Reinforcing, rather than challenging prevailing notions of racial difference |
Yet, just as Douglass had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted in pejorative assumptions about blacks as angry or inferior. In other words, this idealised view of ‘bi-racial’ people reinforces, rather than challenges, prevailing notions of racial difference, of white superiority and black inferiority. The fascination with Obama as a seemingly ‘raceless’ mediator, once praised by a news presenter who gushed after a major presidential speech, “For an hour, I forgot he was black,” is a far cry from the resentful perception in some quarters of his wife, Michelle, as an “angry black woman.” The belief that a mixed race president heralds an era of racial harmony seems not just naïve, but misguided…
Kevin Gaines, “Vision Turns to Division,” American Review, Issue 2 (May 2010): 12-15. http://americanreviewmag.com/opinions/Vision-turns-to-division
Tags: American Review, Kevin Gaines