically, probing into racial identity among black/white biracials leads to question about the meaning of race, the efficacy of racial categorizations, and how and why Americans have persistently used the “one-drop rule” to determine who is black in America.9 According to Rockquemore and Brunsma, due to the singularity of the black-white relationship, it is a master key of sorts that can unlock the answer to the meaning of race—as if the meaning of race was located in the black-white relationship and the constitution of the black and white categories.10 Although they admit that empirical studies of other racial combinations would be valuable, for them the study of black-white biracial identity reveals the “meaning of race,” which should be reflected but which does not have its origin in the other multiracial identities. Rockquemore and Brunsma have gone beyond the third version of the black-white binary and have asserted a version of the blackwhite binary that is explicitly political: B-W Binary4 Racial patterns can be described in black and white terms, because “black” and “white” pick out prescriptive patterns of racial organization.


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This version accords with the view of the majority of the proponents of the black-white binary. They do not claim that the binary provides a demographic description but that it describes prescriptive patterns of racial hierarchical organization. These patterns, which derive from America’s history of race, organize the complexities of ethnic and racial experiences into the American “bipolar schema,” and in this schema racial groups are politically either included as whites or excluded as blacks.11 This view is behind and provides the force for social and political thought from 1865, the start of Reconstruction, to 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, which made the achievement of civil rights for African Americans the crux of the realization of an authentic American democracy. Thus in 1957, Richard Wright wrote, “The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms,” and “The Negro is America’s metaphor.”12 And James Baldwin, in 1962, wrote that the Negro is “the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his.”13 Wright’s and Baldwin’s comments had a historical specificity and were justified given the world-historical moment in which they were writing, but even their vision of black and white America swept away other relevant facets of American racial divisions, such as Native American legal struggles to guard and recover tribal sovereignty during those decades. All the same, Baldwin was correct about African Americans and the future of the nation in 1962. Much, if not all, depended on black Americans achieving their civil rights. The problem is that too many still see African Americans as the American metaphor and the key to the future of the country—this is the substance of the fourth version of the black-white binary. This view is certainly defended by Andrew Hacker and is represented by the expansive title of his book Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.14 Likewise, the view is perfectly captured in the pithy remark of Mary Frances Berry, historian and former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, that the United States is made up of “three nations, one Black, one White, and one in which people strive to be something other than Black to avoid the sting of White Supremacy.”15 In addition to sociology, history, and political science, this version of the binary has even found support with some political theorists. For example, in Thomas McCarthy’s otherwise careful discussion of deliberative democracy and reparations, this version of the binary is a centerpiece of his argument for national deliberations about racial justice: The black/white polarity has fixed the geography of the colorcoded world to which successive waves of immigrants have

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The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice had to adapt. . . . This is not at all to deny that Americans of diverse origins have their own histories to relate and their own politics of memory to pursue. It is merely to point out that the history of slavery and its aftermath have formed a template for those histories, they have been shaped by it, and that their fates have been inextricably entangled in the racialized politics that is its legacy.16

Examples of this form of the binary abound, but its most recent and most visible public expression was in the discussions of race and class in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Suddenly, to the nation’s horror, that storm brought race and class back to the American consciousness and reminded the nation that despite the rhetoric of national unity broadcast throughout the nation in the days that followed September 11, 2001, race and the effects of racism were real, present, and cast in familiar black-white terms. Hurricane Katrina forced the nation to confront the presence and legacy of anti-black racism. Its most dramatic, destructive event was the deluge of New Orleans, and the majority of its victims were black and elderly, and mostly poor.17 Discussions about historical patterns of anti-black racism and the systematic neglect of African American urban communities quickly spread across the nation through major English language news sources, leaving long behind the context of New Orleans and demonstrating that the nation was not finished with the black-white binary. The United States was not finished with the binary exactly because it never effectively addressed the full effects of the legacy of anti-black oppression.18 Admitting this does not vindicate the binary’s claims at describing prescriptive patterns; instead, it reveals that assertions of the binary so often clumsily stand in for demands of justice undelivered. The ensuing discussions that ricocheted across the nation should have addressed the nation as multiracial, but they did not; they were completely framed by the binary, and so much so that the racial divisions over the government’s response to the storm were cast in black-white terms, as if the attitudes of blacks and whites comprehensively sorted any possible reaction based on race or ethnicity.19 Instead of focusing on the particularity of anti-black racism and the disparities that poor, urban African Americans face, problems that all Americans have inherited an obligation to address, the significance of the event took over the whole meaning of race in America, and it became a discussion for and about black and white people.


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One reason public deliberations, or news media polemics, return to the black-white binary is because black-white conflict is assumed to be this nation’s primary and most intractable racial problem, even in the face of national turmoil over immigration. This assumption appears in two forms—the first is sociological, while the other is historical, and both imply that black-white conflicts and disparity have an ethical priority. The sociological form of this assumption provides the most defensible version of the binary and can be conceptualized in the following way: B-W Binary5 Disparity between blacks and whites is the United States’ greatest social injustice and most pressing social problem. According to this version of the binary, the injustices that African Americans had to endure, such as slavery and subsequent decades of Jim Crow oppression and benign neglect, are the United States’ greatest infractions of justice, and those injustices have given the nation its deepest political, economic, and social disparities. These disparities cut across a wide range of life in the United States, including political representation, wealth, employment, housing, education, health, medical care, and other social indices; they are persistent and have not been adequately addressed by the nation.20 The second form of the assumption that black and white conflict is this nation’s primary racial problem takes the following form as a historical claim: B-W Binary6 Black and white conflict is the United States’ primary historical racial problem. This version of the binary is closely related to the fourth and fifth versions, but it is conceptually distinct; moreover, the interplay between these functions of the binary demonstrates how it works in the minds of its proponents as the master key to race in America. First, black-white conflict is privileged because it simply has a historical priority.21 Second, black-white conflict has a higher significance and needs to be addressed as such because, as in the words of Mary Frances Berry, “Racism against African Americans remains the prototype for racism in America.”22 Claims of this sort have the status of dogma, and versions of it are plainly apparent in the examples I have used thus far, the sociological research of Rockquemore and Brunsma,

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the political analysis of Andrew Hacker, and the moral and political philosophy of Thomas McCarthy.23 The point of this dogma is that as “immigrants,” who are by definition outsiders to the American racial system, assimilate to U.S. culture, they mimic whites by adopting anti-black racism. This is a position articulated by Berry, Hacker, and McCarthy. Here is Berry’s account: If we are to become a truly multiracial democracy, [Clinton’s race initiative] must influence greater change in White behavior based on perceptions of African-Americans. When their behavior changes, maybe others who mimic their attitudes and actions also will be affected.24 Notice the naked nativism of Berry’s statement. She claimed, in effect, that blacks and whites are at the center of American racial dynamics. Asian and Latinos are cast as mimics, and Native Americans, as is typical, are completely ignored. The implication is that because so-called yellow, brown, and offwhite folks mimic white folks—apparently red folks are now white or do not matter—the black-white conflict assumes a historical and political priority. According to Berry: As we absorb the world’s tired, poor and hungry, we must first bring closure to our internal wounds. Americans must learn to measure themselves, not by their distance from Blackness and proximity to Whiteness, but by their acceptance of remedies of racism.25 In other words, the solution to the problem of white privilege and anti-black racism is the master key to all racial problems.

The Exclusions of the Black-White Binary The black-white binary provides an inaccurate and irresponsible representation of the status of ethnoracial groups and the history of race in the United States. In this subsection, I argue the aforementioned two points, focusing on the more substantive fourth through sixth versions of the black-white binary. Objections to the root form of the binary have been provided, and the second form of the binary, as an empirical claim, can be quickly dismissed because it prima facie provides an inaccurate description of race in America. The third form of the


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binary, as methodological focus, is due to the structure of the academy and the demands of individual research, both of which are beyond the scope of this work to critique. Furthermore, the third form of the black-white binary is most interesting when it is motivated by other forms of the binary, which are undermined by my later arguments.

Objections to the Prescriptive Claim (B-W Binary4) The fourth form of the black-white binary commits several faulty conflations. First, it conflates Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, immigrants from Asia or Latin America, and others who do not fit into the “black” or “white” categories into an amorphous and enormous middle group whose racial function, meaning, and role are totally defined by the principal black-white nodes. To put it simply, in the United States, the categories “Latino,” “Asian American,” and “Native American” must have the normative status of either “white” or “black.” According to the likes of Berry and Hacker, those groups began with the normative status of “black” and, like the Irish, seek to attain the normative status of “white.” That conflation, in turn, depends on a series of other conflations; in particular, it assumes that nonwhite, nonblack groups have, with each other as well as African Americans, identical accounts of (1) racial formation and (2) racial experience. The conflation across such disparate and large groups of the first two items also is prima facie wrong. Each of these so-called “intermediate” groups has complex compositions that cut across race, ethnicity, and nationality. These groups have their own account of history and social processes, which has resulted in their individual formation—each category has a unique story behind its ontological status.26 Taking seriously the claim that the binary names prescriptive patterns of racial organization involves discounting the particularity of each nonwhite, nonblack group during deliberations about the broad dynamics of race. In that space, in public forums such as national conversations about race, according to the partisans of the black-white binary, there are only black and white folks. The inaccuracy and irresponsibility of that strategy are what Gary Okihiro objected to when he analyzed the question “Is yellow black or white?”27 To deracinate “yellow,” according to Okihiro, is to fundamentally miss the particularity of Asian American history and experience. The discrimination that Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Persians, and Arabs suffered was due to their perceived “Asian-ness”

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and foreignness. The American concept of black does not capture the dynamics of the “Asian” and “Asian American” categories. The difference between these groups is ensconced in Judge Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which was discussed in the second chapter. After arguing that the constitution is properly color blind, he argues further for the rights of African Americans by highlighting their nativity in comparison to the strange foreignness of the Chinese: There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the State and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.28 The black-white binary completely misses this history and the import of the particularity of Asian American racial formation and experience, because it is only aware of how the Asian American experience matches up to its conception of blackness—everything else is jettisoned. Thus it cannot account for the vital particulars of the Asian American experience, such as the judgment of absolute foreignness. This reveals that the black-white binary also conflates (3) experiences of group-specific racism. The result is that American conceptions of racism have not taken seriously xenophobia and nativism, or rather nationalist claims of natality and priority, in the American experience of racism—forms of racism that affect Latinos, immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and Asian Americans. Worse, as I discuss later, the binary functions to distance xenophobia and nativism from racism, thus protecting the xenophobic nationalists from the charge of racism. This conflation, consequently, has ill effects for African Americans. It has contributed to the common assumption that there is nothing unique about anti-black racism. The idea here is that expressions


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and the legacy anti-Asian or anti-Latino racism are quantitatively and qualitatively equivalent to anti-black racism. David Hollinger has named this the “one-hate rule,” and it is a deeply misguided and inaccurate assumption that has undervalued the extent, depth, and effect of anti-black racism.29 The one-hate rule has resulted in unfair, and quite malicious, comparisons of African Americans to socalled “model minorities.”30 Further, it has muddled the purpose of originally backward-looking civil rights programs conceived to rectify past racist harms against African Americans.31 The errors and consequences that result from the conflations of the fourth form of the binary are grounds enough for its dismissal. However, it has other consequences that deserve exposure, because they show the full force of its irresponsible nature, which ultimately will have profoundly troubling effects on liberal discussions of race and social justice. Linda Martín Alcoff pinpoints this problem in her critique of the black-white binary. According to Alcoff, “The black/ white paradigm has disempowered various racial and ethnic groups from being able to define their own identity,” with the result that “Asian Americans and Latino/as have historically been ignored or marginalized in the public discourse in the United States on race and racism.” These marginalizations have eliminated “specificities with the large ‘black’ or nonwhite group” and have “undercut the possibility of developing appropriate and effective legal and political solutions for the variable forms that racial oppression can take.”32 The black-white binary, as Alcoff has argued, is a bald attempt by black and white America to speak for the totality of the racial experience in the United States.33 Its impulse to be avant-garde regarding concerns over race and social justice undermines its own conceit that it is inclusive. It leaves out claims for consideration that are radically different than traditional African American claims for civil rights and integration into the basic structure society. This reveals a fourth conflation committed by the fourth version of the black-white binary: it assumes that (4) African American solutions for racial oppression are fit for all other groups. However, traditional black-white civil rights claims are silent about, and perhaps even hostile to, claims for multicultural rights typically made by indigenous groups, groups whose primary language is something other than English, and immigrant groups. To underline this final point, the critiques of the binary offered by legal scholars, such as Juan Perea and Richard Delgado, underscore the dangers that Alcoff’s critique exposes.34 Delgado in particular distinguishes three ways that the binary negatively affects Latinos

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and Asian Americans. First, it has framed the legal conception of equal protection in terms of the struggle for equal black citizenship. That frame aids in discrimination against nonwhite immigrants and undermines the equal protection of Latino/a and Asian American citizens. Second, the binary plays into contractarian justifications for the national self-determination of citizenship and thus cements past race-based (and racist) definitions of citizenship. Third, the binary places Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans “out of sight” and thus out of the discourse of racial justice. The consequence of the normative force of the binary is that African Americans, according to Delgado, are trained to pursue, and are recognized as the primary legitimate recipients of, benefits and protections that flow from antidiscrimination laws. The black-white binary, as a “template” or master key, demarcates who is a proper subject of our thoughts about race, racism, and civil rights. Consequently, some individuals and groups, and their respective interests, are left out of public deliberations of race and social justice, and are typified as, quite literally, foreign issues. Legal scholar Juan Perea put it this way: If Latinos/as and Asian Americans are presumed to be White by both White and Black writers . . . then our claims to justice will not be heard or acknowledged. Our claims can be ignored by Whites, since we are not Black and therefore are not subject to real racism. And our claims can be ignored by Blacks, since we are presumed to be, not Black, but becoming White, and therefore not subject to real racism. Latinos/as do not fit the boxes supplied by the paradigm.35 In the wake of the reaction of the United States to the terrorist strikes against the World Trade Center towers, the black-white binary’s role as principle of exclusion in the service of American nationalism took on an ugly clarity.36 It assuaged American worries about racism as it targeted Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims in the war against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the war against Iraq, and the everlasting war on terror.37 Whatever the role of racism in the rounding up, questioning, detention, and expulsion of Arabs, Muslims, and people from the Middle East, the United States was comforted by the “United We Stand” rhetoric, and a rainbow coalition of Americans helped author and justify the United States’ reactions to terrorism. Thus practices such as the racial profiling of Arabs, Muslims, and those who look like them, to our eyes, met with 60 percent approval


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ratings, while before the war 80 percent of Americans disapproved of racial profiling, a sentiment that George Bush and even John Ashcroft supported before the war. It is of great consequence that this exclusion is a result of a particular black-white normative vision of the American nation as being properly and primarily black and white. The implication is that the black-white binary is a nativist idea that aids the continued exclusion of Latinos, Asian Americans, and other nonwhite immigrant groups, such as Arabs and Muslims, from full citizenship and equal protection.38

Objections to the Sociological Claim (B-W Binary5 ) As I mentioned earlier the fifth form of the black-white binary is defensible. It would not be reasonable to dispute its claim that racist oppression and discrimination against African Americans is a fundamental fact of U.S. history, and that its legacy is profound and persistent. This claim can be held and defended, however, without recourse to the black-white binary. The fifth form of the binary has two parts: one is the recognition of the role of anti-black racism in the United States, and the other is a claim that anti-black racism has a sociological priority. What would the claim of sociological priority be based on? A quantitative claim that black suffering outweighs the suffering of other groups, or that blacks qualify for the Rawlsian category of the “least well off” would be very hard to establish and is an overextended sociological claim that is not needed to establish the fact that large portions of the African American community suffer from distributive injustice and other forms of oppression. Typically, claims of priority are based on the fourth (the binary names prescriptive patterns) and sixth (the binary as a historical claim) forms of the black-white binary, but they are, for the reasons discussed in the previous and next section, unsupportable. There is no reason to hold onto the fifth form’s central claim, that disparity between blacks and whites is the United States’ “most pressing” social problem. Fortunately, recognizing the severity of anti-black racism and its centrality to United States does not require the assertion that blackwhite disparity and conflict have a sociological priority over other racial and ethnic divisions and disparities. Indeed, without the assertion of priority, the recognition of the role of anti-black racism in the United States is not properly an instance of the black-white binary. Therefore, if the claims of priority do not hold and are abandoned,

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when researchers and theorists focus on black life, they cannot be considered supporting or utilizing the black-white binary. There are many reasons to concentrate on the role of anti-black racism in the United States; indeed, it is important so that the specificity of anti-black racism and its effects is not lost. Thus Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Sexual Politics, objects to demands that researchers and theorists adopt “more abstract theories of race and racism” instead of focusing on the “black/white relations paradigm.”39 She argues, correctly, that turning away from the specificities of the black experience would harm the study of African American life and contribute to those forms of racism that seek to “cover over the harm done to victims and to mute their protest.” While Collins is correct to defend the need for specificity in studies of ethnoracial groups, her otherwise elucidating defense of the specificities of black studies is tainted by an assertion of another sort of priority. According to Collins, the demand that black scholars abandon the black-white binary . . . redefines Black intellectual production that focuses on social issues that are of concern to Black people as being myopic and reflecting special interests. One important dimension of the new racism is to cover over the harm done to victims and to mute their protest. Telling African Americans to take a number and wait their turn in a long line of special interest groups vying for recognition in an oppression contest rewrites the specificity of American race relations in an especially pernicious way.40 Although I agree with her defense of specificity in black studies, I am disturbed by her invocation of the image of African Americans being told to “take a number” and wait in a “long line of special interest groups.” Insofar that Collins rejects the depiction of racial politics in the United States as an arena of competing special-interest groups, or the idea that the demands of justice from Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans can be reduced to special-interest demands, she is correct. The demands for social justice by communities of color in the United States are not mere policy “interests” but are reasonable demands of procedural, distributive, and reparative justice that the United States, if it is to be a liberal democratic society, must deliberate about and address. However, Collins employs the image of the “long line” in the context of her dismissal of counter-black-white binary critiques. So who exactly is in this long


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line? Does she mean groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the special-interest group representing the beef industry? No, in the context of her argument, the “long line” is composed of other ethnoracial groups. Collins is supporting a version of the sixth form of the binary, which asserts the unsupportable idea that the black-white binary has a historical priority.41

Objections to the Historical Claim (B-W Binary6) The sixth form of the binary is justified for some because of the historical precedence of the African American experience, as well as the relative severity of the conflict between African Americans and whites. For others, such as Mary Frances Berry, Andrew Hacker, and Toni Morrison, the sixth form has additional justification because, as Toni Morrison put it, assimilation and integration into the United States happen upon the “backs of blacks.” My objection to the fourth form of the binary (that it names prescriptive patterns of racial organization) undermines the latter claim, and without it the first claim is not as significant. Mainstream African American demands for justice deserve satisfaction, and those claims do not need the black-white binary as justification. Worse, the black-white binary in the contemporary multiethnic United States, with the complexities of its history in which the conflations of the black-white binary are invalid, undermines the realization of social justice for all because it, as Alcoff argued, “seriously undermines the possibility of achieving coalitions.”42 Therefore, public deliberations that commence by professions of the black-white binary are anti-political and either imperil or end public communication on race and social justice. Additionally, the basic historical claim of the sixth form of the binary is suspicious when Native American claims are considered. Native Americans possess their own history as a group defined as a national other and enemy of the United States. The history of Native Americans, since 1492, has been interwoven with that of the descendents of Africans brought to the Americas by European powers, but their history is distinct in terms of geography, language, culture, international political treaties, and the formation of sovereign nations within North and South America and the Caribbean. The claims of the black-white binary are so totalizing that it would erase the importance of this history by assimilating Native Americans in the black-white system. This is the reason Native Americans scholars, such as Vine Deloria and David Wilkins, need to remind Americans that Native

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Americans are members of “sovereign nations” and are not minorities; or, in the words of Will Kymlicka, indigenous Americans are “national minorities” rather than a “polyethnic” group.43 The black-white binary does violence to that distinction by erasing Native Americans’ claims of precedence and envisioning a state of national racial harmony that is at odds with Native American sovereignty. In concluding this section, I return to the events around Hurricane Katrina, because just as it served as an example of why there remains some commitment to the black-white binary, it also serves to demonstrate its failures and dangers. As the aftermath of the hurricane developed, the image of African American urban poverty dominated the news and discourse. It dominated so much that the nation struggled to figure out how to talk about the loss of other groups. The discussions of the hurricane and race did not stray from stories about poor African Americans and worked to exclude the news that the Bush administration had used the disaster as an opportunity to apprehend and deport undocumented Latin American immigrants who ended up in shelters. This move was, of course, paired with widespread exploitation of Latino labor by contractors who sought to take advantage of federal and state monies for the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region. Additionally, the binary blocked from public attention the news of the losses of Honduran Americans in New Orleans and Vietnamese American communities of the Gulf Coast.44 The race story was simply the black story, and the result was that the nation thought of race in its old black-white terms. Immigration policy and the plight of immigrants were not on the table. These dynamics were crystallized when Mayor Ray Nagin shared with America his worry that during the rebuilding of New Orleans, Mexicans would overrun the city that, in his words, he hoped would again be “chocolate.”45 Nagin was conforming to an American script informed by the blackwhite binary and he, like Mary Frances Berry, did not bother to distinguish between citizens, resident aliens, and undocumented aliens in his complaint about Mexicans: “they” were simply here after us; “they” were all Mexicans and were not really New Orleanians, not really Americans.

A Limited Defense of the Black-White Binary The black-white binary has few explicit defenders; few, if any, assert that race in the United States can be completely understood through black-white terms and experiences. The binary, nonetheless, does have


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implicit proponents: those who attempt to explain and understand the experience of race in the United States primarily through blackwhite terms and experiences.46 The title of Hacker’s book, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, seemingly says it all, and in politics its echoes could be detected in Senator John Edwards’s moving, yet simplistic, references to “two Americas” during the 2004 presidential campaigns. It is inaccurate to say of Hacker, Hill, or Morrison that they are being merely “lazy,” or that the implication of the binary in their works was unintentional, for they do cast blacks and whites as the principal actors and agents in U.S. racial drama. Certainly these and other proponents of the binary do not assert that the binary is strictly descriptively accurate, yet they do think that it names prescriptive patterns of racial and ethnic social organization and hierarchy in the Unites States. Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and multiracial persons are understood according to their relative (socioeconomic, cultural, or political) similarity to either whiteness or blackness. Likewise, progress, under this model, is understood as the process of assimilation into white Protestant American life. To those not familiar with U.S. history, the binary may look terribly naïve or inadequate, but the reasons for its adoption by analysts of American life are rooted in the racial history of this nation. The earliest English language discourses on race in the United States were concerned with the obvious conflicts between Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans and were put in terms of “questions” and “problems” about “Negroes” and “Indians.”47 Over time, and despite national and major occurrences and wars with Native American nations, but due to the belief that Native Americans would experience extinction, blacks came to dominate all discussions of the “race question.” The “race question,” then, was not about the white “question” or “problem” but about white concerns about “Negroes” and “Indians,” and eventually it pertained exclusively to the “Negro question.” Hence, there was never any conceptual parity between the so-called races in the “white-black-red” paradigm or the evolving “black-white” binary. The “black-white” binary was, and still is, primarily about white problems with black people. At best, and only occasionally, is the binary about the problems that black and white people have about each other; the binary is really a mask for a singularity: the problem of being “black” in the United States. The binary, therefore, names an experience that is constitutive of the history and experience of race in the United States; it refers to the anchoring roles given to both blackness and

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whiteness in American racial and ethnic concepts and identities. The black-white binary, then, and for all its faults, has assumed the role of conceptual baseline in national discussions of race.48 Any discussion of race that ignored the fundamental nature of the obsession over blackness in American life would be dishonest and, given the American history of anti-black racism, irresponsible. Thus the status of the binary as a conceptual baseline of race in the United States should be acknowledged so that the obsessions to which it refers can be confronted. This can be accomplished, moreover, without giving in to the totalizing pressures of the binary. For example, the nation can address the conflicts between delivering social justice for historically disadvantaged national groups and the duties of liberal immigration policy without accepting xenophobia directed against Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, and immigrants from non-European and non-English-speaking nations. Likewise, the nation can attend to the particular structure and harms of anti-black racism without discounting xenophobia. These are not unreasonable prescriptions, as post-civil rights era African American politics has already been invested in multiracial coalitional politics.49 Visions of multiculturalism and racial justice that do not address the reasonable content of the binary, such as popular and culturally embedded antipathy toward blacks or popular folk theories of black inferiority, simply aid in the conservation of anti-black racism. The conservation of anti-black racism is one of the core anxieties about the browning of America and those movements, such as multiracialism, that celebrate national “browning.” This anxiety and fear is one of displacement: African American moral and political claims will be displaced by claims from Latinos, Asian Americans, multiracial groups, and immigrants who do not require extensive rectification and are, thus, less expensive and easier to satisfy; and their claims would be more politically popular than black claims because, well, they are thought to be closer and more appealing to whites. The persistence of the black-white binary may be due to the widespread assumption that black, whites, and Native Americans are specially “native” to the United States, in contrast to the perpetual foreignness of Asians and Latinos, whether they are citizens or not.50 Yet the black-white binary also persists, because as a conceptual baseline, it points to unmet moral and political claims concerning anti-black racism. The binary reminds the nation that many of its citizens are still participating in personal anti-black racism or fail in their moral duties to treat and regard African Americans as equal human beings and citizens. It also reminds the nation that anti-black institutional


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and social racism is still prevalent, and that the legacy of anti-black racism and exclusion has yet to be satisfactorily rectified.51 Apart from a conceptual baseline, the black-white binary, then, also is a moral baseline by which to measure this nation’s progress toward racial justice. The binary is one of this nation’s moral gauges by which it measures its attempt to achieve racial justice. Ignoring this baseline, again, would be dishonest, as it would mean actively ignoring and forgetting formative aspects of U.S. history. Further, it would also mean actively abandoning and openly mocking our public morality and claims of justice. Nicolás C. Vaca’s account of the conflicts between African Americans and Latinos, in his The Presumed Alliance, is a painful example of such dishonesty and irresponsibility.52 Vaca assumes a legal model of responsibility and simply claims that Latinos “are not responsible for the plight of African Americans.” His claims depend on a liability or a moral conception of responsibility, which informs dominant conceptions of legal responsibility. Hence, he claims that since Latinos did not create or support the systems, such as slavery or Jim Crow segregation, that oppressed blacks, they are not responsible for their plight and must approach them in the political arena with a “clear conscience.” With that thin argument he washes his hands of any responsibility to African Americans, and he blithely evades the open question of whether Latinos have a political responsibility for the nation’s past racial harms. Political responsibility, however, cannot so easily be washed away; it is a responsibility based on group or, in this case, national, membership, and it is assumed along with all of the other duties and responsibilities that come with citizenship.53 Thus claiming that, for example, Asian Americans did not start the 2003 Iraq War does not mean that Asian Americans as members of the United States do not bear any responsibility for the actions of the U.S. government as it prosecutes that war and the occupation of Iraq. Whether any individual has a “clear conscience” in regard to any group is beside the point; what Vaca evades is the co-equal political responsibility between Latinos and African Americans, and all of the people of the United States, to fulfill its responsibilities to its people and the peoples of the globe. Further, Vaca’s own reasoning contradicts his claims. Although he must recognize that all whites are not, strictly speaking, liable for the oppression of African Americans, Vaca seems to recognize that whites may not have clear consciences; therefore, he implicitly recognizes some form of collective or political responsibility. If such political responsibility holds true for whites who were not

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directly involved in black oppression, ceteris paribus, then the same must hold true for Latinos and other groups as well. Given the ubiquity of claims such as Vaca’s and the high likelihood that the demands of African Americans for rectification of race-based distributive injustice and reparations for past racist harms will continue to be neglected or denied, fears about displacement are warranted. Thus behind the reluctance to move beyond the black-white binary are legitimate anxieties about the future of racial justice. The browning of America is changing the classic African American baseline for racial justice without those legitimate demands ever having been satisfied. An echo of this threat was heard in Mayor Nagin’s unfortunate complaint about the threat of a substantial and “foreign” Mexican presence in New Orleans. Just ignoring or dismissing this anxiety, or urging African Americans to just swallow the bitter fact that they are no longer the United States’ dominant nonwhite group, which is Vaca’s solution, will not be effective; instead, the long-existing claims of the black-white baseline for racial justice should be squarely addressed and solutions offered. Another fear of the browning of America connected to the stubbornness with which the binary is adhered to is the fear of replacement. African Americans have stood as the icon of the quest of racial justice in America. The leadership of the Left clings to that black-white iconography, however, in the mind of the public, and in the rhetoric of the Republican National Committee (RNC), African Americans have been replaced with the image of the Mexican, Latin American, or Asian immigrant. This replacement was on full view at the Republican Nationbal Convention of 2004 and in the RNC’s brilliant decision to highlight Asian American and Latino faces and voices (in particular, three speakers addressed the mostly non-Latino crowd in Spanish).54 That event was singular, as it was a national and an international spectacle of the committee’s vision of American multicultural diversity, and at its core was the image of the assimilated model minority next to images of accomplished and exceptional African Americans, such as Powell and Rice. An interesting result of this spectacle of replacement was that conservative Christian African American groups rallied with the anti-homosexual rights agenda of the RNC and the Bush administration, while concurrently reiterating demands based on the civil rights model.55 In effect, they were hoping to parlay their status as civil rights “moral gauges” to counter the appropriation of the language of civil rights by the same-sex marriage movement, in exchange for Republican support for their policy agendas.56


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There is nothing redeemable within this fear of replacement except its connections to the fear of displacement. Neither blacks nor whites are justified in a presumption of dominance over America, whether demographic or in the realm of images or meaning. Xenophobia need not be indulged in order to satisfy African Americans’ demands. To indulge in xenophobia would be to accept, fundamentally, the logic of the racial state, and doing that would be to absolutely betray the value of equal personhood and other core ideas of political liberalism. There was, therefore, much to celebrate in African American civil rights organizations declaring solidarity with Latino activists during the “Day without an Immigrant” protests that occurred during March and April 2006. Bruce S. Gordon, the president of the NAACP, declared solidarity with the marchers and stated essentially that discrimination and distributive injustice rather than immigration of Latinos was the barrier to black progress.57 Gordon’s declaration of solidarity, along with the statement of other African American public figures, stands as a strong counterstance to the embarrassing words of Mayor Ray Nagin. Although the press and few black figures did remark on the conflicts between African Americans and Latinos, an impressive show of solidarity was displayed by African American religious and civil rights figures. Most stunning were the words of Rev. Hurmon Hamilton and Rev. Ray Hammond, of the Black Ministerial Alliance and the Ten Point Coalition, offered at Boston’s pro-immigration rally: We are a nation of immigrants with an eternal debt of justice to pay with regard to immigration. It is a tortuous logic for the dominant power class in this country to forget that we were established as a nation when people immigrated here from Europe, and displaced the Native Americans, destroying their jobs, homes, food supply, and culture. Those new Americans used and profited from forced immigration, as millions of African slaves were brought here to build our cities, plant and harvest our crops, and become the backbone of our modern-day economic power. So the descendants of those who immigrated to this land and shattered resources and hope for others, and who benefited from forced immigration of Africans for over 100 years, should have only one response when asked what to do about our immigrant sisters and brothers, and it should be in the form of a question: “How do we pay the debt of justice we owe?” We acknowledge that immigration will always be

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The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice a challenge, as long as our neighbors to the south of us, and families throughout our world, have a substandard of living in a global economy of wealth and opportunity. As Americans we have a responsibility to use our wealth not only to fatten the calves that we eat, but to ensure that our neighbors in this hemisphere and beyond eat in their homes at their family tables as well as we do here in America.58

Their prophetic words (in Cornel West’s sense) demonstrated many of the dynamics I analyzed earlier; they called on the United States to remember its racial history and debt of justice to African and Native Americans, while refusing the temptation of xenophobia and calling on the United States to take seriously its responsibilities in light of the demands of global justice.

From the Binary to Deliberation Calling for the termination of the black-white binary is too easy. There are historical political and moral demands behind this binary that should be understood, positively transformed, and then incorporated. Otherwise those methodologies and perspectives that are offered as substitutions, whether color blind, multiracial, or mestizaje, risk, at best, abandoning racial justice, or, at worst, further entrenching anti-black and anti-indigenous racism and social disparities. The nature of the black-white binary goes far beyond its place as a flawed method for describing patterns of racial organization and oppression. Couched inside the binary is a political and ethical demand that people of the United States contend with the conflicts between white and black Americans as well as the particularity of anti-black racism, and rectify the harms of racism and racial oppression inflicted on African Americans. At best, the binary is a demand for justice. At worst, the binary marks a peculiarly American liberal form of racial anxiety over the displacement and replacement of African Americans from the focal point of discussions of racial justice, as well as the displacement of the black-white baseline for all racial matters in America. In this form the binary is a complaint and a call for recognition of a black-white America as the authentic, real, and, ironically, native America. As such, it is a mirror image of the fear of the browning of America as the loss of white dominance exhibited by various forms of white nationalism. These anxieties are nostalgic


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visions that should not be catered to because of the exclusive and covertly racial nationalism they seek to perpetuate and the social and cultural homogeneity they seek to enthrone. Although the image of a black-white authentic America should not be surrendered to, the demand for justice behind the black-white binary is a facet of the politics of recognition. The politics of recognition is a response within democratic liberal societies to recognize, at various degrees and institutional involvement, important and central social identities within societies.59 This aspect of the binary strongly connects to its redeemable aspects as a moral and political reaction. Beside the call for the official recognition of African Americans as a group, with specific rights, by the state, the employment of the binary by African Americans is a demand that the state and its people remember as well as recognize the constitutive role of African Americans in the formation of American political concepts, religious life, and social and cultural institutions, in addition to the racist harms it had to endure.60 Insofar as the request for recognition is in the service of white or black-white racial nationalism, it is dangerous and should be considered with deep suspicion; recognition can develop into enthronement or institutionalization of group identities at odds with reasonable conceptions of liberty and deliberative democracy.61 Further, consistent with Seyla Benhabib’s criticisms of the politics of recognition, the reasonable demands of the black-white binary have more to do with the politics of equal dignity and distributive justice than with recognition.62 It is precisely the nationalist and conservative concepts of political life within the binary that are and should be rejected, yet the liberal concepts of equal dignity and citizenship also within the binary, lead to its partial redemption as a political idea and provide for its role in public deliberations of race and racism. Without calling for nativist exclusions, the binary asserts that the nation has an obligation to remember America’s debts and obligations to the African American community—before the “browning of America” makes the black-white baseline of racial justice completely irrelevant.63 Which parts and how that history is to be remembered, however, are contested.64 To call on the people of the United States to remember controversial accounts and interpretations of the genocide and displacement of Native Americans, the continued exploitation and oppression of Native American nations, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, or, for that matter, the Alamo and the Mexican-American War is to assume unity, offend the value of reasonable pluralism and autonomy

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of citizens, and invite prolonged frustration. All the same, there is a great need for a widespread awareness of the role of race in U.S. history, and its role in the formation of our national institutions and communities within the nation. Awareness can be cultivated through democratic deliberation, through national and local forums, yet can leave room for democratic disagreement.65 Importantly, public deliberations offer the public space for the reasonable claims and demands that may be extracted from the binary to be shared with and considered by the citizens and resident noncitizens of the United States. They would generate legitimacy for the state and signal to the population that the state takes seriously its moral and political obligations regarding race and social justice and is invested in nurturing civic pride in multiracial citizenship. Dialogues about the history and legacy of race in a changing United States will strengthen political life and help citizens form reasonable positions on the controversial concerns of the public, what Rawls called truly public political opinions.66 But deliberation is not enough. What else is needed, of course, so that the people of this nation remember the legacy of race and answer its obligations, is old-fashioned political agitation and activism.67 When it comes to its national moral obligations, the memory of the United States is poor and lethargic. Public forums, however, provide communities afflicted by the historical legacies of racial oppression with opportunities to continue to argue and agitate for distributive justice and the rectification and reparations of past racial harms. Thus democratic deliberation, accompanied by multiracial coalitional political activism, has the potential to resist the alienation that results from the lack of official recognition.68 Finally, national discussions of race and racism should upset the nativist presuppositions and xenophobic tendencies of the black-white binary. The black-white binary should not be allowed to dominate national discussions of race, as it did the dialogues sponsored by the Clinton administration.69 On this point Vaca, in Presumed Alliance, is correct, but he misunderstands the purpose of overturning the binary: In the area of ethnic relations the Latino population will continue to grow and have power to wield. And let there be no doubt that this power will be wielded. In the relations with African Americans a new dialogue must be opened, one with perspective and recognition of the Latino’s new numerical stature.70


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Vaca’s invocation of Latino power as a tool or weapon to be wielded is the negative image of Samuel P. Huntington’s white nationalist anxieties about Latino power; both images are deeply flawed, because they cast the political in zero-sum terms, as competition between friends and enemies, between so-called cultural or ethnic groups.71 Neither man’s political recommendations are fitting for a liberal pluralist society. In contrast to Vaca’s view, I assert that the purpose of sweeping away the binary is not to make room for the power brought on by Latino’s “new numerical stature.” Rather, the binary must go so that new dialogues will not be hindered by nativist assumptions, and the nation can achieve new conceptions of national belonging, citizenship, civil rights, and political responsibility that meet the needs of its transnational population, as well as the demands of global justice.


Chapter 4

Interracial Intimacies Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America

Terror or Salvation The threat and promise of the browning of America rest in its implications for the ethnoracial image of this nation as a Western nation, whose language is English, and whose people, values, and cultures, albeit diverse, are, in main, white and European derived. As with all ethnoracial threats—or promises of deliverance—browning operates through the private, intimate arenas of love, sexuality, gender, family, and friendship. The sexual nature of browning is unmistakable. As a demographic phenomenon, the browning of America is part of a social history of migration and amalgamation that has worked to undermine social prohibition and control interracial intimacy. Myriad historical events, of which browning is the latest instance, undermined the careful distinction in American life between the interethnic intimacy permitted among white ethnic groups (which can include indigenous, Asian, and Latino individuals in limited and controlled circumstances) and the discouraged interracial intimacy between blacks and whites (and, at times, everybody else). The browning of America represents as well a running together of the melting pot, which was deemed “good” and included processes of social assimilation, and miscegenation, which for much of American history was considered taboo. The browning of America promises only more of the same and, what is more, the bodily, social, and political transformation of the 93

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United States. This is the nature of threat and the promise of browning, and it is why Americans view it in terms of either a salvation or terror. As James Baldwin wrote in his reflection on racism, sexuality, and masculinity, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” interracial sexuality—in ways connected to homosexuality—touches “our most profound terrors and desires.”1 The emotions terror and desire represent the disjunctive visions of the browning of America, and racism is at the core of the disjunction. On the one hand, racism implies the absolute rejection of interracial intimacy, and at the very least the utilization of interracial sex in the service of sexual and racial domination. More than a rejection of interracial love, this position is the absolute denial of an interracial nation and equal citizenship. On the other hand, browning for some represents the literal loving away of racism.2 This chapter explores these disjunctive visions by thinking through the links between racism, gender, and sexuality. Approaching the topic of interracial intimacy through an analysis of racism uncovers within those disjunctive visions exactly what is wildly terrifying or desirable about the browning of America. This investigation begins, therefore, with a brief discussion of the historical links between gender, sexuality, and racism and then turns to an analysis of the evasion of gender, sexuality, and interracial intimacy in two prominent and contemporary philosophical accounts of racism. Contemporary philosophical investigations of the meaning or significance of racism, unfortunately, have largely avoided the topic of interracial intimacy and all that it implies, such as the ethics of interracial romantic relationships, interracial adoptions, interracial matters in custody disputes, and so on. This is an immense mistake, for those matters make up the content of our most intimate and daily experiences with race and racism. Likewise, investigations of racism have avoided the general relationship of gender and sexuality to racism.3 Beyond the deficiencies that this evasion causes within philosophical theories of racism, it reflects and contributes to the evasion of gender and sexuality in public and pedagogical discussions of racism. This is a serious deficiency, because it isolates discussions of racism from other forms of oppression, namely, sexism and homophobia. The result of this practice has been the masculinization and heteronormalization of the racism debate. Another benefit of approaching the topic of interracial intimacy through an analysis of analytic theories of racism is that it disturbs popular and facile representations of racial harmony that restrict interracial associations and friendships to the public sphere and leave

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racially defined communities largely untouched. Most theories of racism typically assume such ideals of harmony as a countervision to a world infected by racism; however, breaking the back of explicitly racist ideologies (as racists well know) profoundly opens up the possibility of interracial intercourse across all spheres of society, which then threatens the internal coherence of the harmonizing groups. Further, this process necessarily upsets assumptions about the conservation of distinct racial and ethnic communities in common visions of a just racial future. This chapter closes by considering this process and how it characterizes the wider implications of the browning of America.

Gender, Sexuality, and Racism Race and racism, since their inception, have been bound up with gender and sexuality. In 1684, François Bernier penned “A New Division of the Earth,” a document that contains what historians of race consider the earliest mention of “race” as a modern, biological idea.4 Bernier’s new division of the earth, though, is just as much concerned with the relative beauty of brown, black, red, and yellow women that slavery and colonialism had, to be blunt, made available to the sexual appetites of European men in the service of those politico-economic institutions. The cradle of “race” was global slavery and colonial systems, but the “labor” that those exploitative systems extracted was sexual as well as agrarian and mechanical.5 The intimate links between race, racism, gender, and sexuality, as historians of race have documented, were present at every shift in biological and popular conceptions of race.6 For example, the opposition to racial equality in the United States was, and remains, deeply concerned with the sexual implication of social equality.7 The anxiety over the sexual and familial implications of browning, moreover, is not isolated to white nationalists. It is just as common in influential conservative and neoconservative nationalists.8 In that vein, opponents of state-sponsored racism directly took aim at this fear by either denying that an increase in interracial relations would result, or by contradicting the claim that interracial love and sex were immoral or unnatural.9 Is the racialization of sex, sexuality, and gender only concomitant to the concept of racism? Certainly they are not contingent factors in the intellectual history of race and racism, but can we conceive of racism without them? As race is a system that marks the bodies, instilling racial meaning, and then hierarchically orders them, and since

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our bodies—through related sociopolitical processes—are sexualized and gendered, assertions that race can be neatly divided from gender and sexuality are immediately suspicious. Some forms of racism have little or nothing to do with sexuality and gender. For example, aversive racism, which is measured by recording small physiological reactions of which the subject is unconscious, may solely be about race. Likewise, the negative reactions to “black-sounding” names of prospective employers are about race as well.10 Both of these examples are consistent with a conception of racism that holds that racism operates on both the private and public levels, but its main effects are public, and expresses its injustices through our principal political, economic, and social institutions. In short, racism works to generate injustice through what John Rawls called the basic structure of society. According to this conception, when racism does overlap with issues pertaining to gender or sexuality, the result is merely concomitant: women of race R suffer more than men of R because they face a world that is both anti-R and anti-woman. Here the link is one that is a mere aggregation of moral wrongs.11 The power of racism on the public sphere is undeniable and vast, however, the majority of experiences of racism occur in the private sphere, and in the numerous ways the private intersects with the public. In those innumerable instances of everyday racism, gender and sexuality are close to the center of the experiences. One encounters a racist, or experiences a racist or racial incident, as a gendered, sexualized, and racialized being. What is striking is the language of gender that marks these experiences (of “manhood” or “femininity”) and how sexuality is likewise often implicated (in terms of parenting, and especially sexual availability).12 The confluence of class, race, gender, and sexuality in moments of racism is not an experience of merely the aggregation of easily identifiable stereotypes and wrongs. Instead, racism, classism, and sexism, when experienced together, are amplified into an experience of moral wrong and injustice. As is often said about these experiences, one is rejected as absolutely inadmissible in the intimacies of the public or the private. One is simply abject.13 Beyond the conceptual relationships between race, racism, sexuality, and gender, which were drawn within various race theories, systems of racial domination have asserted fundamental sexual and gender differences between the races and have prohibited, managed, and used interracial sex as part of their exercise of power. Race theorists asserted that there existed specific gender and sexual differences


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between the races that dovetailed with judgments of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual inferiority of non-Europeans. Further, they asserted that interracial sex was aesthetically undesirable, and that it was unthinkable that whites would desire or initiate sex with racial others, and that interracial reproduction was impossible. Such assertions were made in the face of widespread and well-known performative contradictions in racial states, such as the United States and South Africa, and throughout European colonies.14 The use of gender and sexuality as ideologies and systems, what some call “technologies,” in racial differentiation and control converged with the use of race as a technology for the control of gender and sexuality. The practice of racial-sexual-gender control was part and parcel of the history of race and racism. The juridical and political history of the prohibition and utilization of interracial sex is extensive and present in every racial state.15 More than concomitant, the connections between race ideologies, racist practices, and institutions and gender and sexuality were extensive and thoroughly part of the history and experience of race and racism—from Bernier’s divisions of the earth, to anti-miscegenation legislation in the United States and South Africa, to official recognition of mestizaje in the Hispanic world, to social Darwinism, to the eugenics movement, and to the contemporary controversies of multiracialism and the browning of America. The failure of theories of racism to account for the relationship between racism, gender, and sexuality additionally misses fundamental aspects of the phenomenology of racism. This lapse is odd and unforgivable, because racism is experienced in gendered and sexualized contexts (e.g., the fear of black men and various racial-gender-sexual stereotypes, such as black or Latina welfare mothers, black male “studs,” Asian “dragon ladies,” and male “Latin lovers”). Victims of racism are discriminated against because they are members of race R, but their experience of racism is molded by their gender, sexuality, and class as a member of R. Indeed, representations and discussions of the links between racism, gender, and sexuality are important features in writing by and about African American women on their experience of race, gender, and sexuality. Harriet Ann Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the speeches of Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Red Record and Southern Horror are classic examples of texts that recognize the links asserted here.16 Moreover, the arguments first given by Jacob and Cooper have been a

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central part of African American, Native American, Latina, and Asian American feminist theory.17

The Evasion Discussions of gender, sexuality, and interracial intimacy have been given little room in philosophical accounts of racism. Theories of racism have largely been concerned with the role of reason in racism, explaining its precise moral failure and harm, and identifying the meaning, or behavioral or cognitive essence, of racism.18 Angela Davis, David Theo Goldberg, and Naomi Zack, in contrast to this general trend, have described and theorized the role of gender in the experience of race and racism and the use of gendered and sexualized racial categories in systems of racial oppression and the racial state generally.19 Contemporary analytic theorists have not taken their lead; this is regrettable, as some of their theories have generally clarified the concept of racism, and, in fine detail, catalogued its varying expressions and effects. In particular, the account given by Lawrence Blum stands out for its clarity, explanatory power, and influence in public and pedagogical discussions of racism. But Blum, like many others, has avoided gender, sexuality, and interracial intimacy in his account of racism. Blum’s “I’m not a Racist, but . . . ”: The Moral Quandary of Race provides a relevant analysis of racism and taxonomy of a variety of racial conflicts related to racism but not necessarily racist.20 It derives its relevance from its exploration of particular American moral anxieties over race and racism; for example, the title of the second chapter, “Can Blacks Be Racist?,” is richly particular and strikes at the heart of the resentment of, and disinclination to participate in, public discussions of racism. The relevance of Blum’s work to our collective and group-based racial anxieties is one of its principal virtues. Another virtue of his theory is that it opens up space for deliberation and discourse within the forums it employs. His theory opens up deliberative space because he criticizes the drift of the central meaning of racism and distinguishes so-called “true” or “real” racists and racist acts, beliefs, and so on from mere racial insensitivity, ignorance, and mistakes. Blum, in short, wants to preserve the moral weight of racism, for the truly racist. Harm is done, as he recognizes, from the moral drift of “racism,” for the drift blunts the sting of accusations of racism and encourages guilt, incredulity, and the cessation of discourse and the moral work of interracial repair.


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Blum locates the core of various racisms in the themes of “inferiorization” and “antipathy,” which he then uses to define and delineate between personal, social, and institutional racism.21 His theory recognizes degrees of difference and moral asymmetries between various racisms. Moreover, in line with his general goal of halting the categorical drift of “racism,” racism in Blum’s account is not inherent in, nor a necessary part of, the lived experience of “whiteness.” The concern of Blum’s theory with our collective racial anxieties and its careful typology of “racism” work well together, for the provision of a deliberative space allows for reflection on racism, and that cannot constructively occur without first managing the panic of racial anxieties.22 For a work concerned with racial harmony, opening up deliberative space, and addressing the everyday concerns about racism, Blum’s work, however, evades the intersection of racism with gender and sexuality. He takes time to discuss a variety of topics from racial jokes to the racial politics of school lunchrooms, but he neglects discussions of gendered experiences of racism, as well as the topics of interracial love, sex, marriage, dating, rape, and so on. That evasion, however, works to conserve one of the most troublesome barriers to racial harmony, the very goal that Blum claims is our national ideal.23 “Sexual racism” should at least be treated as a major topic within discussions of racism, right next to “racial jokes,” “color blindness,” and so on.24 That much is needed to increase the relevance of contemporary discussions of racism in our era of browning. Further, given the central role of gender and sexuality in the history and experience of racism, it is appropriate that sexual racism be considered one of the core semantic themes of racism. This is Baldwin’s point in his essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood.” He claimed that American racism could not be understood apart from violent and dominative expressions of American masculinity: the pathology of racism is at once a gender and sexual pathology.25 Commonly recognized expressions of racial-gender-sexual objectifications are regarded as racist that are not always involved in one or the other themes. Although X may view Y as sexually available or desirable because Y belongs to race R, and X holds that R is either inferior or the appropriate object of antipathy (sick and inconsistent but historically common), this is not always the case—for example, the marking of Asian or Latino/a bodies as exotic and sexually desirable due other racial-gender-sexual stereotypes, or the phenomenon of “jungle fever.”26 In such cases, X may view Y as sexually desirable because Y belongs to race R, and X holds that members of R possess

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race-specific sexual qualities, or X is solely interested in sexual adventure and tourism. Either option reduces Y to a racial-sexual-gender object, but neither necessarily involves inferiorization or antipathy.27 These obsessions, if you will, tell us something about racism not captured by Blum’s two themes. Even if “sexual racism” does not qualify as a core theme of racism, sexuality and gender do belong in major philosophical treatises on racism. Consider some of the subheadings of Blum’s text: “Racial Prejudice,” “All Colors of Racists,” “Who Cares about Prejudice?,” and “Same-Race Socializing,” “Racial Discomfort or Anxiety,” and “Statistical or ‘Rational’ Discrimination.” Where are the romantic, sexual, or familial themes? The intersection of sex, gender, and racism is precisely an area that causes a significant amount of racial anxiety, guilt, and unfortunately trauma. Worse, the evasion of sex and gender in a discussion of racism occludes discussions of American racism: from the anti-black terrorism and lynching that stretched from the end of the Civil war to the hetero- and homosexual torture and humiliation of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib and Arab men in the shadows of our pens in Guantanamo, racism has been inexorably caught up with gender and sexuality. The Birth of [Our] Nation has at its core the trinity of race-gender-sex marked by pathology.28 In short, there is no time or justification to be demure; avoiding sexuality in our discussions of racism avoids a major facet of the structure and lived experience of race.

The Family The evasion of gender and sexuality in theories of racism coincides with the general evasion of the topics within discussions of racism of the formation and expression of romantic and sexual desire, the choice of romantic partners, either for dating or for marriage, and family formation and relations. All of these topics are equally as pressing for the browning of America as affirmative action and the morality of same-race socializing in high school lunchrooms and college social clubs. Anita Allen has argued that after Loving v. Virginia, philosophers took the moral issues around interracial sexuality as settled and then moved on to the issues of affirmative action and busing.29 Yet U.S. Supreme Court decisions have not led to the cessation of philosophical debate on a host of other topics, from affirmative action to busing. What is behind the silence is prudishness and patriarchy but also, as Baldwin contended, terror.


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Anti-civil rights conservatives of the precivil rights era did not avoid this topic, and their ideological descendents remain committed to denouncing interracial sexuality.30 Indeed, they recognized interracial love and sex as the inevitable and terrifying consequence of social equality. In reaction to white fear of “miscegenation,” abolitionists and activists for full citizenship for nonwhites—with the exception of Douglass and the early amalgamationists—downplayed the possibility of interracial unions, argued that black, Latino, and Native American liberation was not based on their collective desires for white women, or simply avoided the issue. In general, the consensus on the Left for many decades, from abolitionism through the 1960s, was that the topic was politically untouchable; to discuss the matter would play into the hands of racists. The fragmented movements and organizations that can be called the Left in the United States have largely followed suit. On the one hand, the image of multiracial children and families has been widely embraced and utilized but, on the other, the Left has refrained from directly advocating familial multiculturalism. Moreover, as will be discussed in the following chapter, some liberals and segments of the Left, especially traditional civil rights groups, have reacted coolly and with some suspicion to the mixed-race movement. It is necessary to overcome our prudishness and force the discussion of racism to go where angels fear to tread—into the realm of the private. The very goals of theories of racial justice that are encased largely within liberal conceptions of the state and international polity, inevitably lead, as the opponents of racial equality have long asserted, to interracial and interethnic amalgamation. Whether it is celebrated or mourned, it is a consequence of liberal social organizations that must be faced. Social, legal, political, and economic equality within the framework of liberal individualism leads to individuals exercising their freedom of association across racial, ethnic, linguistic, national, and gender lines, totally affecting their public and private lives. It is not that this result is so obvious that it does not merit discussion; rather, certain conditions hold that will continue the evasion. First, there is a general patriarchical prudishness around interracial sexuality that exists for a variety of social and historical reasons. Second, there is the fear of browning, which reinforces the Left’s evasion of the topic. Third, although there has been an upsurge of sociology and history about mixed-race persons and marriages, generally there has been silence about the relationship of interracial sexuality to the topic of race and social justice. As discussed in the first chapter, Douglass avoided a direct reference to amalgamation because it was politically dangerous, yet he nonetheless believed and hoped that “nature would

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take its course.” Several theorists of race and social justice probably take Douglass’s pragmatic position. However, a number likely hold that we can have both racial “harmony” and the long-term conservation of traditional American racial and ethnic groupings, that group members will choose not to freely associate across racial and ethnic bedrooms.31 Within a liberal democratic framework, these goals are in conflict, and the constitution of groups will be transformed over the long term. In short, there is an assumption of a racial mosaic, with a few blurry edges, in liberal, forward-looking conceptions of racial justice, but the browning of America threatens that easy vision. The majority of liberal race theorists, however, go nowhere near discussions of interracial sexuality. Rather, they focus on distributive justice and its components, justice in political, social, legal, and economic spheres.32 Either these philosophers consider browning a nonissue, something that may or may not occur in a free society, or they assume a mosaic vision of racial and ethnic diversity. Multiculturalism, in contrast, takes seriously the desire of groups to conserve group identity and existence. Instead of directly arguing against browning, they argue for the continued conservation of traditional ethnic and racial groups and claim such groups ought to be provided with some degree of group rights—rights that institutionalize the survival of the group’s identity and population.33 The concern of multiculturalists is not so much browning; rather, they seek to attain distributive justice while protecting the rights of particular groups and preventing the erosion or destruction of their forms of life by social and economic forces within liberal democratic capitalist societies. At the base of this avoidance, though, is patriarchy. The straight men who dominate discussions of racial justice willfully ignore the private realm. Thus this prudish evasion of interracial intimacy, gender, and sexuality is not innocent; it is a legacy of patriarchy, and it relegates all discussions of the private—in this case interracial intimacy, gender, and sexuality—to feminists and queer theorists. It favors, to a fault, discussions that focus on so-called public matters. In doing so, it ignores everyday experience, where most racism occurs, and where ethical discussions of racism could be of great use—for example, in areas such as interracial erotic relationships and marriage, interracial adoption, custody disputes resulting from the dissolution of interracial marriages, interracial family formation and belonging, and so on. Beyond these so-called private matters, interracial intimacy is connected to the public matters that are taken up in traditional investigations of racial justice. For example, the two main topics of social justice are liberty and distributive justice, and interracial intimacy is


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involved with both. Interracial intimate relationships—from casual romances to adoption—are done in the face of racisms at all levels and go against the grain of racist social mores to limit such liberty. Further, this expression of liberty presents ethical challenges to family and community obligations that are asserted for the sake (in the best instances) of the progress and protection of communities that have been racially oppressed. Likewise, the connection of interracial intimacy to distributive justice is equally pertinent. Distributive justice implies the dismantling of racist forms of distribution in society. Traditional race-based forms of distribution, which are based on traditional views of white supremacy, reward whites through the reproduction of the white family.34 The conservation of racist and unjust distribution of the benefits and burdens of society depended on the conservation of racial family categories that analytically propagate the system. Therefore, the end of the racial privileges afforded to some whites entails the end of a white family identity that is pegged to notions of white superiority, purity, and privilege. Such a reconstruction may make the very idea of a white family nonsensical—families would no longer be thought of and valued as white.35 The implications of dismantling white family identity are tremendous, and not just for issues of distribution, for the dismantling pressures on white families would necessarily affect other racially and ethnically exclusive identities.36 Just as browning accompanies racial harmony, so it accompanies distributive justice. Indeed, in a society such as ours, where oppressed racial and ethnic groups suffer uniquely damaging levels of concentrated poverty and hypersegregation, the breakdown of social isolation will be a condition of an equitable distribution of resources. Orlando Patterson argued this point in his book Rituals of Blood.37 Poor, urban African Americans are geographically and economically isolated. Patterson adds to that analysis, that not only are communities isolated, but the fractured families within those communities are isolated from each other as well. Hence, for Patterson, the single African American resident, child or adult, in a poor and segregated ghetto is isolated not only from larger (social, political, and economic) networks of support, among nonblacks but likewise isolated from kinship and community networks as well and suffer from both external and internal isolation. Patterson offers several recommendations to break down both types of isolation. Among suggestions about reforms of education systems, child support, and criminal justice and sentencing, he recommends that the federal government commit to helping with the

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provision of affordable and safe day care and the enforcement of child-support laws. Additionally Patterson urges that internal and external isolation be contravened through out-marriage. The effects of de facto and de jure enforced endogamy have been that . . . Afro-Americans remain cut off from the intimate familial ties with other Americans. The consequences of this are twofold. They have been, and remain, isolated from the priceless social capital of the majority’s interlocking social networks. And they have been shut out of the nation’s most important cultural process—that dynamic exchange of cultural dowries that are at the heart of the civilization’s dazzling intellectual, artistic, technological, and entrepreneurial achievements.38 Patterson argues that out-marriage would “immediately improve the marital prospects of Afro-American women” and lead to the exchange of valuable networks of social capital, what Patterson calls “social dowries.”39 Out-marriage need not be the precondition of distributive justice, nor would it be wise to peg all hope of distributive justice on intermarriages. There are serious barriers to an increase in black-white, black-Asian, and black-Latino intermarriages, not the least of which is the devaluing of black individuals in the first place. At worse, this proposal could be another silly “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” demand that has little chance of working out. There is no honor or morality in pegging justice on what Du Bois called “self-obliteration.” This solution appears to be asserting that justice is found in the marital embrace of folks outside of one’s race, and this message is especially aimed at darker peoples. The horrible implication, which can even be detected in Patterson, is that the distributive injustice is perpetuated in part by the participation of the victims of distributive injustice in their own isolation. At best, though, Patterson has not laid distributive justice at the feet of the beds of the poor. He has simply remarked that out-marriage is one of the conditions, and outcomes, of a larger program of distributive justice. Moreover, it is a vital facet about the future of racial justice that current theories of racial justice largely ignore. Moreover, out-marriage, as advocated by theorists of multi- and interracialism, is seen as dismantling the racist legacy of exclusive white family identity, and by Patterson as dismantling exclusive networks of social capital maintained by de facto racial and ethnic endogamy.40


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The aforementioned two points directly confront the multiculturalist preference for forms of external diversity—diversity between groups—and the desire for the perpetual conservation of group identity. The demands of personal autonomy and liberty in liberal democracies are inconsistent with the very idea of managing the individual sexuality of racial and ethnic group members for the sake of group conservation. It is not the job of the state to directly promote interracial unions, just as it is not appropriate for the state to do so for forms of marriage sanctioned by thick conceptions of the good. It is in the interest of the state to promote stable, loving, and productive—in the widest sense—relationships that nurture and produce just, moral, healthy, productive, and civically engaged citizens. As part of this project, the state has an interest in tearing down the veil of lies and illusions that has propagated the myth and demands for a monoracial state and family. This means admitting and celebrating the multiracial and ethnic origins of the state. This may mean showing how this nation’s forefathers, and lawgivers, were fathers, although compromised and failed ones who were caught up in racial-sexual denial, of actual multiracial families, just as they were fathers of a multiracial United States. And it may mean the ascension of additional deities to our civic pantheon, especially those individuals who have made historic contributions to the expansion of American freedom.41 Or we can let the father and lawgiver just stay dead and go on without recourse to romantic, contentious, and potentially dangerous mythologies. Whatever our choice, dealing with racism, gender, and interracial love and sex will unavoidably present serious challenges to the present debate. In the second chapter I argued that the politics of browning should not lead to, or support, the evasion of traditional demands for social justice that are due to this nation’s racial history and politics. The politics of browning should not interfere, as far as possible, with backward-looking claims of justice. However, browning will and should challenge forward-looking claims of social justice that have emerged from the fight against racism and racial oppression. Many claims of forward-looking racial justice contain more than a demand for distributive justice across the nation’s population. They also contain assumptions of monoracial representation and communities. Clearly, the ends of many arguments of forward-looking claims are needed and desirable, even if they fall short of present needs. However, insofar as we are a nation wedded to the mosaic image of diversity behind such visions of justice, browning represents a serious challenge.42 What social and racial justice looks like is indeterminate

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and full of potential for transformation. This transformative vision is what browning can and should contribute to the public discourse over racial justice. Transformation of the racial and ethnic status quo is a threat. It is threatening not only to white nationalist racists but to those who seek the conservation of a wide array of racial and ethnic community identities. Such is the cost of life within liberal democracies, such is the cost of distributive justice, and it does us no good to ignore the communal loss that also is a cost of browning. Communal loss is, at the same time, the birth of new communities and the growth of those present in our societies. The advocates of browning are correct to assert the potential for the exchange of social capital, yet they are spectacularly incorrect to see in interracial love and sex the resolution to the world’s racial problems. There is a vanity of seeing interracial, especially heterosexual, marriage as the key to all racial division. That fantasy arises out of a larger fantasy that we hold about romance and marriage as fundamentally unifying. Two become one in marriage, thus two races become one in the interracial variety—and problem solved. This fantasy is not a solution for conflicts in marriages of any sort, nor is it for racial politics. Unfortunately, for the new amalgamationists and those who hope that interracial intimacy on its own will bring about the beloved community, the actual history of interracial family formation has been deeply marked and manipulated by nationalistic projects of economic and political domination. Interracial intimacy brings us nothing if those intimacies are manipulated by the economic and political ends of a nationalism that manages ethnoracial transformation to conserve and reproduce its hegemony, such as seen in the dynamics of brides taken by war or bought by mail order.43 Ultimately, the amalgamation fantasy is as hostile to difference and politics and finds too-easy solutions to inevitable political, moral, and even personal conflicts in yet another vision of homogenous “blood,” family, and nation. The real challenge of the browning of America for the nation and its individuals, families, and communities is the creation of ethical and just interracial public and private lives. Interracial America must overcome the opposition of white nationalist extremists—who will inevitably turn to violence to resist America’s cosmopolitan turn—enamored with the fantasy of America as a majority white and Christian nation. It must also resist multiracial narcissism of a future messianic totality, the smug resolution that within its light brown face all of the conflicts of history are finally, and beautifully, resolved. The price of that vanity, of course, will be the continued pursuit of American hegemony over developing nations and the conservation of race-class


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disparities without the worry that these divisions have anything to do with race. A brown “America” will still be the United States of America, with all of its economic, national, and international projects. Certainly this change will profit many more citizens. But what difference would a brown United States, still wealthy and powerful, make for poor, dark, marginal citizens, for the indigenous, for the alien, or for the citizens of other nations? The curt answer is that it would make little difference, outside of some slight changes in rhetoric, and that cold reality interrupts the romantic fantasy of the browning of America as some profoundly transformative moment. Nevertheless, what can be transformative is if the proponents of the browning of America, and the individual institutional advocates of the groups that comprise the phenomenon, take up the obligation to realize internal and long-standing claims of justice in the United States. I first broached this issue of intergroup responsibility in the second chapter; it also is the concern of the next.


Chapter 5


Ambiguity, Conflict, and Hope The ambiguities and conflicts around personal multiracial identity are the result of the inherent ambiguities and inconsistencies within national and colonial systems of race.1 These ambiguities and inconsistencies, and outright errors disguised as racial science, were compounded by migration, trade, and other contacts—an active process at the heart of today’s browning of America. Multiracial lives have been living signs of the profound errors of all racial systems in their vain attempt to categorize, sort, order, and control. Multiracial lives were from the first days of modern race theories ruptures of racial mores, and they remain so at some social sites today. There is, however, a vast gulf between the common belief, which held for the majority of the history of race in the United States, that multiracial persons were “mongrels” and degenerations, and the ubiquity of celebratory images of multiracial persons and families now common. Multiracial identity has evolved, in the post-civil rights decades, into an identity in rebellion against monoracialism, yet it remains the target of racist fears, just as it develops its own form of racial privilege. Multiracial identity is, as its defenders have asserted, a psychologically and socially difficult identity to live with: multiracial individuals must struggle for recognition in a society that does not fully welcome or officially acknowledge their existence.2 Likewise, the assertion of multiracial identity in the form that it presently takes in the United States is possible only as a result of a shift in dominant racial projects that has allowed, and favors, the emergence of a distinct multiracial identity and political advocacy movement, the flourishing of which 109

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may come at the expense of traditional civil rights goals—arguments, significantly, that dominate legal critical race theory discussions of these matters.3 This chapter revisits both sides of the debate, especially in light of the role of multiracialism in the browning of America. The next section investigates how multiracialism is a target for liberals and those on the Left who are opposed to the institutionalization and spread of multiracial identity because of its effects on the demographics of traditionally dominant, American delineated ethnoracial groups and on civil rights policy. The third section turns to the manipulation of multiracialism by neoconservatives, and the careless actions of some multiracialist organizations that allowed their demands for multiracial recognition to be associated with neoconservative color-blind policy agendas. The fourth and fifth sections investigate the charge of racism against multiracialism—a powerful charge that directly contradicts and threatens the utopian racial harmony vision some associate with the browning of America. The sixth section explores the worries about the expansion of multiracial recognition beyond the census to public schools, colleges, and universities, and it presents and supports arguments in favor of the expansion of multiracialism. The chapter ends with a reconceputalization of multiracialism as an identity and a movement that are called to repair, that is, to act responsibly in the face of racism, to remember the history of race and the American family, and to engage in restorative justice in a society damaged by racism.4 Multiracial persons, and the movement that claims to look after their interests, have special obligations that are rooted in the very experience that leads individuals to claim this identity: their obligation to memory. The demands of memory lead them to seek repair, yet they also demand that multiracialism contribute to the repair of the damage wrought by racism.

Cruel and Counterproductive Rebukes The criticism that multiracial, or mixed race, is an impossible identity, or that multiracialism is simply a variant of racial passing available to the brown is cruel,5 cruel because it dismisses the particular experiences of multiracial persons and precludes any possibility of the existence and legitimacy of multiracial identity. The intention is to foster incredulity about the intentions of persons who dare claim multiracial identity, and to code multiracialism as simple racist betrayal. These liberal and leftist critics of multiracialism wrongfully perceive


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themselves as allies of racial justice and are unfortunately engaged in the sad project of silencing debate through cruel rebukes and denying the possibility of multiracial life. The intention behind criticisms of multiracialism is to expose the interactions, perhaps necessary or intentional, between multiracialism and personal, social, and institutional racism; another aim is to ward off those who may be tempted to identify with multiracialism. It is a curious strategy, because the critics use cruelty to appeal to loyalty, but their rhetoric merely drives away those who most closely identify with multiracialism. What, then, is the political or racial project of the criticism of multiracialism? To absolutely associate multiracial identity with racist betrayal is akin to labeling so-called “illegitimate” children bastards. Will calling a group of fatherless children “bastards” make them any more legitimate? Given the self-destructiveness of the rhetoric that many of the most vociferous critics of multiracialism deploy, their strategy cannot be to engender loyalty; rather, it is a politics driven by a post-civil rights version of racial-sexual-moral panic.6 Their racial project is a demand for political and social authenticity, while their political one is recrimination and revenge—it is, at its base, the repetition of the language of absolute loyalty, plus the threat of disowning and exclusion, that has historically marked the ruptures around multiracialism. In contrast to those claims, critics who explore the relationship of multiracialism to personal racism are respectable as they raise serious normative concerns about the choices of individuals acting within networks of racial projects.7 Similarly respectable are the investigations of how multiracial identity, whether rooted in personal racism or not, interacts with racist systems and institutions. Both of these streams of vital critique allow for the possibility of rectification, reparation, and restoration. What must be avoided is insisting on the nonexistence or moral irretrievability of multiracialism. Multiracial identity is an identity derived from specific experiences of being born into, and living among, the gaps of racial and ethnic categories.8 This category is the result, on the one hand, of numerous ruptures of racial mores and, on the other, the implications and policies of those very same mores. Race was imagined to designate deep, permanent, and impermeable barriers between varieties of peoples; yet racial systems have consistently been accompanied by an erotic imaginary of miscegenation, and of course its widespread practice. There is a third element, though, that must be added to the dyad: the mulatto/as and mestizo/as that resulted from these ruptures

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and utilizations have been the object of curiosity, denial, and terror. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century race theory, white-initiated interracial sex was privately recognized but publicly denied, and the children of miscegenation were mysterious.9 In stark contrast to the territories influenced by the power of Spain and France and the official racial systems of South Africa and Brazil, there has been little space for the expression of multiracial identity in the history of race in the United States, although the identity cannot be said to have been absent. The “one drop of blood” rule for African Americans and the blood quantum rules for Native Americans more or less guaranteed that any black-white offspring would be black, and red-white offspring would be white.10 This is the backdrop only by which the phenomena of passing, which is distinct from the claiming of multiracial identity, or the ostracism of the racially ambiguous in the United States, can be understood. Despite, however, the widespread adoption of de facto and de jure rules to guard whiteness from specifically black inclusion, recognition of multiracialism from within and without racial and ethnic communities proliferated. Social and legal institutions in large part did not allow for an independent multiracial identity and category, yet the recognition of multiracial genealogy and experience has always been present.11 The critics of multiracialism are quick to recognize the presence of multiracial individuals as part of so-called monoracial, nonwhite communities. The recognition, however, of multiracial genealogy and experience in the history of race in America has been the cause for much confusion in current debates, as well as the failure to properly distinguish between having multiracial genealogy and experiencing one’s self and life as being multiracial. Critics argue that multiracialism is superfluous: the categories “African American” and “Native American” already include those who are “mixed,” those whose genealogy includes white ancestors—white ancestors, and families, who are largely ignorant of, or deny, familial connections.12 In fact, in the cases of African American and Native Americans, the majority of these monoracial communities have multiracial genealogies. A corollary argument is that there are no ontological grounds for the existence of multiracial identity as a separate identity or category. Race is real at any particular site, because it results from various social forces, at those sites, that place social and political meanings on bodies. In the United States, and in the black case, in particular, those forces have coded all persons with any black ancestry (and socially determined black phenotypes) as exclusively black.13 The American racial project, with few exceptions, has identified multiracial individu-


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als as members of a single race. Although race in the United States experienced significant changes, there has been no serious alteration in the racial formation of blackness, thus there is no justification for a multiracial category, so there is no reason to label, for example, the child of a black-white union multiracial because the black (and probably the white) parent is already multiracial. These arguments support the request, made by legal critical race theorists, who criticize the multiracial movement, that multiracial persons keep their mixture a private matter and do not ask the state or its institutions to make their mixture a matter of public record.14 The movement for official recognition of multiracial identity in statistics is best understood, according to these critics, as a movement toward white privilege and a betrayal of civil rights. The request that multiracial individuals go into the “closet” with their identity is stunning. First, the mere counting of multiracial individuals, who under present guidelines are counted when they check more than one racial or ethnic “box,” does not necessarily undermine the collection of data needed to enforce civil rights policies. Second, the demand that multiracial people hide themselves from view in the public sphere amounts to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” multiracial policy. It advocates the application of a public-private distinction in personal identity for the sake of accomplishing traditional civil rights goals. This demand goes hand in hand with, and would support, the restriction of public discussions of racial justice to a narrow realm of “public” affairs: jobs, income, wealth, housing, health care, education, and so on, which are the large-scale distributive ends of civil rights policy. Off the table would be public discussions of changes in individual identity, family structure, and the implications of the browning of America for the future of civil rights policy. Public discussions of race and the private sphere would be kept out of the realm of public discourse, on such topics as interracial intimacy, multiracial identity, interracial adoption, and the effects of racial identity in custody claims of dissolved unions—discussions that are vital to have in a browning America.15 As with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals in the U.S. military, such a multiracial policy effectively ignores demographic reality (there are homosexuals in the military, and there are multiracials in America), refuses to recognize people in this category who morally deserve recognition while benefiting from their presence, and refuses to deal with fundamental shifts in American social life.16 Last, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” demand is stunning, because it so brazenly employs the private-public distinction to remove multiracialism from politics,

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from public life—a distinction that has been the target of decades of arguments by feminists and race theorists. On the one hand, it recognizes the growing trend of multiracial self-recognition, but on the other, it asserts that multiracial persons as such are not morally or politically entitled to public recognition. As with the refusal to consider differences of social identities by liberals who support strict neutrality or blindness to social differences, “don’t ask, don’t tell” multiracial policies imperiously refuse to deal with intracommunal difference and simply demand silence. Further, “don’t ask, don’t tell” arguments suppose that multiracialism is primarily tied to genealogy, and with that supposition the emergence of multiracial as an individual identity and a political movement is involved in many of the problems its critics have enumerated. The largest problems have to do with the ontology of race: if there are no races, then there are no multiracial individuals. Race, though, is understood as a social concept, and belonging to one or another race is largely, though not exclusively, tied to racialized genealogy. Racial genealogy is not democratic, as the different races are not considered by widely held social mores and legal practices to mix equally (e.g., the one drop of blood rule). Thus racial categories already include those of mixed genealogies. Moreover, the genealogy of individuals admits of a high degree of mixture. Thus either we are all multiracial, or, really, none of us are. The supposition that multiracial identity is a genealogical claim is false. It is significant that both the proponents and opponents of multiracialism make this error. Multiracialism cannot be largely a genealogical matter; rather, it is an experience. Multiracial activists and organizations that base multiracial identity on simple genealogy do grave damage to their own cause by reinforcing absurd and discounted simplistic biological conceptions of race and standards of racial purity. Likewise, those who criticize multiracialism by merely pointing to past patterns of racial categorization fundamentally do not understand—or just have not listened to accounts of—post-civil rights era multiracial identity formation.17 A preponderance of accounts in art, literature, autobiography, and social science demonstrates several variants of the multiracial experience that stretch back to the birth of the concept of race.18 Denying the existence of multiracial experience, and thus multiracial identity, is patently false and absurd; it is, as has been said, cruel. Likewise, denying the existential validity of the form it takes today simply because of its past forms is not a serious argument. Each multiracial experience


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is tied to a particular site—to a particular social forces network that gives the identity presence and effect—rendering it distinct.19 Yesteryear’s octoroon is not today’s hapa. Although there has been little possibility in pre-1960s’ America of a multiracial identity separable from a traditional racial category, significant shifts have occurred in social practices, mores, and laws (in short, social forces) that have opened up enough social and conceptual space for such a category. Hence, X, born in 1950, whose parents were white and black, was considered by her family, friends, strangers, and herself to be simply black, even though she was largely recognized as a mulatta or, in popular parlance, “redbone.” X falls in love with a white person, Y, and in 1980 they have a child, Z, together. Z faces racial and ethnic pressures similar to X, but as Z exists in a distinct site, she faces different degrees of those forces as well as wholly new forces. Z’s experience of race is distinct, and she has an option that X never did: she can reasonably declare that she identifies as both black and white and considers herself multiracial. X never could reasonably claim to be multiracial. After the 1980s, X and Z both experience the loosening of racial mores, but Z can internalize and identify with these shifts in a way that was unavailable or incomprehensible to X. Multiracialism, then, is linked to interplays between genealogy, social forces, and the phenomenology of race. Accusations of bad faith or betrayal are directed toward multiracialism for different reasons and from a variety of directions. Ruptures mark the experience and presence of multiracial life. Multiracial individuals are living symbols of the rupture of racial-sexual mores and divisions. These ruptures are alive, for better or worse, in all of our families and communities. The difficulty with which white family structures deal with nonwhiteness within is now a well-told tale; the tragic stories of ostracism and denial are as old as this nation—indeed, they are stories in this nation’s myth of political and social origins (e.g., Thomas Jefferson’s relation with Sally Hemmings).20 Latino, Native, African, and Asian American families have, to various degrees, similar stories of ostracism and denial. These stories, at once personal, familial, and social, resulted in a variety of personal choices: from the most painful choice of passing to the contemporary declaration of multiracialism. Each of these stories carries the signs of personal-familial-social rupture. The personal expression of multiracial experience, whether racist or not, interacts with the social processes, the various racial projects, responsible for racial formation in the United States. Therefore, as the dominant racial

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projects connect each day to macro-level processes, there is a looping effect, or a network of mutual support between racial formations on each level. The ruptures around multiracialism are transitive across the personal, the familial, and the social. Each of these sites of rupture must be addressed by the work of repair that multiracialism should accomplish. These ruptures do not necessitate the shunning of multiracial identity or the dismantling of the multiracial movement, but they do entail responsible commitments and action in the face of these personal and social challenges. Has the multiracial movement engaged its issues in the spirit of repair? If writings from the critics of multiracialism are the gauge, then the multiracial movement offers nothing more than shrill and sustained screams for multiracial identity and multiracial family identity. Certainly some in the multiracial movement (e.g., Project Race) have offered such protests. Although their actions are understandable in the face of existential denial and assumptions of personal racism, their unfortunate tactics represent intransigence and the assertion of disconnected individuality. Calls for recognition are not by themselves acts of repair. Yet a careful look at the history of multiracial advocacy shows that much of its activity has been characterized by the desire for repair as well as recognition.21 It is as if the critics of multiracialism do not bother to notice this facet of the movement and have been uncharitable and hyperbolic.22 Theirs is a tactic, as I argue later, that is counterproductive and inconsistent with their political aims.

Color Blindness and Multiracial Privilege Those who bear multiracial identity are relieved to various degrees of the social forces that subject their monoracial, and often darker, relations. It would be unfair to call their lives easier, for they live their own particular racial hardships, but they do escape some of the norms that discipline, limit, and degrade monoracial individuals. The social space in which they exist, then, opens up opportunities not available otherwise, for example, judgments of their “accessible” and “exotic” beauty, or judgments of their character and normalcy based on their “mixed” characteristics; multiracial individuals may even have the possibility of passing. At worst, multiracial identity may be an identity based on racial opportunism that depends on anti-black racism, as well as on class and racial privilege.


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These complaints, however, are too focused on individuals and personal choices. Indeed, the debate suffers from an overwhelming focus on whether or not the personal assertion of multiracial identity is racist, and whether the multiracial movement is motivated by the racism of its leadership. As Paul Spickard has commented, individualism has a “stunning” predominance in the discourse on both sides.23 The intention of individuals is an important issue, and will be investigated later, but more important is the way in which multiracial identity may interact with American racial politics and macrolevel processes. Multiracialism may participate in and contribute to social and institutional racism. On this point the dominant worries, of course, have been expressed about the national census and other public records closely linked (such as K-12 and college enrollment and admission forms). Additionally, multiracialism has been adopted by the proponents of naïve color blindness in their pursuit of law and policy scrubbed free of any reference to, and influence of, race and ethnicity. Now there is an obvious trajectory from the politics of the American Left to support for multiracialism; a line of descent from Loving v. Virginia to the 1997 congressional hearing on “Federal Measures of Race and Ethnicity and the Implications for the 2000 Census.”24 Just as obvious is the appeal of multiracialism for American neoconservatives. Neoconservatives, and others on the Right, such as Right-leaning libertarians, see in the multiracial movement what they extrapolate from Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King Jr.: statements of one America. We should no more fault the multiracial movement than we do Douglass or King for the Right’s adoption or manipulation of them. Certainly there has been cooperation between a Republican majority and the movement. The 1997 hearings on the 2000 U.S. Census, which were to determine whether a “multiracial” category would be included as an identity option, were held under the aegis of the Republican leadership of the House. There is no reason to believe that a Democratic majority would have prevented the hearings. In particular, much has been made by the critics of the multiracial movement of the support of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA).25 Gingrich did support the addition of a multiracial category, but so did several Democrats. It is a marker of the viciousness of the debate that Susan Graham, executive director of Project Race, has been lambasted for praising Gingrich for his aid; those criticisms contain intentional misinterpretations and distortions of her praise for Gingrich. Graham’s critics do not mention her praise for President

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Clinton’s support or her overall point that the hearings were a bipartisan effort.26 What Gingrich wrote, though, does demonstrate why the Right has appropriated, although without much cash or real support, the multiracial cause. According to Gingrich, multiracialism is a positive demographic, social, and political development because it leads to a whole American identity. Citing the history of ethnic assimilation, Gingrich stated: I think we need to be prepared to say, the truth is we want all Americans to be, quite simply, Americans. That doesn’t deprive anyone of the right to further define their heritage. . . . It doesn’t deprive us of the right to ethnic pride, to have some sense of our origins. But it is wrong for some Americans to begin creating subgroups to which they have a higher loyalty than to America at large.27 Gingrich ends with an appeal for the multiracial category as a way of ceasing to force Americans into “inaccurate” and “divisive” subgroups; ultimately, as he testified in his writing, this is a step toward the ideal of having but “one box on federal forms that simply reads: ‘American.’ ” The Right’s support for multiracialism, however, largely derives its opposition to color-conscious civil rights laws (it is not opposed to being conscious about color when it suit its own agenda). The stated support of multiracialism by George Will and Ward Connerly is closely linked to their opposition to color-conscious programs, in particular to affirmative action.28 The pro-multiracialism and anti-affirmative action activism on the Right are closely linked; this link is most directly visible in the rhetoric and activism of Connerly. Connerly’s successful effort to pass California Proposition 209 and his failed effort on California Proposition 54, as well as including “multiracial” on University of California forms, are, in his mind, one project.29 The organizations he has led, the American Civil Rights Institute and the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), both represent the dual directions of his anti-civil rights color-blind agenda.30 Connerly, along with other black conservatives (e.g., Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele), disagrees with the principle of race consciousness that has been securely part of the black freedom struggle since Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races.” For Connerly, and other neoconservatives, appeals to race and racism are less explanations of nonwhite social disadvantage than obstacles to assimilation and excuses for individual and group failure. Color blindness, understood as strict


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racial neutrality, then, is a remedy as well as an ideal; it is a remedy for the many ways that race and appeals to racism have plagued communities of color, especially Latino/as and African Americans.31 It is amusing, then, that Connerly and his allies appeal to the very tool they disparage: they demand that government institutions be color conscious, that is, of multiracialism, to achieve the general eradication of all racial categories. As Gingrich expressed it, multiracialism is the path to the singular communal conception of “American.” The Gingrich-Connerly example displays how multiracialism converges with naïve versions of color blindness. Multiracialism, in some forms, is simply hostile to the collection of any racial data. As an element of that anti-race hostility, it may obfuscate the importance of race by falsely signifying the end of racism. Beyond such political posturing, multiracialism may contravene civil rights programs by obfuscating the census count of traditional racial categories; likewise, it may deny those groups members and thus lessen their political clout and be utilized as a step toward color blindness in law and policy.32 Beyond, though, mere frightful possibilities is the present fact that the RPI was explicitly used to support the end of race-conscious policies, such as affirmative action. Just as with the browning of America, multiracialism may seem at first glance to run counter to color blindness; it is, after all, about the recognition of the proliferation of colors. Yet precisely because of this proliferation, opponents of color-conscious law and policy find in the multiracial movement ideological support for naïve versions of color blindness.

Personal Racism The initial complaint against multiracialism is that personal racism motivates the adoption of the identity. Those who would adopt and declare that identity are doing so because of their racist beliefs against the nonwhite communities with whom they are associated through genealogy. The motivating racist beliefs may involve beliefs, explicitly or unconsciously held, that the relevant nonwhite groups are inferior or antipathetic.33 Likewise, if a nondoxastic model of racism is the guide, then the racist belief, plus the discriminatory act of choosing a “multiracial” identity (a label that is either inherently racist or has such effects), is what makes its adoption racist.34 There is little evidence for the charge of explicit personal racism, although some critics offer anecdotal evidence gathered from the

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ill-considered remarks of a few of the principal figures of the multiracial movement.35 Certainly personal racism was part of the psychological dynamics of those who participated in passing, an activity and a choice that can be ascribed to what has been called internalized racism. It is unwarranted, however, to read the site-specific motivations of those who passed, and who are still passing, into the current multiracial movement. A response to this reply points to the function of multiracialism, that is, to open what Degler called the “mulatto escape hatch,” thus providing an individual solution to racism, and reinforcing racism (how it does so is dependent on the site).36 If a person is not already white, then it is better to be mixed than not; similarly, multiracial identity reinforces the social racist belief that it is better to be partially white than nonwhite. That multiracial identity functions this way, however, is not sufficient to charge self-declaring multiracial individuals with personal racism. Nonetheless, insofar as the declaration of multiracial identity discriminates against nonwhite groups, we can hold multiracial individuals and such movements accountable for their participation in social and institutional racist harm.

Social and Institutional Racism The symbiosis of multiracialim with racism is displayed in four ways: first, multiracial identities exist because race theories have constructed nonwhite identities as being inherently inferior and antipathetic. Second, it provides an individual solution to racist oppression that not only fails to question racist social structure but also depends and profits from that structure. Third, it is a vehicle of individual and communal declaration that reinforces all three types of racism. Fourth, it sets up a multiracial group—the colored or mestizo/as—as a buffer zone that protects whiteness by ensconcing it within a protective class of brown folks seeking white privilege via the mulatto escape hatch.37 These claims are thought to by supported be referencing the history of passing in the United States and multiracial identity in South Africa and Brazil. If multiracialism functions in any of these four ways, then it is certainly accurate to accuse it of supporting social and institutional racism. The problem with this objection, though, is that there is no evidence that any one of these four processes is occurring in the United States on a level comparable to Brazil or South Africa.38 While there may be, even today, nonwhites who chose to pass as white, today’s passing is not like yesteryear’s: being white need not involve


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the absolute denial of all nonwhite ancestry. All the same, passing in the United States, or the self-declaration of multiracial identity, hardly adds up to a “buffer zone.” The charge of social and institutional racism can still be pressed against the multiracial movement by detailing how the movement may play into the hands of conservatives opposed to civil rights legislation by supporting color-blind policy, law, and judicature. Harold McDougall, director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP, gave a clear form of this charge at the 1998 hearings on Federal Measures of Race and Ethnicity and the Implications for the 2000 Census, held by the subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology. McDougall concentrated his objection on the effects that the introduction of a “multiracial” category may have on the census and the deleterious effects that would follow for the national civil rights agenda. According to McDougall’s testimony, “Census data aggregated in its present form, respecting historically protected categories, has been used: • to enforce requirements of the Voting Rights Act; • to review State redistricting plans; • to collect and present population and population characteristics data, labor force data, education data, and vital and health statistics; • to monitor discrimination in the private sector and to establish and evaluate programs; • to monitor and enforce the Fair Housing Act; and • to monitor environmental degradation in communities of color.39 This work is not done, as McDougall forcefully demonstrated, and nonconvoluted census data are integral to this effort. McDougall’s list is but a summary of the important work done with race statistics that the census gathers. Representative Stephen Horn’s (R-CA) opening statement at that hearing lists some thirty-four programs, stretching from the Education Department to the Justice Department.40 The laws involved include the most important civil rights legislation in the history of this country. These programs are extremely important for ensuring, maintaining, and extending civil rights to many Americans—they should not be toyed with for the mere self-indulgence of the multiracial identity.

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It is important to note that the main de facto leadership of the multiracial movement voiced strong support for the history and pursuit of civil rights for all persons of color. Indeed, McDougall worked with the American Multi Ethnic Association (AMEA), Project Race, and the Hapa Issues Forum to lend support to the “check all that apply” option over the unified “multiracial” box option. The testimony of the leadership from the AMEA, Project Race, and Hapa categorically denounced the idea that their movements strive for anything similar to the color caste systems in South Africa or Brazil.41

Threat and Recognition Traditional nonwhite communities did not lose a significant amount of their populations because of the decision by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect multiracial data, nor has this data convoluted the collection of data of the traditional races in the United States. What has occurred is that we now know that a significant number of Americans consider themselves multiracial or biracial persons.42 The recognition of multiracial persons in the national census extends a challenge to various institutions across all governmental levels: shall local institutions, if they collect racial data, additionally count multiracial persons? The reasons proposed to arrest the spread of the counting of multiracial persons parallel the general objections against the inclusion of a “multiracial” category in the national census. Local, institutional arguments against the spread of counting multiracial persons are tied to local concerns, however, in addition to being vulnerable to the rebuttals discussed earlier, these arguments suffer from serious practical problems that are created by the urge to altogether evade the issue of multiracial presence. Connerly’s failed attempt to have a multiracial category added to the University of California’s (UC) admission forms pointedly illustrates the dynamics around local worries about multiracialism. Regent Connerly, during the fall of 2004, proposed to the UC Regents that the university add a “multiracial” and “multiethnic” category to its admissions forms. He argued that this category was needed to recognize both the identity of multiracial students and demographic changes in society that are reflected in the student population.43 Fresh on the heels of Connerly’s failed Proposition 52, this move was motivated by his color-blind and multiracial-consciousness agenda. Significantly, in opposition to Connerly’s proposal, the AMEA, the Hapa Issues Forum, and the Mavin Foundation released a joint


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declaration against Connerly’s proposal. They supported UC’s decadelong policy of allowing students to check “one or more” racial or ethnic categories on admissions forms.44 Unfortunately, the opposition of these groups to Connerly’s color-blind and multiracial-consciousness agenda was not covered or emphasized in the press coverage of the event. The opposition of those national groups to Connerly’s proposal belies the opposition that is too frequently drawn between multiracialism and the traditional civil rights agenda. Multiracialism, as imagined by the most visible and representative activist organizations, is not a threat to backward-looking, race-conscious law and social policy. Despite their opposition to Connerly’s suspicious proposal, multiracial advocacy groups do want the number of multiracial individuals counted. They agree with Connerly on that single issue; however, their support for being counted does not imply that they want their numbers removed from the counts of the traditional racial and ethnic groups, which is precisely the result that Connerly intended. UC allows students to “check one or more” racial and ethnic boxes on their admission forms, but it does not count the number of students who check more than one box. Opposition to such a count is based on the same fears and recriminations that have already been covered. The ends of race-conscious reparative or rectificatory policies do not justify the refusal to count multiracial students, especially if such a count does not put the numbers for underrepresented minorities at risk. A refusal to count is tantamount to a refusal to recognize, and that failure of recognition is both morally and politically unjustified, and ineffective. The refusal to count multiracial persons is simply absurd. If the worry is the loss of populations from traditional racial and ethnic groups, then not counting multiracial persons will not stop the loss. Those who want to flee the traditional categories are not stopped, in this age of self-reporting, by denying access to a multiracial option on the national census or on admission forms—they can either resist checking one box, or they can take the radical option of passing. Second, refusing to count multiracial persons does not stop the critics of race-conscious policies from using multiracialism as a divisive tool. Critics such as Connerly will not cease to say that, for example, affirmative action in higher education is unjustified, because those we identify as “black” or “Asian” or “Latino” are not simply black or Asian or Latino. Counting multiracial persons exposes what the enemies of civil rights always knew—there is a high degree of mixing between the socially labeled races, and the children who have resulted are very aware of how they arrived in the world. The enemies of civil rights,

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at one point, hated that fact. Now they seek to use it by claiming that few Americans are truly eligible for race-conscious programs. Indeed, Connerly and other opponents of race-conscious programs accuse the “civil rights industry” of hiding the truth it fears. Not counting multiracial persons will not stop those critics and simply amounts to a cheap and transparent cover-up. Such tactics are poisonous; they alienate multiracial individuals—a situation that completely contradicts the desire to hold multiracial persons within traditional groups—and they reek of moral and political weakness. Further, the self-declaration of multiracial identity does not bear on the central questions at the heart of race-conscious rectificatory or reparative justice. Do the generations that have suffered because of racial discrimination deserve remediation, rectification, or reparation for the crimes of racism? To what extent are the children of interracial unions qualified for these programs? It is on these grounds that the opponents of color-blind law and social policy should meet its proponents. The self-declaration of multiracial identity does not affect the essence of these questions. A mass movement of individuals asserting their multiracial identity is not necessary for multiracial genealogy to cause trouble for race-conscious laws and social policies. Not counting multiracial persons is to act like the little Dutch boy with his thumb in the dike. We pretend to protect the status quo from unwelcome demographic changes that will fundamentally transform the life of race—with its benefits and flaws—in America. Attempts to stymie the recognition, and even the self-identification of multiracial persons, are politically, morally, and practically flawed. The instinct to stymie this movement is rooted in the perception that multiracialism challenges race-conscious law and policy. As long as multiracial organizations act responsibly, multiracialism in itself should not threaten backward-looking arguments for race-conscious laws and policies. Nonetheless, multiracialism does threaten popular conceptions of the ends of forward-looking, race-conscious laws and policies. Forward-looking policies are concerned with nurturing social and institutional conditions that support some level of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity—a condition that is desirable for its beneficial effects on institutional ends and culture. It is significant for this conversation that the only grounds upon which affirmative action is justifiable, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, are forward-looking ones. Insofar as conceptions of forward-looking, race-conscious policies and laws are predicated on received, albeit


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contentious, visions of racial and ethnic integration paired with cultural pluralism (or perhaps even nationalism), as opposed to assimilation or amalgamation, then multiracialism is a threat to the ends of those conceptions. Multiracialism does not make diversity impossible, but it does challenge preconceived notions of diversity. Forward-looking arguments for diversity seem to assume that diversity is accomplished by having some portion of each traditional group represented in institutions. It stresses what has been called external diversity, which its critics lampoon as oddly zoological, or worse as Epcot-center-style representations of diversity.45 Multiracialism undermines the simplistic idea that an individual is identified and represents one racial group. The multiracial movement stresses the micro-diversity that exists within families and communities, or what can be called internal diversity. Multiracial activism, as seen on the campuses of the University of California and California state universitites, should continue to support the ends of backward-looking race-conscious policies. Likewise, they should, in principle, support the larger ends of forward-looking programs without backing down and acquiescing to indifference. Universities and other institutions should allow the populations they serve to “check more than one box.” They also should count those who have checked more than one box; they should provide statistics on multiracial students, staff, and faculty (likewise, the Department of Education should follow suit). The reasons for counting the multiracial populations begin with empirical concerns but are founded in moral and political demands for recognition.46 Multiracial organizations should demand recognition, and with that recognition they should forcefully push their respective visions of racial justice and harmony, in the knowledge that when such groups look forward to the future they will necessarily trouble American preconceptions of what racial justice looks like.

Repair Multiracial persons find themselves born into a world riven by racial fault lines, a situation they frequently feel they carry within their bodies and identities. In reaction to racially broken societies, some have indulged in the romantic idea that multiracialism, amalgamationism, mestizaje, or some other conceptualization of ethnic or racial hybridity is the conceptual key, or worldview, that can repair racial fault lines.

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The idea is simplistic and messianic and helps itself to the fallacy that a new unity equates to harmony. Likewise, this argument has been forwarded in favor of multiracial or mestizo consciousness, seemingly a way of knowing and interacting with the world that either accepts or synthesizes differences. In the extreme, this power has been identified with multiracials themselves as some messianic “cosmic race” that will sweep away the old divisions through their very existence. These romantic notions have been roundly criticized, in part by merely pointing out that mestizo nations have hardly achieved their touted values of racial democracy.47 Yet multiracials can be said, without making them into a brown army of interracial messiahs, to play a particular role in interracial repair. All the same, we should be extremely reluctant to claim that multiracial identity is an identity called to repair. “Calling” specific categories of people to noble missions is too rhetorical. “Calling” multiracial individuals and groups to repair is not as satisfying as simply compelling them to attend to the demands of social justice. Of course, one way to compel multiracial persons to attend to these matters is to not allow them to “escape” the traditional categories, thus forcing them to work against the forces of racism and oppression that afflict the traditional categories. That strategy, though, as has been argued earlier, is equally ineffective as “calling” them to anti-racist struggle. Psychologists and sociologists friendly to the claims of the multiracial movement have rejected conceptions of multiracial identity as pathological or “broken” identities; they are, of course, breaking with the long tradition of seeing multiracial persons as “mixed up,” “marginal,” or “tragic.”48 Asserting that multiracials are thrust in social conditions that require interracial and interethnic repair is not a return to those images of pathology. However, we need not entirely break with that tradition. Multiracial identity is a painful and difficult identity, and its richness as an experience is linked to its traditional problems and struggles.49 All the same, it is preposterous to say to multiracial persons, “You are called to repair relationships that you did not break.” It is tantamount to burdening children born out of wedlock with being bastards, and then asserting that they are responsible for rebuilding their legitimacy. Nonetheless, multiracialism is burdened with its special measure of responsibility to repair the ruptures around race in their lives, families, and communities. Multiracial individuals are thrust into brokenness, into the ruptures that mark their condition. They can react like libertarians and assert their absolute autonomy


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and disconnection, or they can acknowledge the broken world that surrounds them. In the record of multiracial activism, there is evidence of both kinds of reactions; indeed, the former reaction is modeled by the actions of Interrace and Project Race, and the latter we find modeled in the actions of the UC multiracial activists. Turning to the idea of repair as an organizing principle for multiracial identity helps transform the discussion of multiracialism from individualist to communal, political, and social. Repair is about self, among others. The work of repair—moral, political, social, and psychological—will refer to the social and institutional concerns that haunt the assertion of multiracial identity. Given that traditional civil rights organizations stress the continuing need for distributive justice, and rectification and reparation for past racial harms, dialogues with those groups about social justice will be driven by those traditional concerns. Further, beyond redistribution, rectification, and reparation, the work of repair is restorative.50 Restorative justice is a form of justice that has received too little attention from traditional legal, moral, and political theorists. The truth and reconciliation processes that have occurred in South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda and Burundi are examples of attempts at restorative justice; those proceedings precede or work in concert with criminal and distributive justice. Restorative public discussions of race in the United States tend to be more ad hoc and are intermingled with criminal or civil proceedings (e.g., the prosecution in 2005 of Edgar Ray Killen, who was accused of murdering three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964). In future restorative conversations, multiracialism should play a central role—it marks the boundaries of what needs restoration (e.g., retelling the central myths about the birth of our nation). Understanding multiracial identity as “called” to repair, and being born into conditions that demand repair, will confront the nation with the need to have discourses of restoration rather than merely discourses of distribution and separation. Discourses of restoration are disturbing and have the potential to go all the way to the bone of our racial history. One of the interesting aspects of restorative justice is that restorative dialogues do not, and cannot, have as an end restoring people to their pre-trauma conditions. Restorative justice seeks to heal and to bring victims to a new image, a post-traumatic image of themselves.51 Likewise, multiracialism as repair will not bring the nation or groups back to their pre-rupture condition. Multiracial persons should not have to heal themselves into oblivion. Rather, through a reflection of our racial history, mediated through our collective experience


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of love during times of racism, and racism during times of love, we are led to an image of restoration and an image of ourselves that we have not yet imagined. Turning to repair as an organizing principle for multiracial identity, experience, and organization also aids in concretizing the political and moral burdens to which multiracialism needs to commit if it is to resist the traps of racial privilege. In “Being and Being Mixed Race,” I argue that multiracial groups and individuals must fulfill specific conditions if it is not going to be politically and morally irresponsible: 1.

A rejection of naïve popular conceptions of race and biological conceptions of race

2.

An understanding of race as a social category made real by social forces

3.

An understanding that race, via racism, is a mode of oppression—with social status, privileges, and burdens parsed out according to a racial hierarchy that places whiteness at the top and darkness at the bottom

4.

A rejection of, and a commitment to resist, racial hierarchy and white privilege52

Those are fine conditions, but they do not place specific obligations on multiracial persons and organizations. They can be said to apply to all persons, multiracial or not. Specific or special obligations to commit to anti-racist principles and actions for multiracials are called for because of their experience and their place in the racialization process. Multiracial persons and organizations are uniquely situated to cause or perpetuate racist harm, as their behavior is linked to the well-being of those who are vulnerable to racism. Multiracial individuals, through their interactions with the forces for racialization and the network of existent racial projects, have a direct effect on monoracial lives. This call to repair and restoration is not foreign to the multiracial experience. Again, the identity is one born into brokenness, and assertions of multiracial identity have consistently evoked themes of personal, familial, and social repair.53 In particular, multiracial identity has been justified on the grounds of familial repair, that we need to recognize all the members of interracial families.


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Specifically, appeals to recognize “white mothers” have become a contentious point in so much of the discussion, taken as evidence of the motivating desire to “escape blackness.” Much credence should not be given to those who make such claims. There are nasty gender and race politics in those arguments, and they are largely ad hominem attacks. The push for multiracial identity, according to a few critics, is driven by the interests of white mothers of nonwhite children; those interests, accordingly, demonstrate the multiracial movement’s relationship to white privilege. Such objections are superficial and ignore the thick relationships of family belonging that are nurtured rather than rejected in the post-civil rights era. Nonetheless, we can turn to the claims of family belonging to ground a responsible and reparative multiracial politics. The demand to recognize, if you will, our mothers is a moral response, itself grounded in our obligations to care for those who are connected to us by bonds of love. This response, as has been elucidated by the proponents of the ethics of care, is political. In that light, multiracialism is caught, like Antigone, between the demands of political communities and communities of familial love. The way out of this trap is to affirm the obligations that multiracial persons have to the memories of their mothers. To refuse that obligation, again, is a repetition of the ruptures of interracial intimacy marking the history of race and multiracialism. Nonetheless, the experience, internal structure, and history of multiracialism implicitly demand that it confront the dynamics of racial privilege. This demand is the result of our movement toward our mothers. Our obligation to our mothers is a call to moral interconnection, not an invitation to laissez-faire, disconnected politics. An individualistic libertarian conception of absolutely autonomous identity is the reaction that I often receive from students when I confront them with the racist dynamics of multiracialism: “This is my identity, I am not causing direct harm to monoracial groups, and I have a right to truthfully identify myself.” Individualism, though, fails to meet our moral demands to our mothers, and our familial obligations. If obligation to the memory of mothers is going to be the ground for multiracial identity, then other obligations follow. The other obligations are illustrated by the comic, sometime cynical, Cuban and Puerto Rican saying about family racial identity and the hidden grandmother: “Those who aren’t descended from the peoples of the Congo are descended from the Carabalí; and for he who claims he knows no such thing, where are you hiding your grandmother?”54 That is exactly the question I would put to multiracial individuals,

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and anyone else, who claims a radically individualistic conception of their social identities: Where is your grandmother? What of your obligation to the memory of your mother’s mother? The assertion of obligation to the memory of our mothers links us to obligations to the memories of our African American, Asian, Latina, Native American, and Anglo grandmothers to their and their children’s welfare. This is a special obligation that multiracial children must face that is grounded in their experience and family ties. The demand for the recognition of multiracial identity, then, ought to be grounded in children’s recognition of particular responsibilities (psychological, social, economic, and political) to their mothers and grandmothers. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to multiracialism is related to the general evasion of discussions of interracial intimacy in public discourses of racial justice. Public discussions of racial justice have been restricted to public affairs for practical purposes, so as not to inflame opponents of racial equality or to run counter to the endogamous or nationalist values of some parts of the civil rights coalition. One result of this relegation is the shock that has greeted assertions of multiracial identity. Yet multiracialism is just a part, a highly visible part, of interracial intimacy—the very topic that was ignored and dismissed in the first place. The continued ignoring of interracial intimacy in the time of the browning of America comes from a stubborn desire to continue with resistance as usual and the fear that the baseline of racial justice has been shifted without traditional claims ever being met—this is the demands of justice part of the black-white binary that was discussed in chapter 3. Yet it is a dangerous strategy, because its continuance will make present claims based on the legacy and categories of the civil rights movement seem irrelevant to the lives of a changing American public. In this context of silence about interracial intimacy, multiracialism represents a breakout of dissentious discourse, not only against racial categories but also against the refusal to think about racial progress and justice within the private sphere. Multiracialism, then, is a gateway to the other submerged controversies around interracial intimacy that ethical and political theory has likewise ignored. This is especially true for individuals who are just as likely not to be multiracial and who engage multiracialism as a starting point for thinking about the myths, secrets, and lies of their racial family identity. So much of the interest about multiracialism, especially from the young, is about their relationships with the interracial dynamics of the modern American family that contains members who have different racial identities: half


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siblings, whether recognized by the family or not, adopted siblings, stepparents, and extended family. The injustices of the American history of race are deeply related to conflicts over interracial intimacy. The way we have loved and failed to love across the color line needs to be a part of any reasonable vision of racial reconciliation. The “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about multiracialism is yet another sad attempt to keep discussions of racial justice in the public sphere, away from the private, and away from the potentially troubling topic of interracial intimacy. However, discussions of racial justice, progress, harmony, and so on cannot be so restricted. The racial ruptures in our private lives must be addressed if we are to achieve socially meaningful racial justice in the public sphere, and thus societal repair. Challenging monoracial family identity, and, more to the point, the reproduction of racial identities and divisions that attend the monoracial family is not enough. All hope does not lie in new, happy, healthy, multiracial families. They are not our political salvation. Integrated families may come without substantial distributive justice or serious anti-racist policies effected. Nonetheless, the revolution of the American family (and the dismantling of racist and nationalist concepts of family belonging) is an important condition of social justice. Moreover, revolutionizing the American family will transform us in ways that will lead to an image of ourselves that we may not welcome or recognize, but we cannot be so arrogant as to presume the face of justice before us.


Conclusion

Chief Justice Robert’s concluding remark in the Seattle and Jefferson County decision, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” concisely expressed a legal and political opinion that has a sizable and popular audience about the need to realize color-blind law by quitting color-conscious policies that, without any foreseeable end, racially divide and discriminate against individuals.1 His remark, however, is deceptively simple and is not equivalent to the position that he outlined in his authored opinion; nonetheless, it is the spirit of the simple statement that commentators will likely endorse and utilize.2 The idea they will run with is that the government should be strictly guided by the color-blind principle, and that ending the government’s use of racial categories will help race matter less in society in general. This is reflective of the sentiments in Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion as well. Furthermore, Thomas was quite clear in his glee that the Seattle and Jefferson County decision was a blow against race-obsessed school administrators and academics who engage in social engineering and peddle socially dangerous “elite race theories.”3 Perhaps the plurality of the court agreed with Justice Thomas’s larger vision and such “cold turkey” cures for the United States’ racial obsessions, but the plurality opinion, despite the Chief Justice’s flourish, makes a narrower claim. The plurality decided that the “extreme” means—which was integration according to the defendants, and racial balancing according to the plurality—that the school districts used had insignificant effects and were not narrowly tailored to meet their stated ends. Those ends were to prevent resegregation and achieve certain educational and social benefits from the provision of an integrated learning environment; according to the plurality of the court, those ends were unacceptable because they required potentially endless state intervention, and the government did not have a compelling interest to achieve those ends. The means and ends of the school districts’ desegregation plans failed to meet the standard of strict scrutiny and 133

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were unconstitutional. Apart from ending de jure segregation, rectifying state-sponsored discrimination, and the narrow conditions outlined in the Grutter decision, which the Roberts court has limited to law school admissions, the state has no interest in using racial categories and every interest in being color blind. Therefore, the plurality opinion severely limited state-sanctioned color consciousness and explicitly stated that only de jure discrimination deserved state intervention or remediation. The plurality could not have been clearer: explicit colorconscious policies to counter de facto segregation are unconstitutional and not in the state’s interest. To this Justice Thomas added that he called into question the very idea of de facto segregation, arguing that the racial imbalances that result from “innocent” private decisions should be referred to as separation.4 Hence, there is a dizzying distance between the soaring ideal of the first half of Chief Justice Robert’s concluding remark and the heavy reality within the substance of the second half. This distance represents a bold equivocation. Worse, it is an equivocation that is an explicit evasion of racial disparities in education, and the long tails that de facto racial disparities have, which reach back to historical de jure racial discrimination in housing and education, and the segregation that followed the Brown decision. This equivocation rings with echoes of the equivocation in Justice Harlan’s original claim of constitutional color blindness, and just as Harlan’s color-blind reading of the U.S. Constitution allowed him room as a justice to publicly mourn the presence of Chinese in the United States, the color blindness of the plurality allows them to evade deeper questions of racial disparities and social justice. What is more, this evasion is now the law, and all government institutions are to join them in evading social justice. The New York Times responded to the decision with an editorial entitled “Resegregation Now.”5 The allusion, of course, is apocalyptic (indeed, the plurality took issue with Justice Breyer’s assertion that the decision would be); the editor saw in the decision a hard blow against the ideal of racial equality. The “now,” however, in the title is additionally troubling because the “now” the nation is experiencing is the browning of America. That such evasions happen now brings into sharp focus the shortcomings of the romantic promise of the browning of America, which I critiqued as hollow in the fourth and fifth chapters. The browning of America, however, serves as more than a backdrop to this decision; both Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas made use of the ethnoracial diversity of the Seattle school district to argue that there

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is no segregation nor threat of resegregation in the school district.6 The plurality even took a swipe at the black-white binary and the narrow visions of “diversity” formed under the limiting influences of that binary in its pointed criticisms of Seattle’s and Jefferson County’s “crude” methods of dividing students by using “black/other” and “white/nonwhite” categories: Even when it comes to race, the plans here employ only a limited notion of diversity, viewing race exclusively in white/ nonwhite terms in Seattle and black/”other” terms in Jefferson County. . . . The Seattle “Board Statement Reaffirming Diversity Rationale” speaks of the “inherent educational value” in “providing students the opportunity to attend schools with diverse student enrollment.” . . . But under the Seattle plan, a school with 50 percent Asian-American students and 50 percent white students but no African-American, NativeAmerican, or Latino students would qualify as balanced, while a school with 30 percent Asian-American, 25 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino, and 20 percent white students would not. It is hard to understand how a plan that could allow these results can be viewed as being concerned with achieving enrollment that is “broadly diverse.”7 The plurality’s comments demonstrate three of the five problems, which I identified in the second chapter, that result when the rhetoric of the browning of America converges with the naïve conceptions of color blindness. The browning of America is used to support colorblind public policy and bring to an end color-conscious policies, and it is used as an excuse to forget this nation’s racial history and neglect its debt of justice to remediate the legacy of racial injustice. The court’s decision demonstrates as well the risks involved with incautious abandonment of the black-white binary, because now no categories, dichotomous or not, are permissible, and the de facto segregation of schools may no longer be directly countered with race-based initiatives. As I argued in the third chapter, dismissing the binary is too easy and typically amounts to an evasion of long-standing claims for social justice by African Americans and Native Americans. All the same, I agree in principle with the court’s condemnation of the binary racial categories used by the school districts; those categories depend on and help conserve simplistic, external conceptions of diversity, and those binary categories, no matter how practical they

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were in the context of the districts in which they were used, run against the grain of the growth of both the ethnoracial diversity of local communities and awareness of the descriptive inadequacies of the traditional American racial categories. Justice O’Connor, in the Grutter decision of 2003, estimated that the nation’s law schools only needed a quarter century more to use race-conscious admissions standards. As the Seattle and Jefferson County decision so clearly demonstrates, that time will not pass quietly for state-sponsored, color-conscious policies. In this period of decline for official color-conscious policies, what should activist and advocacy organizations that seek to prevent or mitigate the evasions of longstanding claims for social justice do? As I indicated in the discussion of the black-white binary, the links between the plight and claims for the justice of immigrants and migrant labor should be explicitly connected to the demands for national distributive justice. Likewise, every effort should be made to expunge narrow visions of American nationalism and nativism in domestic civil rights organizations. To address the long-existing claims by Native Americans and African Americans for social justice, efforts should be made to counter anti-indigenous and anti-black racism among Latinos and Asian Americans, and immigrants generally. Public, uncompromising opposition to expressions of racism would go a long way to secure the trust of Native American and African American publics, and their advocacy groups. Since inter-ethnoracial coalitions cannot revive the backward or forward-looking colorconscious programs that the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly declared unconstitutional, these groups should support facially raceneutral policies that seek to address de facto racial disparities.8 They also should visibly make a stand against de jure practices that lead to the great racial disparities in incarceration, education, health care, and employment that haunt our nation; for example, multiracial advocacy groups should not only be concerned with adding more boxes to school forms, they also must be involved in addressing racial and class disparities in education. Above all, individual activists, and advocacy groups, should strive to build an inclusive democratic dialogue at various levels to address the issues at risk of being evaded. The people of this nation, whether resident, undocumented, or citizen, may not get the nation to forthrightly address its long-standing obligations to address de facto racial disparities, nor is it likely that progressive activist organizations will secure broad legal and political support for color-conscious programs. Yet they can subvert the national habit of forgetting and evading its

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history by engaging in a democratic dialogue about national interests that the institutions have declared are not officially interesting. Local democratic dialogues do not replace or do the work of just laws, but they are valuable because of their restorative nature; they help restore and build communal and political relationships that can, in the long term, pave the way for liberal, color-conscious policies, and, in the short term, they can be the basis of effective local action. To engage in such dialogues and projects of restorative justice is to take a cue from the figure Pausanias, who, in Plato’s Symposium, remarks, “It is no good for rulers if the people they rule cherish ambitions for themselves or form strong bonds of friendship with one another.”9 When America’s rulers are committed to the evasion of social justice, individuals and groups may fulfill their political responsibilities by forming “staunch friendships and fellowships” across American divisions. Although I put little stock in the political romance of the browning of America, the bonds of cosmopolitan-minded civic friendship may realize the political potential of the interracial intimacy that the browning of America promises.


Notes

Introduction 1. As I discuss in the second chapter, the phrase “browning of America” is controversial. Nonetheless I use it because of its social currency, and precisely because of its problems. “Browning” has an emotional weight that I do not want to avoid. Since I confront rather than avoid the moral and political ambiguities embedded in the racially meaningful term brown, it would be counterproductive to avoid the phrase. Further, throughout the book I occasionally shorten the phrase to just “browning.” 2. Richard Rodriguez, Brown (New York: Viking, 2002). 3. Michael Lind, Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1996). 4. This book does not offer a sustained critical discussion of white nationalist objections to the browning of America, although a sketch of that fear is offered at various points within. Such ideologies tend to be illiberal and depend upon assumptions of nationalistic, racial, and ethnic privileges. They are counter-cosmopolitan ideologies that are nostalgic for those eras when white supremacy was so established that most people did not have to bother even reflecting about white power. Rather, this book takes up liberal concerns about the implications of the browning of America for traditional projects of, and ways of understanding, race and social justice. 5. Mary Frances Berry, “Pie in the Sky? Clinton’s Race Initiative Offers Promise and the Potential for Peril,” Emerge (September 1997): 68. 6. Rodriguez, Brown, 142. 7. Political philosophy has long been dominated by a single-minded concern with “national” issues, with an exception, of course, for philosophy about war. This is evident in the history of political philosophy from Hobbes and even has haunted the work of contemporary political philosophers, most notably John Rawls’s. Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” is an exception, and Rawls attempted to address these concerns in his The Law of Peoples (notably, since the 1970s in the United States, there has been a wealth of publications on the philosophy of global justice). The dichotomy between the “national” and “international” and the traditional focus on national questions in Western political philosophy nicely colludes with the just as traditional focus on

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questions of national social justice to the exclusion of global or international justice. This in turns colludes with the grouping of Native American and African American issues with national social justice concerns to the exclusion of concerns that arise from the Asian American or Latino experience. African Americans and Native Americans are judged to be “inside,” while Asian Americans and Latinos are left “outside” of Anglo-American political considerations. See Etiene Balibar’s discussion of these issues in relation to what they call “new racism.” Whether this collusion is intentional or not, the effect is the same, and that is the focus on national questions in a context where Asian American and Latinos are taken to be on the “outside” results in the evasion of their concerns in political and social philosophy and reinforces the prejudicial judgment that they are perpetual foreigners. Here we get a sense of Balibar’s claim that racism functions as a hidden supplement to nationalism. It has been suggested to me that these divisions and evasions are a function of white supremacy. In the United States, they are the result of practices from the history of political philosophy that supplements judgments about the racial makeup of the nation derived from its political history as a white racial state. 8. This charge was raised against my analysis of the black-white binary during a presentation at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists in the spring of 2007. I would like to thank the audience of the panel in which I participated for raising this and other objections and forcing me to confront what will be a constant complaint about my analysis of the browning of America. 9. Paul Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2004); Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, a Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Howard McGary, Race & Social Justice (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 10. Jorge Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 11. J. Angelo Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993). 12. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 13. Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 14. Rodriguez, Brown; Michael Lind. Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); and Gloria Anzaldúa, Boderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Luke Books, 1987). 15. Ronald Sundstrom, “Being and Being Mixed Race,” Social Theory and Practice 27 (2001): 285–307. 16. Velasco y Trianosky, Gregory. “Beyond Mestizaje: The Future of Race in America,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st

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Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, 176–93 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003). 17. Ronald Sundstrom, “Falling into the Olongapo River,” Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 2:2 (2003): 25–27.

Chapter 1 1. See, for example, the cases Hopwood v. State of Texas, 94–50569 (5th Cir. 1996) and Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Further examples of this trend are the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” or Proposition 209, and the failed “racial privacy initiative,” Proposition 54, that was proposed in California. The phrase “color blind” entered legal parlance with Justice Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. The majority in that decision defended the idea of racial segregation and the idea of “separate but equal.” Justice Harlan, in dissent, argued that the U.S. Constitution was “color blind.” See Bernard Boxill’s Blacks and Social Justice (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992) for a discussion of the history and problems with racial color blindness. 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Passing of Douglass,” in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Terri Hume Oliver, ix (New York: Norton, [1903] 1999). See also Waldo Martin’s “Images of Frederick Douglass in the Afro-American Mind: The Recent Black Freedom Struggle,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, 271–85 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Du Bois proposed a biography of Douglass for the George W. Jacobs & Co. series The American Crisis Biographies, but that opportunity was usurped by Booker T. Washington. See Aptheker’s introduction to John Brown (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, [1907] 1973). 3. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 39. 4. For the link between Douglass and Brown, see Douglass’s Life and Time of Frederick Douglass, in Frederick Douglass Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, 453–1045 (New York: Library of America, 1994). For Douglass’s support of self-defense and retributive violence, see his account of his fight with Covey in all three of his autobiographies. All future citations to Douglass’s three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times, refer to the collection Frederick Douglass Autobiographies, which will from here on be referred to as FDA. 5. Ronald Sundstrom, “Douglass and Du Bois’s der Schwarze Volksgeist” Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. R. Bernasconi, 32–52 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). 6. Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (New York: ArgosyAntiquarian, [1907] 1969). There is a large literature on the relationship between Douglass and Washington and a close literary and historical relationship between their respective autobiographies. The structure of Washington’s 1901

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autobiography Up From Slavery was based on Douglass’s Narrative, and Up From Slavery contains the same accommodationist language that Washington employed in his biography of Douglass. For these connections, see Charles T. Davis and Henry L. Gates Jr., “Introduction: The Language of Slavery,” in their edited volume The Slave’s Narrative, xi–xxxiv (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 7. Ibid. For Washington’s argument about Douglass’s nativity and legitimacy, see p. 225, and for his backhanded response to Du Bois, see p. 339. 8. Ibid. For Washington’s discussion of Brown, see p. 187, and for his claims about Douglass’s rejection of social equality, see p. 259. 9. For an account of the value of interracial relationships to Douglass, see William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), and Maria Diedrich’s controversial Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). See my “Being and Being Mixed Race” Social Theory and Practice 27 (2001) 285–307 for an account of the inconsistency of conservatives in their approach to white versus black racial purity. 10. “Speaker Hastert and Congressional Republicans Announce Funding to Complete Renovations on Frederick Douglass’ Cedar Hill Historic Site Tout Agenda to Empower African Americans to Achieve American Dream,” http://www.speaker.house.gov/library/misc/030508frederichdoug.asp (accessed April 8, 2003). 11. Frederick Douglass, “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 3, ed. John W. Blassingame, 289–300 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), and “What the Black Man Wants,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, 157–65 (New York: International Publishers, 1955), and “I Denounce the So-Called Emancipation as a Stupendous Fraud, April 16, 1888,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 712–24 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). From here on the volumes of The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass will be referred to as LWFD, followed by the volume number. All future citations of Douglass’s speeches, letters, and editorials refer to these volumes, unless otherwise noted. See McFeely’s account of Douglass’s relationship with the Republican Party in Frederick Douglass. 12. “Opinion of Thomas, J.,” in Grutter v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 306 (2003), 2. Beyond Hastert and Thomas, other members of the Republican Party have called on the memory of Douglass. A notable example was President George W. Bush’s speech at Goree Island in Senegal and his July 2004 speech in front of the Urban League. See “President Bush Speaks at Goree Island in Senegal,” July 8, 2003, Office of the Press Secretary, http://www.whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030708-1.html (accessed July 8, 2003), and “President Emphasizes Minority Entrepreneurship at Urban Leagues,” July 23, 2004, Office of the Press Secretary, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/07/20040723-8.html (accessed July 23, 2004). 13. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, in his The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978), traces, among others, Douglass’s influence on both contemporary black conservatives and black nationalists.

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There are many, as of yet, unexplored elements of classic conservatism in Douglass. During his 1846 tour of Great Britain, he read several classics, some of which influenced his rhetoric. His utilization of Shakespeare and the influence that Coleridge had on him have been noted, but the influence of Edmund Burke’s writings has not been duly explored. Although Burke and Douglass are irreconcilable on the question of slavery, there are several striking parallels between their arguments. Burke’s writings must have been on Douglass’s mind as he toured Ireland and campaigned both for repeal and abolition. 14. Federick Douglass, “Seeming and Real,” in LWFD, vol. 4, 226–28. For a discussion of Douglass’s position on land reform and his use of the rhetoric of self-reliance, see the ninth chapter of David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass’ Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 15. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 240–42. His rejection of the activities of private charities further displays the distance between Douglass and the “principles and values” of the Republican Party, for Douglass did not want to leave the welfare of African Americans in the hands of private, and especially faith-based, organizations. 16. In contrast to Justice Thomas’s appropriation of Douglass, there is an affinity between Douglass and the majority opinion of Grutter v. Bollinger (p.13). Justice O’Connor’s claim about diversity and the interests of the state squares with Douglass’s numerous arguments about the racial interdependency of U.S. identity and destiny. Likewise, O’Connor’s ambivalence about the moral legitimacy of racial categories and her expectation that race-conscious admission decisions will no longer be needed in twenty-five years reflect Douglass’s hope in the end of race and his conception of human fraternity. Moreover, the sort of nation the decision envisions where racial diversity has been achieved to such an extant that race no longer needs to be considered in our decisions about the constitution of institutions is akin to Douglass’s vision of a United States where blacks and whites have assimilated and amalgamated into each other. 17. Frederick Douglass, “Mixed Schools,” in LWFD, vol. 4, 288–89. Douglass, in that article, goes on to defend integration by arguing that African Americans want this not because African American schools are inferior, but because they wanted to “do away with a system that exalts one class and debases another” (289). Douglass’s claims run counter to Thomas’s that such state intervention harms the self-respect of black students. For an extensive argument against Thomas’s argument that affirmative action harms black self-respect, see Bernard Boxill’s Blacks and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985). 18. For Douglass’s position on racial organizing, see note 31 that follows. 19. For Douglass’s use of the phrase “scorching irony,” see his “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, July 5, 1852,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 192. That speech is a good source for his talk of God’s judgment. See also the “Appendix” to his Narrative in FDA.

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20. For a detailed discussion of Enlightenment ideology among nineteenth-century black intellectuals, see Moses’s The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. See also Waldo Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 21. For a discussion of the individualism of Douglass’s faith, see Donald B. Gibson, “Faith, Doubt, and Apostasy: Evidence of Things Unseen in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, 84–98 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). From here on this volume will be referred to as FDN. Douglass makes the distinction between “ideals” and “practice” in many places and usually in the context of criticizing American Christianity. See the “Appendix” of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in FDA. The Narrative was published in 1845. Douglass made this distinction, though, as early as 1841 in his “The Church and Prejudice, December 23, 1841,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 103–105. For his account of the history of the Christian church in the fight against and in defense of American slavery, see his “The Anti-Slavery Movement, March 19, 1855,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 333–59. 22. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, July 5, 1852,” LWFD, 181–204, emphasis added. Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass (chapters 4 and 7) gives one of the best accounts of what Martin calls Douglass’s “moral universe.” 23. Ibid., emphasis added. The psalm reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God (King James Edition).” This verse was a centerpiece of “Ethiopianism” in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. See Moses’s The Golden Age of Black Nationalism for a discussion of Ethiopianism and its incarnation in the works of American black intellectuals. Douglass, as a believer in human brotherhood, rejected the racialist mysticism of Ethiopianism. This verse, for Douglass, signified Africa’s uplift, its coming role as a part of Western civilization. For others, like Crummell or Du Bois, it had a racial message. 24. Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, July 12, 1854,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 289–310, emphasis in original. 25. Ibid. 26. Douglass’s “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, July 12, 1854,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 289–309 is the best source for his position on race. See his “An Address to the Colored People of the United States, September 29, 1848,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 331–36, for his arguments against the “Hammite” stories of the origins of nonwhites. 27. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism. 28. Frederick Douglass, “The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America, June 1863,” in LWFD, vol. 3, 349. 29. Frederick Douglass, “God Almighty Made but One Race,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 5, ed. John W. Blassingame, 147 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Douglass is equivocating with his use of race. Seemingly, he means by his first two uses and last use of race something like species, if it is going to be consistent with his third use. This equivocation

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was due to his intellectual struggle with race. He devoutly believed in human brotherhood, but the existence of race, which he felt the evidence would not let him deny, was a stumbling block to the realization of that brotherhood. Thus he begrudgingly accepted the “technical” divisions of race, all the while diminishing it in “light” of human brotherhood. For Douglass, racial divisions existed, but from a divine perspective they did not. 30. Frederick Douglass, “The Folly of Racially Exclusive Organizations,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame, 109–11 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). See also his “An Address to the Colored People of the United States, September 29, 1848,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 331–36. See also Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass. 31. See Douglass’s “What Are the Colored People Doing for Themselves, July 14, 1848,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 314–20, “An Address to the Colored People of the United States, September 29, 1848,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 331–36, and “The Union of the Oppressed for the Sake of Freedom, August 10, 1849,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 399–401. Douglass’s support of, and participation in, the Negro convention movement of the mid and late nineteenth century underscores this point. 32. Frederick Douglass, “An Address to the Colored People of the United States, September 29, 1848,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 331–36. 33. See Douglass’s “The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America, June 1863,” in LWFD, vol. 3, 347–59, “The Future of the Negro, July 1884,” in LWFD, vol. 4, 411–13,” “The Future of the Colored Race, May 1886,” in African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920, Howard Brotz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 309–10, and “The Nation’s Problem, April 1889,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 725–40 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). The severity of Douglass’s assimilationism in “The Nation’s Problem” is amazing. To the argument that black unity is strength, Douglass replied: “My position is the reverse of all this. I hold that our union is our weakness” (p. 732). In the paragraphs following that statement, he recommends that blacks disperse among whites and argues for the complete folding in of black interests, identity, and activities into white society. 34. Frederick Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem, April 1889,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 730 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). 35. Frederick Douglass, “The Folly of Colonization, January 9, 1894,” in African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz, 328–31 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995). 36. Ibid., 329–30. 37. Frederick Douglass, “The Destiny of Colored Americans, November 16, 1849,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 148–49 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). Douglass’s conception of human brotherhood is where he is most Burkean. Burke’s conception of the organic and eternal society takes on a unique edge when combined and informs Douglass’s anti-racialist conception of America. It may be shocking to

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Douglass’s fans on the anti-racialist Left, but it is his doctrine of brotherhood that directly connects him to classic conservative thought. 38. See Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in FDA, especially chapter 3, for a detailing of his years with Garrison’s party. 39. Frederick Douglass, “To Gerrit Smith, Esqr., January 21, 1851,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 149–51. 40. See Douglass’s “Change of Opinion Announced, May 23, 1851 in LWFD, vol. 2, 149–50. See also Douglass’s “Is the United States Constitution for or Against Slavery?,” in LWFD, vol. 5, 191–99. 41. See Charles Mills’s “Whose Fourth of July?,” in his Blackness Visible, 167–233 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Robert Bernasconi’s “The Constitution of the People: Frederick Doulgass and the Dred Scott Decision,” Cardozo Law Review 13 (1991): 1281–96; David Schrader’s “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass,” in FDC, 95–99; John McKivigan’s “The Frederick Douglass-Gerrit Smith Friendship and Political Abolitionism in the 1850s,” in FDN, 205–32. 42. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in FDA, 390. Not only is independence the point of Douglass’s tale, there is a spirit of independence and revolt in his writing of the text (see FDN). Douglass’s assertion of “manhood” against the paternalistic attitudes of Garrison in My Bondage and My Freedom was an outgrowth of his assertions of existence presented in his first autobiography. See Houston A. Baker Jr.’s “Autobiographical Acts and the Voice of the Southern Slave,” in The Slave’s Narrative, 242–61, and John Sekora’s “ ‘Mr. Editor, If You Please’: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and the End of the Abolitionist Imprint,” Callaloo 17: 2 (1994): 608–26. 43. John McKivigan, “The Frederick Douglass-Gerrit Smith Friendship and Political Abolitionism in the 1850s,” in FDN, 205–32. 44. Douglass, Life and Times, in FDA, 705–706. 45. Blassingame, in his editorial remarks of Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” identifies as influences Lysander Spooner, author of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: B. Marsh, 1845), and the figure in Smith’s Liberty Party; William Goodell, author of Views of American Constitutional Law, Its Bearing upon American Slavery (Utica, NY: Lawson and Chaplin, 1844) and Slavery and Anti-Slavery (Utica: 1844); and Samuel E. Sewall, author of Remarks on Slavery in the United States (Boston: Bowles and Dearborn, 1827). Of course, Gerrit Smith published several tracts on the question as well. Further, black abolitionist James M’Cune Smith, who wrote the preface to My Bondage and My Freedom, certainly influenced Douglass. Smith’s contributions to the anti-slavery literature can be found in his contribution to the first (and only) volume, in 1859, of the Anglo-African Magazine. Smith’s essays “Citizenship” (pp. 144–50) and “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia” are classics from that era; see The Anglo-African Magazine (New York: Arno Press, 1968). 46. Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution and Slavery, March 16, 1849,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 361, emphasis in original.

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47. David Schrader, “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass,” in FDC, 92. See Douglass’s “The Dred Scott Decision, May 14, 1857,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 415. 48. Frederick Douglass, “The Right to Criticize American Institutions, May 11, 1847,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 234–43. 49. Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision, May 14, 1857,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 415–16. 50. Ibid., 411. Douglass repeats these arguments in his famous Fourth of July address. 51. Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?, March 26, 1860,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 469. See also Douglass’s “Is the United States Constitution for or Against Slavery?,” July 24, 1851,” in LWFD, vol. 5, 191–99. 52. See Bernasconi’s “The Constitution of the People” for a discussion of Douglass’s “black reasons” for ending slavery and how they differed from “white reasons.” Bernasconi’s distinction is compelling, however, it needs to be tempered by the history of Douglass’s transition. See supra note 42. 53. Douglass discusses these issues in “The Dred Scott Decision, May 11, 1857,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 407–24. 54. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery, March 26, 1860,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 479. Douglass first uses this argument in “The Right to Criticize American Institutions, May 11, 1847,” in LWFD, vol. 1, 234–43. Although Doulgass’s writing and oratory styles were touched by his appreciation for transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, his critique of Garrisonian abolitionism and the transcendentalist penchant for moral suasion over inaction serves as a reason to refrain from associating Douglass too closely with the transcendentalists. John Wright, however, makes a strong case for the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work on Douglass; see Wright’s introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), vii–xxii. 55. Clearly Charles Mills’s claim, in regard to these issues, that “everything Douglass said was wrong,” is itself wrong. See Mills’s “Whose Fourth of July?,” 200. 56. Frederick Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem, April 16, 1889,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 725–40 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). Douglass repeatedly used the question “What of the night?” as a rhetorical device. See his “What of the Night?, 1848,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 97–99 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). 57. See Lucius Outlaw’s “Against the Grain of Modernity: The Politics of Difference and the Conservation of Race,” in his On Race and Philosophy, 135–57 (New York: Routledge, 1996), for a criticism of the tradition of universalism in politics. The amalgamationist aspects of Douglass’s legacy were rejected by Du Bois, and then by a generation of black intellectuals, activists, and artists during the Harlem Renaissance. A primary example of that trend

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is Alain Locke’s work, in particular, his edited volume The New Negro, and his famous essay by the same name collected in that volume. 58. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 59. See Charles Mills’s “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent,’ ” in his Blackness Visible, 167–233 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), Tommy Lott’s “Frederick Douglass on the Myth of the Black Rapist” in his The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation, 27–46 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), Angela Davis’s “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” in FDC, 339–62, and Waldo Martin’s “Images of Frederick Douglass in the Afro-American Mind: The Recent Black Freedom Struggle,” in FDN, 271–85. 60. Frederick Douglass, “The Destiny of Colored Americans” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 148–49 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). 61. Douglass quickly recognizes the taint of racism in U.S. relations with Haiti from his experience as a minister resident and consul general to Haiti. See his account of his experience in the last two chapters of his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in FDA. 62. Douglass, Life and Times, in FDA, chapter 7, “Triumphs and Trials.” 63. Douglass, in his Narrative, wrote, “Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?” (FDA, 61). 64. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in FDA, 59. 65. Ibid., 60. 66. Douglass began all three of his autobiographies by recounting the mystery surrounding the identity of his biological father, who he surmised was his white owner. His narrative of his birth was meant to expose the crimes that destroyed black families and that undermined the sacredness of the American family: the rape of bondswomen, the separation of the bondswoman from her children, and the enslavement and selling of the master’s own children or blood relatives. Douglass was preoccupied with the significance and meaning of the mystery of his father’s identity his entire life; see McFeely’s Frederick Douglass. 67. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 30. 68. Ibid. 69. Donald B. Gibson, “Faith, Doubt, and Apostasy: Evidence of Things Unseen in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,” in FDN, 84–98, and Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Gibson’s investigation of Douglass’s apostasy is appealing, however, Douglass is not technically an apostate. That day at

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the brink of the land, facing the Chesapeake Bay, Douglass likewise neared the brink of apostasy, but he did not renounce his faith and thus fulfill the condition for being an apostate. His experience was a forcible confrontation with the illusion of religion, and he was quick to realize the illusions of the nineteenth-century concepts of race, and the illusions of the U.S. Constitution. With the latter, as I already argued, Douglass engaged in a reconstruction of political illusions. Of course, Freud set forth the connections between religious, ethnic, and political illusions in the seventh chapter of The Future of an Illusion. For another discussion of Douglass’s loss of faith, see John Barbour’s Versions of Deconversion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994). 70. Herbert Aptheker, “An Unpublished Frederick Douglass Letter,” Journal of Negro History 44 (July 1959): 279–80. 71. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, July 5, 1852,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 181–204, “The Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Negro People, May 11, 1853,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 243–54, “The Anti-Slavery Movement, March 19, 1855,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 333–59, and “Seeming and Real, October 6, 1870,” in LWFD, vol. 4, 226–28. 72. Frederick Douglass, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?, The Lesson of the Hour, 1894,” in LWFD, vol. 4, 522. See also his “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, July 5, 1852,” in LWFD, vol. 2, 181–204. In his Fourth of July oration, Douglass used the ideas of “mocking” and “mourning” to conceptualize American political and religious failure and hypocrisy, as well as the condition of enslaved black Americans. 73. See Bernard Boxill’s “Douglass against the Emigrationists” in FDC, 33. There is, of course, a long history of commentary about race and alienation. Beside Douglass, many others have given what are considered classic discussions of racial alienation. Likewise, there is a long history of the theory of racial alienation in general and black alienation in particular. See, for example, Frantz Fannon’s Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), or the essays collected in James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). Cornel West’s writings on this topic are useful and controversial. He took up alienation explicitly in several of his titles, most famously in Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1993). Toni Morrison’s reflections on alienation in Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1993) are brilliant. In connection to Boxill’s essay, and the challenge to political philosophy that arises out of the experience of racial alienation, Howard McGary’s “Alienation and the African American Experience,” in his Race and Social Justice, 7–26 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), is invaluable as it presents several devastating challenges to contemporary liberal theory.

Chapter 2 1. Ronald S. Sundstrom, “Douglass and Du Bois’s der Schwarze Volksgeist,” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. R. Bernasconi, 32–52 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003).

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2. Plessy v. Feguson, 163 US 537 (1896). 3. Ibid. 4. Gabriel Chin, “The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases,” Iowa Law Review 82 (1996): 151–82; and Frank Wu. Yellow (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 131–72. Harlan’s anti-black and anti-Asian racism undermines his conception of color blindness, and leaves it open to arbitrariness and manipulability. Moreover, and maybe worse, Harlan’s “color blindness” is limited to those “colors” acceptable to American, white-dominated nationalism. I discuss this in detail in the following chapter. 5. Chief Justice Earl Warren did not cite Harlan’s color-blind principle in his opinion, yet color blindness influenced liberal interpretations of Brown. See James T. Patterson’s Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have A Dream,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington, 217–20 (New York: HarperCollins, 1986). King’s standard, captured in his character versus color remark, has been the subject of competing interpretations. Defenders of color-conscious policies are quick to point out that King approved of policies of rectificatory justice that took race and ethnicity into account. Conservative intellectuals and commentators, however, used King’s idea to oppose many color-conscious policies, especially affirmative action. See Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). 7. King, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. 8. See Frank Wu’s discussion of double standards and color blindness in “Neither Black nor White: Affirmative Action and Asian Americans,” in Yellow, 131–72. See also David Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo, Racialized Politics: The Debates about Racism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 9. The sexual nature of this fear of the desegregation of public space will be discussed in chapter 4 in this book. Additionally, it is a notable aspect of the cases that defended the idea of separate but equal that an infringement of this principle would curtail the “right” of citizens to keep their private lives and spaces segregated. See, for example, the comments of Justice Bradley in Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 24 (1883). 10. Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985). 11. Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). 12. Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1996). 13. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992). 14. These issues will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5 in this book.

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15. Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1996); David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: New Press, 2000). 16. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, eds. America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences vols. 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001); W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race: Beginnings to 1900, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2000); An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2001); Claude Steele, Theresa Perry, and Asa Hilliard III, Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American Students (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004). 17. Sally Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction,” Philosophical Topics 23: 2 (1995): 95–125; “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?, Noûs 34: 1 (2000): 31–55; Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18. Much has been published on this issue. The three I have been most influenced by, however, are Richard Wasserstrom’s “Racism, Sexism, and Preferential Treatment: An Approach to the Topics,” UCLA Law Review 24 (1977): 581–622; Bernard Boxill’s Blacks and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985), and Amy Gutmann’s “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. ed, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, 106–78 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 19. Bernard Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985); Howard McGary, Race and Social Justice (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999). 20. Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist, but . . . ”: The Moral Quandary of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); J. Angelo Corlettt, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 21. Amy Gutmann, “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, ed, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, 106–78 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 22. For an analysis of these broad questions in relationship to racism and sexism, see Wasserstrom’s “Racism, Sexism, and Preferential Treatment,” 581–622. The issue of the role of race in interracially intimate relationships is discussed in chapter 4. 23. See supra note 8. 24. This is not true of liberal and Left defenders of color blindness; they have decried racist pseudo-science and celebrated the potential of color blindness to transform the American family. See Michael Lind’s Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York:

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Free Press, 1996), and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992). 25. For a critical review of this debate, see Lionel McPherson’s and Tommie Shelby’s “Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32: 2 (2004): 171–92. 26. The key eliminativist texts are Anthony Appiah’s “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, 21–37 Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Naomi Zack’s Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993). 27. See supra note 17. 28. Anna Stubblefield, “Does the Reality of Race Really Matter?,” in her Ethics along the Color Line (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press): 70–89. 29. See supra note 9 and 38. 30. Lynn B. Jorde, and Stephen P. Wooding, “Genetic Variation, Classification, and ‘Race,’ ” Nature: Genetics Supplement 36: 11 (November 2004): S28–S33. 31. K. Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, ed, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, 30–105 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 32. See Tommie Shelby’s analysis of black nationalism in light of liberal political commitments in his We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 33. Gutmann’s semantic distinction may be dissatisfying because it obviously leaves open the possibility of the conservation of race consciousness through the utilization of the very same racial categories that race consciousness depends on. Thus color consciousness, within the public domain, can inadvertently aid the conservation of popular conceptions of race within the social and privates spheres. This problem is called the “Du Bois” dilemma by Bernard Boxill in his Blacks and Social Justice and the “taxonomic dilemma” by Michael Root in his “How We Divide the World,” Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): 628–39. See my development of this idea in “Race as a Human Kind,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28: 1 (2002): 93–117. My solution is that color consciousness should be limited to the public sphere, and that all public actors (politicians, judges, academics, journalists, and so on) should only use racial categories for the narrow political purposes outlined in this chapter, and also that the state should act to criticize race consciousness at every turn and thus undermine its popular support. 34. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996). 35. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 36. K. Anthony Appiah, and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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37. Ibid., 112–13. 38. For example, Blum, in his “I’m Not a Racist, but . . . ,” makes a distinction between three sorts of “color blindness,” and they are race neutrality, race egalitarianism, and racial harmony (91). The first I would characterize as naïve and does not involve any degree of color consciousness (that is, in the public sphere), while the latter two require degrees of color consciousness. Likewise, the goal of the second is likely to be the elimination of race, and that also is the goal of the variant of “racial harmony” that is concerned with amalgamation and integration. That variant, of course, projects its goals on the browning of America. 39. Liberal governments cannot compel their citizens to be color blind in their homes and clubs, yet it can encourage this possibility in the same manner it seeks to inculcate other liberal values (e.g., racial and gender equality) within the population. See my discussion of interracial intimacy in chapter 4 in this book. 40. Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996). 41. For a discussion of “yellow peril,” see Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Frank H. Wu’s Yellow (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For discussions of contemporary extensions of yellow peril, see Leti Volpp’s “ ‘Obnoxious to Their Very Nature’: Asian Americans and Constitutional Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 5: 1 (2004): 57–71. 42. Those who approvingly employ the idea of the browning of America, such as Richard Rodriguez, do not admit the nuances in the way they leave groups in and out of the amorphous “brown” category. To admit of the internal differences in the idea would undermine its use as an unproblematically inclusive, welcoming, and affirming category. See Rodriguez’s Brown (New York: Viking, 2002). That criticism aside, Latinos have long represented the core group within the lager brown mass. The “brown” that “browning” refers to has its origins in the Chicano nationalist phrase “brown power.” See Robert Lindsey, “ ‘I Have Nothing against a Community Trying to Maintain Ethnic Purity’: ‘Brown’ Power Arrives,” New York Times, December 30, 1979, DX6. 43. Jorge Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 44. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). See also Linda Martín Alcoff’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 45. Otto Santa Ana, “Proposition 187: Misrepresenting Immigrants and Immigration,” in his Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse, 65–103 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Santa Ana’s study presents many other such examples and analyzes them in relationship to American nationalist fears of the loss of national identity. Especially interesting, from the point of view of political theory, is his discussion of “brown” immigration as an attack against the “body politic,” “house” of the nation, and as overwhelming and sinking the “ship” of the nation.

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46. For a legal history of this fear, see Leti Volpp’s “ ‘Obnoxious to Their Very Nature’: Asian Americans and Constitutional Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 5: 1 (2004): 57–71; for a general history of yellow peril, see Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams. 47. G. W. F. Hegel, “Anthropology,” in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, 41 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000). 48. See supra note 45, 77. The threat in this instance is cultural, because as long as Mexican and Latin American immigrants could be used, managed, and then repatriated, this “brown tide” was judged as benign. 49. Pete Wilson, “The Minority-Majority Society,” in The Affirmative Action Debate, ed. George Curry, 167–74 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. Notice that Governor Wilson adopted the typically absolutist rhetoric on “discrimination.” In his view, any use of racial discrimination (e.g., in the national census) would be “discrimination.” If pressed, I think he would admit that all uses of racial categories were not all equally morally bad; rather, his main point is that in ethnically and racially diverse California the “fundamental American principle of equality” is best pursued through color-blind public policy. 53. The view of “brown” as monolithic has the further result of contributing to what historian David Hollinger called the “one-hate rule.” That rule captures the assumption that all nonwhite groups have identical experiences of racism and suffer identical harms. See Hollinger’s “One-Drop Rule and One-Hate Rule,” in Daedalus 134: 1 (Winter 2005): 18–28. The one-hate rule is discussed in further detail in chapter 3. Likewise, both the problems of “masking” racism and engendering a racism based on gradations of skin color are discussed in further detail in chapter 5. 54. Kevin R. Johnson, “The End of ‘Civil Rights’ as We Know It?: Immigration and Civil Rights in the New Millennium,” UCLA Law Review 49 (June 2002): 1481–1511. 55. See supra note 46. 56. Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 57. Frank H. Wu, Yellow (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 58. The reparations movement also is affected by the browning of America. In the face of rapid demographic change, the relevancy of reparations claims in the mind of the public may be undermined. See the discussion of this issue in the following chapter on the black-white binary. 59. Peter Morrison and Ira S. Lowry, “A Riot of Color: The Demographic Setting,” in The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future, ed. Mark Baldassare, 19–46 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). For more on King/Drew Medical Center, see the Los Angeles Times 2004 series “The Troubles at King/Drew” by Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein, Mitchell Landsberg, and Steve Hymon at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-kingdrewpulitzersg,0,1507651.storygallery (accessed December 5, 2004).

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60. Regina Freer, “Black-Korean Conflict,” in The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future, ed. Mark Baldassare, 175–204 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). See also In-Jin Yoon, On My Own: Korean Businesses and Race Relations in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jennifer Lee, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Kwang Chung Kim, ed. Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Patrick D. Joyce, No Fire Next Time: Black-Korean Conflicts and the Future of America’s Cities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 61. Nicolás C. Vaca, The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 62. Abigai Goldman, “Young to Quit Wal-Mart Group after Racial Remarks,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2006. 63. Michael Barbaro, “Wal-Mart Tries to Enlist Image Help,” New York Times, May 12, 2006. Also see the Web site for the advocacy group, http:// www.forwalmart.com/. 64. David Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). 65. John Doe v. Kamehameha Schools/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estate, 416 Fd 1025 (9th Cir. 2005). 66. For such a position, see Vaca’s The Presumed Alliance. Contrast his claim that Latinos are not responsible for addressing the political concerns of African Americans with Wu’s Yellow. 67. I owe this point entirely to Melissa Nobles. James Baldwin, of course, called this evasion a pretension of innocence. The pretension of innocence, in terms of fresh starts and new beginnings, complements the other values (freedom, hard work, and opportunity) that are wrapped up in narratives of the pursuit of the American dream. 68. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 12. I return to this quote and this issue in chapter 3.

Chapter 3 1. Many books and articles complain of the black-white binary. For a good cross-section of the arguments, see Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams; Wu’s Yellow; Shirley Hune’s “Rethinking Race: Paradigms and Policy Formation,” Amerasia Journal 21: 1 and 2 (1995): 29–40; Juan Perea’s “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” in The Latino/a Condition, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 359–68 (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Linda Martín Alcoff’s, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary,” Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 5–27; Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). As an example of the presence of this complaint in the popular press, see Richard Rodriguez’s Brown (New York: Viking, 2002).

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2. Ronald Sundstrom, “Race as a Human Kind,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28: 1 (2002): 93–117. 3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 4. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, July 5, 1852,” in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2, ed. Philip S. Foner, 192, emphasis added. The psalm Douglass refers to reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (King James Edition). 5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” October 1900, in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker, vol. 1, 1891–1909, 73–79 (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1982). 6. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1990). 7. Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11 (New York: Miramax Films, 2004). For the statistics on military personnel in Iraq at the time of this writing, see John S. Friedman’s “The Iraq Index,” The Nation (December 19, 2005): 23–25. 8. Robert Lindsey, “ ‘Brown’ Power Arrives,” New York Times, December 30, 1979, p. DX6. 9. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), ix, emphasis added. 10. Their vision of the singularity of the black-white relationship relies on the claim that blacks and whites have between them the “greatest social distance, the most spatial separation,” and the “strongest taboos” against interracially intimate relationships. Their claims about social and spatial separation, we can assume, are based on research of urban racial segregation. Although their claim is right about urban life, it is too sweeping, for most segregation studies have not considered the segregation indices of Native Americans on reservations. See my “Racial Politics in Residential Segregation Studies,” Philosophy and Geography 7: 1 (2004): 61–78. The black-white binary constantly undervalues the role of Native Americans in American racialism. 11. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the BlackWhite Binary,” Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 9. For a discussion of race as legal status, and especially the political and legal significance that whiteness has had in the United States, see Ian López’s White By Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 12. Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (New York: Doubleday, 1957). 13. James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” in his The Fire Next Time, 13–106 (New York: Vintage, [1963], 1993), emphasis in original. 14. Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. 3rd ed. (New York: Scribner, 2003), 22.

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15. Mary Frances Berry, “Pie in the Sky? Clinton’s Race Initiative Offers Promise and the Potential for Peril,” Emerge (September 1997): 68. Cited in Wu’s Yellow and Alcoff’s “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary.” 16. Thomas McCarthy, “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery,” Political Theory 32: 6 (December 2004): 636, emphasis added. Robert Gooding-Williams brought it to my attention that there is a tension between McCarthy’s use of the template metaphor, which implies copying, and his use of the verb “shape,” which accords with the first, and least problematic, form of the binary. 17. Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, “Deceased Victims Released 2-23-2006,” February 23, 2006. 18. For a scholarly review of this legacy, see Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, eds., America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vols. 1 and 2. (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001). 19. “Newsweek Poll: Fifty-Seven Percent of Americans Have Lost Confidence in Government to Deal with Another Natural Disaster; 52% Do Not Trust President to Make Right Decisions in a Crisis,” Newsweek (September 11, 2005). Spike Lee’s recent documentary about New Orleans, When the Levees Break (HBO Films, 2006), repeats this mistake. For a wider perspective about the effects of the disaster, see Brenda Muñiz’s “In the Eye of the Storm: How the Government and Private Response to Hurricane Katrina Failed Latinos” (National Council of La Raza, 2006). See also Keith Plockek’s “Shortchanged: Houston-Based Immigrants Who Flock to New Orleans Can Get All the Jobs They Want,” Houston Press 18: 6 (February 9, 2006). Plockek writes, “For the most part, the story of Hurricane Katrina has been told in black and white. The Lower Ninth Ward was devastated, we learned, and the Garden District untouched. White survivors ‘found’ food, while blacks ‘looted’ it. And ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people.’ But Katrina was about more than black and white; it was also about brown. Last month two Rice University sociologists, Katharine Donato and Shirin Hakimzadeh, released ‘The Changing Face of the Gulf Coast,’ a report charting how Latino immigrants have been settling in large numbers along the Gult Coast for the last 15 years. Before Katrina, the New Orleans area was home to some 140,000 Hundurans—making it the largest Honduran community in the United States—and to thousands of immigrants from other countries in Latin America. The evacuation of these immigrants went largely unreported; many of them were undocumented and hesitant to hop on a bus to Houston. But they did come, traveling along an underground railroad of sorts, shacking up with relatives and countrymen whenever they could.” 20. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown, 2005); Joe R. Feagin and Karyn D. McKinney, The Many Costs of Racism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

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21. A charitable interpretation of this idea is that dealing with blackwhite conflict is a precondition for justice in the United States. See Thomas McCarthy’s “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery,” Political Theory 32: 6 (December 2004): 750–72. I agree, but the obvious importance of dealing with black-white conflict does not give it lexical or political priority over other racial conflicts. 22. See supra note 15. 23. Rockquemore and Brunsma, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America; Hacker, Two Nations: Black & White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal; Thomas McCarthy, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA: On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery,” Political Theory 30: 5 (October 2002): 623–48. 24. See supra note 15. 25. Ibid. 26. See M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Sally Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction,” Philosophical Topics 23: 2 (1995): 95–125; Ronald Sundstrom, “Race as a Human Kind,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28: 1 (2002): 93–117; see also Linda Martín Alcoff, “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 267–83 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), and Visible Identities. 27. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asian in American History and Culture. 28. Plessy v. Feguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). For a discussion of Asians in America, see Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston, MA: Back Bay Press, 1998). For a discussion of Harlan’s double standards regarding color blindness, see Gabriel Chin’s “The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases,” Iowa Law Review 82 (1996): 151–82, and chapter 4 of Wu’s Yellow. For an account of the history of Asian American citizenship, see Leti Volpp’s “ ‘Obnoxious to Their Very Nature’: Asian Americans and Constitutional Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 5: 1 (2004): 57–71. 29. See also the discussion of different forms of racism in David Theo Goldberg’s Racist Culture (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993) and the discussion of the scalarity of the harms of racism in Blum’s “I’m Not a Racist, but . . .”. 30. See the discussions of the model-minority phenomenon in Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams, Wu’s Yellow, and David Hollinger’s “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review 108: 5 (December 2003): 1363–90. The “model minority” phenomenon attributed to Asian Americans is a consequence of the language of traditional integration mixed with assumptions of American identity. African Americans are unfavorably compared to Asian Americans, who are considered model minorities for their success within economic life. The implication is that there are no barriers to integration, and the fault of the lack of African American integration is due to an intragroup deficiency. The other side of the coin is, of course, the stereotype of the “yellow peril.” With this stereotype Asian Americans are unfavorably compared to African Americans, who are considered to possess “American-ness,” something that Asian Americans cannot possess because of their Asian racial origins.

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31. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent,” 1363–90, and “OneDrop Rule and One-Hate Rule,” Daedalus 134: 1 (Winter 2005): 18–28. 32. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the BlackWhite Binary,” Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 16–19. Alcoff’s essay offers a sevenpart critique of the black-white binary. Her arguments influenced and parallel my own. 33. Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique (Winter 1991–1992): 5–32. 34. Juan Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” 359–68); Richard Delgado, “The Black/White Binary: How Does It Work?” 369–465, both in The Latino/a Condition, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 35. Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” 366. 36. The binary may have helped Americans see the abuse of Afghanis, Iraqis, and other Arabs and Muslims as a form of racism. In particular, the photographs of smiling faces of white American soldiers engaging in sadistic and sexual torture of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib brought back unwelcome memories of the lynching of blacks. While the binary helped us “see” the racism, this was a result of the American public’s identification with the bodies of the white soldiers, and their troubling smiles, rather than with the tortured bodies of the Iraqis. The soldiers were our co-nationals. The Iraqis, while human, in the United States would be regarded as aliens. 37. Volpp, “ ‘Obnoxious to Their Very Nature,’ 57–71, and “The Citizen and Terrorist,” 1575–92. 38. Ibid. 39. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005). 40. Ibid., 12. 41. Ibid., 13–14. 42. See supra note 32. 43. For a discussion of the key differences and similarities between Native Americans and African Americans in relationship to their status as citizens, and the political recognition of their groups, see David Wilkins’s American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). For a strong position on the difference between the two movements see Vine Deloria’s “The Red and the Black” in his Custer Died for Your Sins, 168–96 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969). For a discussion of the fundamental difference between group rights claimed by national minorities (such as indigenous groups) and polyethnic groups (ethnic, racial, or immigrant groups), see Will Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 44. Linda Hoang, “Asian American Community Calls on Government and Relief Agencies for More Effective Actions for Katrina Evacuees,” press release from the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies, October 3, 2005. A Spanish news agency, Agencia EFE, through the COMTEX news service, brought to the English-language press the story of the plight of

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Latinos and specifically Hondurans in New Orleans. It released six reports following Hurricance Katrina that spanned from September 2 to November 15. For example, see “Hunduran Victims of Katrina Getting Aid from Home,” EFE World News Service (September 2, 2005). 45. Peter Pae, “Immigrants Rush to New Orleans as Contractors Fight for Workers as Many Evacuees Stay Away, Latin American Workers Move In, Lured by Soaring Pay. They Could Change the Face of the City,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2005. 46. For developed theoretical and legal criticisms of the binary, see Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” 359–68, and Martín Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary,” 5–27. 47. Thomas F. Gossett, Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1963] 1997). 48. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1993). That the binary names salient features of race in America is indubitable, yet although it has assumed, or been given, the role of baseline, in part by American historians and the public, does not mean it deserves this position. In other words, the binary does not name an empirical truth about racial patterns in the United States. 49. Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African American Politics (New York: Verso, 1996); Cornel West, “The Paradox of the African American Rebellion,” in his Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, 271–91 (New York: Routledge, 1993); Robert Gooding-Williams, “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” in his Look, a Negro!, 87–108 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 50. According to the Pew Hispanic Center’s report, America’s Immigration Quandary (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, March 30, 2006), 53 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks agree with the statement, “Immigrants are a burden on the country,” and 47 percent of whites and 51 percent of blacks agree with the statement, “Immigrants threaten traditional values.” For more on the black-brown conflict, see Jeff Diamond’s “African-American Attitudes towards United States Immigration Policy,” The International Migration Review 32: 2 (Summer 1998): 451–71; Vaca’s The Presumed Alliance; John Pomfret’s “Jail Riots Illustrate Racial Divide in California: Rising Latino Presence Seen as Sparking Rivalry with Blacks That Sometimes Turns Violent,” Washington Post, February 21, 2006, A01; Jack Kemp’s “A Nation of Immigrants and of Laws,” The New York Sun, April 4, 2006, 11. 51. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, eds., America Becoming, vols. 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001). Poor and urban African Americans suffer the majority of the worst effects of political, social, and economic disparities in the United States—a fact that was vividly on display in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. 52. Vaca, The Presumed Alliance. See especially his “axioms” for altering the dialogue between Latinos and blacks in the “Visions of the Future”

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chapter: (1) Latinos Are the Largest Minority in the United States and African Americans Will Never Regain This Position; (2) Latinos Have a History of Oppression; (3) Latinos Are Not Responsible for the Plight of African Americans; (4) Because Latinos Are Not Responsible for the Plight of African Americans, They Come to the Table with a Clear Conscience; (5) Latinos Will Seek Different Benefits Than Blacks; (6) Latino Immigration Is a Fact of Life; (7) Immigrants Will Compete for Unskilled Jobs with African Americans (185–93). 53. Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (Boston, MA: Martinus Nijoff, 1987), 43–50. For discussions and applications of Arendt’s conception of collective responsibility as political responsibility, see McCarthy’s “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II, 750–72; Iris Marion Young’s “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 12: 4 (2004): 365–88; Brian A. Weiner’s The Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005). 54. For an analysis of the Latino vote in the 2004 presidential election, see David L. Leal, Matt A. Barreto, Jongho Lee, and Rodolfo O. del la Garza, “The Latino Vote in the 2004 Election,” Political Science & Politics 38: 1 (January 2005): 41–49. 55. In particular, see Neela Banerjee, “Black Churches Struggle over Their Role in Politics,” New York Times, March 6, 2005, 23. 56. Angela Dillard, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (New York: New York University, 2001). See also supra note 55 for a discussion of the employment of African American religious figures as “moral gauges” in Republican strategies to derail the movement for same-sex civil unions and marriages. The black conservative Christian gambit will not pay off. They will help defeat same-sex marriages, but racebased public policies will remained doomed, and even the turmoil between those same conservative Christian African American groups and the Bush administration after Hurricane Katrina will not push the administration or the RNC to backpedal on decades of anti-race-based policy commitments. Additionally, and ironically, the identification of African Americans as being in the core of Bush’s “United We Stand” America only serves to exacerbate the process of replacement. 57. Erin Texeira, “Blacks Concerned That Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants Hurts Workers,” Associated Press State & Local Wire, April 6, 2006. See also Leslie Fulbright’s “Polls, Leaders Say Many Blacks Support Illegal Immigrants, San Francisco Chronicle, April 13, 2006. 58. Rev. Hurmon Hamilton and Rev. Ray Hammond, “It’s Our Fight, Too,” Boston Globe, April 13, 2006, A11. The Rev. Hamilton, on behalf of the Black Ministerial Alliance and the Ten Point Coalition, delivered the full text of this editorial letter on April 10, 2006, at Boston’s immigration rally. 59. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann, 25–73. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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60. Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996). 61. Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multiculturalism Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism, 149–63. 62. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 63. For examples of the expression of this urgency, see Thomas McCarthy’s “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II, 750–72; Kim M. Williams’s “Multiracialism and the Future of Civil Rights Future,” Daedalus 134: 1 (Winter 2005): 53–60; Kenneth Prewitt’s “Racial Classification in America,” Daedalus 134: 1 (Winter 2005): 5–17; David Hollinger’s “One-Drop Rule and One-Hate Rule,” Daedalus 134: 1 (Winter 2005): 18–28. 64. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002). 65. Robert Gooding-Williams, “Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy,” in his Look, a Negro! (New York: Routledge, 2006); Howard McGary, “Achieving Democratic Equality: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Reparations,” The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 93–113; Thomas McCarthy, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA: On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery,” Political Theory 30: 5 (October 2002): 623–48, and “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II, 750–72. 66. John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 67. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Michael Walzer, Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 90–109. 68. Howard McGary, “Alienation and the African American Experience,” Race and Social Justice (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999): 7–26. 69. Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary,” 5–27; Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent,” 1363–90; Frank Wu, Yellow. 70. See supra note 52: 193, emphasis added. 71. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy (March–April 2004): 30–45; and Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

Chapter 4 1. James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison, 814–29 (New York, The Library of America, 1998). The essay first appeared in Playboy in January 1985 and was collected in Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Marek, 1985) as “Here Be Dragons,” 677–90.

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2. To see the continuation of classic rejections of interracial belonging, whether political or familial, see Carol Swain’s and R. Nieli’s edited volume Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Maria P. P. Root gives a typical defense of the promise of interracial familial belonging in her Love’s Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001). 3. Charles W. Mills, “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?,” Journal of Social Philosophy 25 (1994): 131–53; Anita L. Allen, “Interracial Marriage: Folk Ethics in Contemporary Philosophy,” in Women of Color and Philosophy, ed. Naomi Zack, 182–205 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Allen and Mills argued that moral and political philosophers avoided moral questions around interracial marriage because they took such questions as settled by Loving v. Virginia and ignored the ethical concerns of people of color. The work of Angela Davis and David Theo Goldberg is an exception to this general evasion. Davis’s Woman, Race, & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983) is a classic text arguing for the interconnections between social identities and specificities of African American women’s experience. Goldberg’s analysis of racism investigates the political meaning of racism, but it is not precisely concerned with identifying its semantic essence. See his Racist Culture (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993) and Racial State (Cambridgem MA: Blackwell, 2001). 4. François Bernier, “Nouvelle division de la terre,” Journal des Sçavans (April 24, 1684): 148–55. Bernier’s essay, “A New Division of the Earth,” also is in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, 1–4 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000). 5. There is an unceasing and obvious obsession with sex (later to be neutrally termed “reproduction”) in the founding documents in the history of race. For a collection of those documents, see Bernasconi’s and Lott’s The Idea of Race. Likewise, see Anthony Marx’s Making Race and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) for a discussion of the prohibition, use, and management of miscegenation by racial states, such as the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. 6. For discussions of sex in the history of race and its role in the formation of the racial state, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Thomas F. Gossett, Race (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1997), George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1982); David A. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review 108: 5 (December 2003): 1363–90. For recent texts that draw a line between race making and state formation, see Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation, and Pamela D. Bridgewater, Breeding a Nation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2006). For a specific discussion of interracial sexuality in history and law, see Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Werner Sollors, Interracialism (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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7. Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, [1965] 1988); Charles Herbert Stember, Sexual Racism (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies; Werner Sollors, Interracialism. Of singular importance on this topic is Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Row, [1944] 1962). Myrdal detailed how sexual anxieties and fear of amalgamation were at the center of American anti-black racism. 8. For example, echoes of this fear appear in the writings of Samuel P. Huntington. See his “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy (March–April 2004): 30–45, and Who Are We (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 9. See supra note 7. 10. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” MIT Department of Economics Working Paper No. 0322 (May 27, 2003). 11. This is the view supported by Calvin Hernton in his Sex and Racism in America. He wrote, “The racism of sex in the United States is but another aspect of the unequal political and economic relations that exist between the races in the American democracy” (176). 12. See, for example, the narratives in Jason Deparle’s American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare (New York: Viking Books, 2004). 13. The literature on overlapping oppressions is useful on this point. See Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in her The Politics of Reality, 1–16 (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Sally Haslanger, “Oppressions: Racial and Other,” in Racism in Mind, ed. Michael P. Levine and Tamas Pataki, 97–123 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 14. See supra note 6. See also Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 15. See Marx, Making Race and Nation; David Theo Goldberg, Racial State (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001); Bridgewater, Breeding a Nation. 16. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in Slave Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 743–948 (New York: Library of America, 2000); Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South, in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, ed. Charles Lemertand Esme Bhan, 45–196 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horror, in her On Lynchings, 25–54 (Amherst, MA: Humanity Book, 2002), and Red Record, in her On Lynchings, 55–151. 17. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My Back (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1984); Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire (New York: The New Press, 1995). See especially the works of bell hooks, for example, her Ain’t I a Woman (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981); also see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251–74.

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18. Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg, 3–17 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); “Racism and Rationality: The Need for a New Critique,” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris, 369–97 (Amherst, MA: Humanity Books, 1999); Jorge L. A. Garcia, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (1996): 5–45. 19. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, [1981] 1983); Naomi Zack, “The American Sexualization of Race,” in Race/Sex, ed. Naomi Zack, 145–55 (New York: Routledge, 1997); Goldberg, Racial State. 20. Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist, but . . .” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 21. Ibid., 8. 22. In particular, Blum’s account assuages white racial anxieties. This occurs because Blum’s account separates racism from participation in white identity. Insofar as white racial anxiety is assuaged, the conceptions of racism held by nonwhite Americans, in particular the identification of whiteness with racism, are cast into doubt: the effect is to hold back the expression of nonwhite experiences of racism, as well as their angry reactions. However, such a holding back may be destructive to the deliberative space that his accounts otherwise encourage. “Holding back” is tiresome and is a common complaint among people of color: whites do not want to deal with nonwhite (though usually black) rage. See Audre Lorde’s essays “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” and “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” in her Sister Outsider, 145–75 (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984) for discussions of the problems that result from evading anger. 23. See supra note 20, 177. 24. I borrow the phrase “sexual racism” from the title of Charles H. Stembert’s Sexual Racism. Other names may be more appropriate since they associate the phenomenon with obsessions rather than with racism per se: racial-sexual objectification, obsession, exoticism, or fetishism. 25. See supra note 1. Baldwin’s privileging of male sexuality is instructive, but there is no reason to not extend a critique of racial-gender-sexual pathology to American expressions of femininity. Indeed, it would be bizarre not to. See Vron Ware’s Beyond the Pale (New York: Verso, 1992). 26. There has been an extensive discussion of this sexual racism and Asian American identity in Asian American studies. For example, see the discussions of sexuality in Gary Y. Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994). The Asian American case provides an incisive example, because the “model minority” stereotype blends with sexual racism in a manner that evades either inferiorization or antipathy. Indeed, the overlap between sexual racism and Blum’s two themes may depend on the group in question (e.g., sexual racism against blacks may always or nearly always be related to inferiorization or antipathy). 27. The aforementioned case is about desirability, but sexual racism also can express itself in beliefs about undesirability: X refuses the possibility of romantic or sexual relations with Y because Y belongs to race R, and X holds that members of R possess race-specific sexual qualities. This case is very close to the theme of antipathy and may be an important instance of overlap.

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Another important but disturbing possibility is where X and Y belong to the same race. X can be accused of participating in sexual racism when she or he refuses or accepts relations with Y solely because Y belongs to race R. 28. The much-commented-on 1915 film Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, is an iconic example of the role of race, gender, and sex in early-twentieth-century conceptions of American nationalism. 29. See supra note 3. 30. See supra note 3. 31. See, for example, the forward-looking vision of racial justice contained in the majority decision of Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). 32. In addition to Blum’s “I’m Not a Racist, but . . .” and Corlett’s Race, Racism, and Reparations, see any number of major contributions on the topic of race and social justice, e.g., Bernard Boxill’s Blacks and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985) and Howard McGary’s Race and Social Justice (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999). This especially holds within major liberal theories that quickly glance at issues of racial justice. 33. For an application of the multiculturalist debate to race, see Lucius T. Outlaw’s On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996) and Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 34. Immanuel Wallerstien, “Household Structures and Labour-Force Formation in the Capitalist World-Economy,” in Race, Nation, Class, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 107–12 (London: Verso, 1991). For a discussion of the legal privileges that collect around white family identity, see Ian F. López’s White By Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 35. See the discussion of white family identity in Zack’s Race and Mixed Race. 36. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1998); Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption. 37. Patterson, Rituals of Blood. 38. Ibid., 163. 39. Ibid., 166. 40. Kennedy, Interracial; Root, Love’s Revolution; Sollors, Interracialism; Patterson, Rituals of Blood; and Zack, Race and Mixed Race. 41. Michael Lind indulges in this project in his The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1995). As practical as it may be to celebrate new, more inclusive civic gods and goddesses, it does not immunize the state from nationalist or even new forms of racist excesses. It is largely a feel-good strategy that gives no comfort to those who do not belong to this nation, or those we desire to exclude. 42. Anthony Appiah’s criticisms of the uses and abuses of “culture,” and his criticisms of external diversity in his The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) are relevant here.

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43. Henry Yu, “Tiger Woods Is Not the End of History: or, Why Sex across the Color Line Won’t Save Us All,” American Historical Review 108: 5 (December 2003): 1406–14.

Chapter 5 1. I appreciate the semantic edge of “mixed race” and “mixed blood” for their confrontational qualities, however, I chose to use “multiracial” rather than “mixed race,” because the former distances itself from the erroneous idea that there are pure, or any, races to mix. Further, there is a growing consensus among multiracial organizations to favor the prefix “multi” because of the negative psychological connotations associated with “mixed,” as in “mixed up,” which parallels the stereotype of the tragic mulatto. “Multiracial” does not entirely escape the problems with “mixed race”; nonetheless, it is a useful shorthand for picking out individuals and groups who publicly represent their identity as multiethnic or multiracial. All persons of modern nations are likely to have multiethnic or multiracial ancestry, but what makes “mulitracials” special in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is their flouting of monoracial identity (sanctioned and imposed by the state and public opinion), as well as their public representations of themselves as multiracial persons. See my “Being and Being Mixed Race,” Social Theory and Practice 27 (2001): 285–307. 2. Maria P. P. Root, ed., The Multiracial Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996). 3. Tanya Kateri Hernandez, “ ‘Multiracial’ Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence,” University of Maryland Law Review 57 (1998): 97–173; Christine B. Hickman, “The Devil and the One-Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S. Census,” University of Michigan Law Review 95 (March 1997): 1161–1265; Lisa K. Pomeroy, “Restructuring Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Controversy over Race Categorization and the 2000 Census,” University of Toledo Law Review 32 (Fall 2000): 67–87. 4. Sundstrom, “Being and Being Mixed Race,” 285–307. In “Being and Being Mixed Race,” I argued that what I then called mixed-race identity was real, and that it was best conceptualized through the experience of multiracial persons, a phenomenology of multiracial experience. Just as it is a real experience, it is likewise one that is not necessarily a racist identity. Nonetheless, multiracialism may be expressed in a personally racist way, and it may be useful to racist social systems or institutions. I proposed, as a response to this challenge, that multiracial individuals have a particular obligation to systematically resist racism and reject white privilege. Unfortunately, my proposal did not place particular moral obligations on mixed-race individuals and the movement. Here I argue for specific obligations based on the ethics of memory. 5. Lewis R. Gordon, “Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—In Theory,” in his Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age, 51–71 (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefiled, 1997); Rainer Spencer, “Assessing

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Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics,” Ethnicities 4: 3 (2004): 357–79; Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Gordon’s objections to mixedrace identity, in particular, are sharp. 6. When the “check all that apply” option was approved from the 2000 census, NAACP officials went on a tour of African American churches to discourage African Americans from checking more than the “black” box. For the NAACP, resisting the inclusion of a multiracial category, or the spread of multiracial identity, is a civil rights issue, and its call on the institution of the black church highlights its position. This strategy, though, is morally questionable, as it encourages the equation of multiracial identity with racist betrayal and social injustice, if not sin! Surely that strategy increased the alienation of self-identifying multiracialsim individuals and families in those congregations. That tour was hardly a movement of agape. See Frank Wu’s discussion of multiracialism and the NAACP reaction in his Yellow. 7. Naomi Mezey, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race, and the National Imagination,” Northwestern University Law Review 97 (Summer 2003): 1701–68; Lisa Tessman, “The Racial Politics of Mixed Race,” The Journal of Social Philosophy 30: 2 (Summer 1999): 276–94. 8. See supra note 2. 9. See chapter 4 for further discussion of interracial sexuality. 10. Karren Baird-Olson, “Colonization, Cultural Imperialism, and the Social Construction of American Indian Mixed-Blood Identity,” in New Faces in a Changing America, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, 194–221 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003). 11. For a discussion of the historical recognition of multiracial genealogy and experience, see Werner Sollors, Interracialism (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2000). 12. See supra notes 3 and 5. 13. James F. Davis, Who Is Black? (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 14. See supra note 3. 15. Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies (New York: Pantheon, 2003). 16. The effects of counting multiracials in the national census, the recognition of multiracialism, and the failure of traditional civil rights policies to deal with the browning in America are discussed in more detail in the following sections. 17. Sundstrom, “Being and Being Mixed Race,” 285–307; Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, Beyond Black (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002). 18. Sollors, Interracialism. 19. See supra note 4. 20. See Randall Kennedy’s discussion of the Jefferson-Hemmings affair in his Interracial Intimacies. 21. For such a careful review, see Williams’s “Multiracialism and the Future of Civil Rights Future,” 53–60.

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22. For example, see Lisa Jones’s Bulletproof Diva (New York: Doubleday, 1994). 23. Paul Spickard, “Does Multiraciality Lighten?: Me-Too Ethnicity and the Whiteness Trap,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, 289–300 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003). 24. Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology, of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, House of Representatives, “Hearings on Federal Measures of Race and Ethnicity and the Implications for the 2000 Census,” Serial No. 105–57 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998). See also Michael Lind’s Next American Nation (New York: Free Press, 1996). 25. Ibid., 661. 26. Graham has been accused of pursuing a multiracial agenda, because as a white mother she is primarily interested in passing down white privilege to her mixed-race black-white children. Graham has expressed support for Gingrich as well as for some, but not all, of Ward Connerly’s projects (she supported Proposition 54). She is in favor of anti-racist social policy but refuses to support or reject affirmative action. For her positions on Gingrich and Connerly, or for that matter, Democrats and Republicans, see her letters posted on Project Race’s Web site, http://www.projectrace.com. For typical exaggerated criticisms of Graham, see Spencer’s “Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics.” 27. See supra note 24, 662. 28. Ward Connerly, Creating Equal: My Fight against Race Preferences (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000) and “A Homecoming, with Too Much Color,” Interracial Voice, http://www.webcom.com/~intvoice/connerly.html (accessed December 1, 2005); and George F. Will, “Melding in America,” Washington Post, October 5, 1997), p. 7. 29. University of California Regents, Committee on Educational Policy, Office of the Secretary, “ ‘Multiracial’ Designation on the Undergraduate Admissions Application,” RE-52, November 17, 2004. 30. See the Web site for the RPI, http://www.racialprivacy.org, for Connerly’s statement to the UC Board of Regents. See as well the Web site for the American Civil Rights Institute, http://www.acri.org/, for more of Connerly’s statements linking multiracialism and color blindness. See also supra note 21. 31. See supra note 28. 32. Tanya Kateri Hernandez, “ ‘Multiracial’ Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence,” University of Maryland Law Review 57 (1998): 97–173. 33. Blum, “I’m Not a Racist, but . . .”. 34. J. Angelo Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 35. Tanya Kateri Hernandez, “ ‘Multiracial’ Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-blind Jurisprudence.” University of Maryland Law Review

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57 (1998): 97–173; Rainer Spencer, “Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics,” Ethnicities 4: 3 (2004): 357–79. 36. Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). See my discussion of the “mulatto escape hatch” in “Being and Being Mixed Race.” 37. David Theo Goldberg, “Made in the USA,” in American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack, 237–56 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), and Racial State (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 38. See supra note 23. 39. See supra 24, 582–83. See also Lisa K. Pomeroy, “Restructuring Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Controversy over Race Categorization and the 2000 Census,” University of Toledo Law Review 32 (Fall 2000): 67–87. 40. See supra 24, 6–12. 41. Still the public recognition of multiracialism could reinforce popular conceptions of the value of blackness in relation to whiteness, and so on. In other words, it could lend support to racial hierarchy. This potential is very much there and has been exploited by individuals and organizations, such as advertising agencies. See Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, Beyond Black (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002); Caroline A. Streeter, “The Hazards of Visibility: Biracial Women, Media Images, and Narratives of Identity,” in New Faces in a Changing America, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, 301–22 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003). 42. G. Reginald Daniel, More Than Black? (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002). 43. University of California Regents, Committee on Educational Policy, Office of the Secretary, “ ‘Multiracial’ Designation on the Undergraduate Admissions Application,” RE-52, November 17, 2004; Tanya Shevitz, “Connerly Wants Multi-Race Box on University Admission Applications,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 15, 2004, p. B2, and “Multiracial Checkbox in Doubt,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 2004, p. B3. 44. American MultiEthnic Association, Hapa Issues Forum, and Mavin Foundation, “Open Letter Requesting Support for Petition against Ward Connerly’s ‘Multiracial/Multiethnic’ category proposal,” October 26, 2004. 45. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princteon University Press, 2004), and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 46. Patrick F. Linehan, “Thinking Outside of the Box: The Multiracial Category and Its Implications for Race Identity Development,” Howard Law Journal 44 (Fall 2000): 43–72; Naomi Mezey, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination,” Northwestern University Law Review 97 (Summer 2003): 1701–68; Lisa Tessman, “The Racial Politics of Mixed Race,” The Journal of Social Philosophy 30: 2 (Summer 1999): 276–94. Multiracialism fundamentally challenges the census, as well as forward-looking conceptions of racial justice. It forces us to think about the various racial and ethnic pressures on the American population, but it need not entail the end

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of all race counting. As was discussed in chapter 3, the challenge of multiracialism is consistent with attempts to radically rethink the census’s race and ethnic categories. See, for example, Kenneth Prewitt’s “Racial Classification in America,” Daedalus 134: 1 (Winter 2005): 5–17. I support Prewitt’s recommendation that race and ethnic categories be combined, and that respondents continue to be allowed to check more than one box. 47. I discussed the romance of multiracialim in chapter 4. For further discussion of this issue, see my “Being and Being Mixed Race” and Linda Martín Alcoff, “Mestizo Identity,” American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack, 257–78 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). For a recent philosophical, political, and theological romance of multiracialism, see John Francis Burke. Mestizo Democracy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). For a criticism of such multiracial messianism, see Goldberg, Racial State. 48. See supra note 2. 49. Alcoff, “Mestizo Identity,” 257–78. 50. Elizabeth Spelman, Repair (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002). 51. Ibid. 52. See supra note 4, 302. 53. See supra note 2. 54. Gregory Velasco y Trianosky, “Beyond Mestizaje: The Future of Race in America,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, 176–93 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003).

Conclusion 1. Parents Involved in Community Schools, Petitioner v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al.; Crystal D. Meredith, Custodial Parent and Next Friend of Joshua Ryan McDonald, Petitioner v. Jefferson County of Education et al. 908 and 915 US __ (2007). 2. For example, see George Will’s “The Court Returns to Brown,” The Washington Post, July 5, 2007, p. A17. 3. 908 US __ (2007), 145. 4. Ibid., 95. For my critique of the idea that de facto racial separation can be normatively uncoupled from de jure segregation, see “Racial Politics in Residential Segregation Studies,” Philosophy and Geography 7: 1 (2004): 61–78. 5. “Resegregation Now,” New York Times, June 29, 2007. 6. 908 US __ (2007), 156. 7. Ibid., 41–42. 8. Justice Kennedy argued that plurality’s view of color blindness was too strict to meet national interests. In his partial concurrence, he defends facially race neutral policies that attempt to address de facto disparities. See ibid., 157–62. See also Jonathan Kozol’s “Transferring Up,” New York Times, July 11, 2007, op-ed.

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9. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato on Love, ed. C. D. C. Reeve, 182c (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006). Compare to Michael Joyce’s translation: “For I suppose it does not suit the rulers for their subjects to indulge in high thinking, or in staunch friendship and fellowship, which Love more than anything is likely to beget,” in Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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Index

Abu Ghraib, 100 African Americans affirmative action programs and, 59 browning of America and, 51–52 color consciousness and, 41 competition with Asian Americans, 59 familial multiculturalism and, 100–102 Hurricane Katrina and, 72–73, 82 Latino tensions and, 60 opportunities gained by “browning,” 61–62 oppression on, 85–86 in race and ethnicity question, 2 social justice and, 3 xenophobia and, 84–85 African Civilization Society, 22 Agassiz, Louis, 21 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 6, 47, 48, 77 Allen, Anita, 100 AMEA. See American Multi Ethnic Association American Anti-Slavery Society, 24 American Multi Ethnic Association (AMEA), 122 Andzaldua, Gloria, 7 Appiah, Anthony, 28, 48, 50 Ashcroft, John, 79 Asian Americans affirmative action programs and, 59 browning of America and, 51–52

competition with African Americans, 59 familial multiculturalism and, 100–102 opportunities gained by “browning,” 61–62 xenophobia and, 84–85 Baldwin, James, 35, 71, 94, 99 Bell Curve, 45 Benhabib, Seyla, 89 Bernier, Francois, 95, 97 Berry, Mary Frances, 2, 71, 73–74, 75, 81, 82 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 13 Black Sexual Politics (Collins), 80 Black-white binary anti-black racism and, 79–80 black/white paradigm in, 77 citizenship definition and, 78 definition of, 66–67 displacement fear, 84 empirical claim of, 69 exclusions of, 74–75 focus on different racial and ethnic groups, 69–70 historical claim, 73–74 historical claim, objections to, 81–82 Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in race discussions, 72–73 “intermediate” groups, 75 limited defense of, 82–88

185

186

Index

Black-white binary as a master key, 78 native idea and, 84–85 political version for, 70–71 prescriptive claim, objections to, 75–79 race question and, 83–84 racial formation, 75, 76 “racial identity” and, 66–67 replacement fear, 86 sociological assumption, 73–74 sociological claim, objections to, 79–81 “white supremacy” notion of, 71 World Trade Center attacks and, 78 xenophobia and, 84 Blue Dog Democrats of the Old South, 15 Blyden, Edward, 21 Brown, John, 27 Harper’s Ferry raid on, 13 influence of Frederick Douglass, 13–14, 17 “Browning of America” affirmative action programs and, 59 approaches for, 55–56 color blindness support for, 53–54 conflicts with civil rights claims, 58–61 conflict with traditional conceptions of racial patterns, 62–63 as a danger for the hierarchy of skin colors, 57–58 definition of, 53 as a foreboding for failure to remember racial history, 61–62 historical view, 58–59 integrational ideal, 64 mestizo identity and, 58 problems with, 52 Brown v. the Board of Education, 39, 46 Brunsma, David L., 70, 73–74 Bush, George W., 79

Civil Rights Act, 71 Collins, Patricia Hill, 63, 80 Color blindness basic definition for, 38 browning as its form, 53–64 browning as its support, 53–54 “cold turkey” approach in, 43 definition of, 40 John Marshall Harlan’s ideas on, 39–40 liberal color blindness difference and, 50 multiracial privilege and, 116–119 normative insights of, 46–51 objections to, 42–46 political fantasies for, 48 popular interest in, 47 role of, 43 Color consciousness elimination of racial categories, 49 illegitimate use of “race,” 47 objections to, 41–42 practical problems of, 42 “special rights “ in, 42 Connerly, Ward, 15, 28, 118, 119, 122, 123 “The Conservation of the Races” (Du Bois), 68, 118 “The Constitution of the United states: Is It Pro-Slavery or AntiSlavery?” (Douglass), 26 Cooper, Anna Julia, 67–68, 97 Crummell, Alexander, 21, 67 Davis, Angela, 98 Delany, Martin, 21 Delgado, Richard, 77 Deloria, Vine, 81 Douglass, Frederick, 5, 6, 46, 67, 101, 117 abolition activities of, 26 Abraham Lincoln and, 15–16 as an Enlightenment thinker, 18–19 as an icon of a raceless society, 11–12

Index anti-racial social vision of, 12–13 assimilation position on, 21–22, 29–30 biologically distinct races idea and, 21 black reason and, 27 Christianity ideas of, 31–32 father complex and political ideas of, 31–32 “final solution” for assimilation, 22 friendship with Gerrit Smith and, 24–25 Garrisonians, independence of, 25 Harper’s Ferry raid and, 13 human brotherhood and, 22–23 John Brown influence by, 13–14, 17 as leading black activist, 11–12 legacy among social theorists, 28–29 Native American displacement view of, 31 natural law, faith in, 30 political apostasy of, 33 race conservation, 14–15 religious and political ideas of, 12, 31 Republican Party and, 15 slavery issues and, 18–19 speeches of, 16 support for school integration, 17–18 U.S. Christianity, condemnation of, 34 views on African American’s amalgamation, 29–30 views on the Constitution, 24, 26 Dred Scott case, 26 Du Bois, W. E. B., 12, 13, 28, 30, 37, 65–66, 104, 118 Edwards, John, 83 Ellison, Ralph, 28 Fahrenheit 9/11 (movie), 69

187

FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 41 Freud, Sigmund, 32 Frist, Bill, 15 The Future of an Illusion (Freud), 32 Garrison, William Loyd, 24, 27 Gender, 95 as an ideology, 97 language of, 96–97 racism ands sexuality links to, 96–97 Gingrich, Newt, 117, 119 Gliddon, George, 21 Goldberg, David Theo, 53, 98 Gordon, Bruce S., 87 Graham, Susan, 117 Grutter. v. Bollinger, 16, 124 Guantanamo, 100 Gutmann, Amy, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50 Hacker, Adam, 71, 74, 75, 81, 83 Hamilton, Hurmon, 87 Hammond, Ray, 87 Hapa Issues Forum, 122 Harlan, John Marshall, 38, 43 Harlins, Latasha, 60 Hastert, Dennis, 15, 16, 18 Hemmings, Sally, 115 Hollinger, David, 77 Horn, Stephen, 121 Human brotherhood biblical doctrine for, 20 Du Bois’s position on, 30 Frederick Douglass’s ideas for, 22–23 racial assimilation ideas for, 22–23 and slavery, 19–20 Huntington, Samuel P., 2, 91 Hurricane Katrina, 72, 82 “I Have A Dream” (King), 40 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacob), 97

188

Index

Interracial intimacies common expressions and, 99–100 communal loss and, 106 evasion of, 98–99 family and, 100–107 family patriarch and, 102–103 homosexuality and gender links, 94 out-marriage need and, 104 and public matters, 102–103 sexual nature of browning, 93 Invisible Man (Ellison), 28 Jacob, Harriet Ann, 97 Jefferson, Thomas, 8, 115 Jim Crow Oppression, 16, 67, 73, 85, 89 John Brown (Du Bois), 13 John Doe v. Kamehameha Schools, 60 Killen, Edgar Ray, 127 King, Martin Luther Jr., 28, 39, 117 King, Rodney, 59 Kymlicka, Will, 82 Latinos affirmative action programs and, 59 African American tensions and, 60 browning of America and, 51–52 familial multiculturalism and, 100–102 opportunities gained by “browning,” 61–62 xenophobia and, 84–85 The Lesson of the Hour (Douglass), 31, 34 Liberal anti-racism, 50 Liberty Party, 25 The Life of Frederick Douglass (Washington), 14 Lincoln, Abraham, 15–16 Lind, Michael, 1, 7 Loving v. Virginia, 100, 117 Lynch Law, 16

Malcolm X, 28 Mavin Foundation, 122 McCarthy, Thomas, 71, 74 McDougall, Harold, 121 mestizaje, 10, 58, 125–126 Mills, Charles, 48 Moore, Michael, 69 Morrison, Toni, 81, 83 Multiracial Americans browning of America and, 51–52 familial multiculturalism and, 100–102 opportunities gained by “browning,” 61–62 xenophobia and, 84–85 Multiracial politics bad faith accusations and, 115 “bastard” children and, 111 buffer zone, 120–122 conditions for anti-racist principles, 128 criticism of, 111–112 “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach in, 113–114, 130 mestizo notion, 125–126 multiracial identity and, 109–110, 112–113, 114 multiracial recognition, expansion of, 110 personal racism and, 111, 119–120 recognition of, 122–125 repair of, 125–131 social and institutional racism, 120–122 threat of, 122–125 university practices in admission process, 123–124 “white mothers” recognition, 129 Nagin, Ray, 82, 86 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Douglass), 31 Native Americans the browning of America and, 51–52

Index historical claims in black-white binary and, 81 in race and ethnicity question, 2 social justice and, 3 xenophobia and, 84–85 “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass” (Schrader), 25 North Star, 24–25, 46 Nott, Josiah, 21 Okihiro, Gary, 75 Patterson, Orlando, 28, 103 Perea, Juan, 77, 78 Pitts, Helen, 21 Plessy v. Ferguson, 38, 76 “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind” (Du Bois), 68 The Presumed Alliance (Vaca), 85, 89 Project Race, 127 Puerto Ricans, 8 Race African Americans and, 12 as an illegitimate biological category, 47 appeal of, 1–2 Asian Americans and, 12 and browning, 55–56 in color blindness objections, 43 and color consciousness, 44 conservation of, 45 as a dominant principle of American society, 43–44 elimination of racial categories, 49 future of, 65–66 Latinos and, 12 meaning of, 1–2 moral status of, 46 Native American and, 12 ontological status of, 46 political fantasies for, 48 xenophobes and, 1–2 Race and Mixed Race (Zack), 4

189

Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), 118 Racism African American and, 6 amalgamation, 7 “black-sounding” names and, 96–97 in color blindness objections, 43 and color consciousness, 44 gender and sexuality links to, 94, 96–97 Native Americans and, 6 personal racism, 119–120 social and institutional racism, 120–122 Red Record (Wells-Barnett), 97 Republican National Committee (RNC), 86 Republican Party, 15 Rituals of Blood (Patterson), 103 RNC. See Republican National Committee Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, 70, 73–74 Rodriguez, Richard, 1, 3, 7, 28, 51 Roger & Me (movie), 69 RPI. See Racial Privacy Initiative Santa Ana, Otto, 53–54 Schrader, David, 25 Sexuality as an ideology, 97 gender and racism links to, 96–97 Smith, Gerrit, 24 Social assimilation, 12 Social justice African Americans and, 3 demographic change and, 4 isolationism in, 3 Latinos and, 4 Native Americans and, 3 race and ethnicity question in, 3 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 13 Southern Horror (Wells-Barnett), 97 Sowell, Thomas, 118 Spickard, Paul, 117 Steele, Shelby, 28, 118

190

Index

The Passing of Douglass (Du Bois), 13 “The Trials and Triumphs of SelfMade Men” (Douglass), 16 Thomas, Clarence, 5, 15, 16, 18, 28 Toomer, Jean, v Totem and Taboo (Freud), 32 Truth, Sojourner, 97 Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (Hacker), 71, 83 U.S. Declaration of Independence, 39 Vaca, Nicolas C., 85 Visible Identities (Martin), 6

A Voice from the South (Cooper), 97 Wailkins, David, 81 Washington, Booker T., 13, 21, 28 Webster, Yehudi, 28 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 97 “What of the Night” (Douglass), 29 “What the Black Man Wants” (Douglass), 16 Will, George, 15, 118 Wright, Richard, 71 Young, Andrew, 60, 61–62 Young, Iris Marion, 47, 48 Zack, Naomi, 4, 28, 98

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