The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire

The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire

Social Identities
Volume 9, Issue 2 (2003)
pages 241-275
DOI: 10.1080/1350463032000101588

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

The political… is not in itself stable, but is rather conditioned by mutability. Writ large for criticism, this means that a political criticism must not take its object for granted: in a specific sense, the object is not there in the first place, for its condition is that it is marked by an interior historicity which subjects it to constant modification, constant shifting. The proper ‘object’ of the critic who is aware of the materiality of history is, paradoxically, an object conditioned not by its appearance relative to a covert essence, but rather an object conditioned precisely by its temporal disappearance or ‘immaterialization’.

Thomas Docherty, 1996

Reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena. Because phenomena constitute a non-dualistic whole, it makes no sense to talk about independently existing things as somehow behind or as the causes of phenomena … The referent is… a phenomenon.

Karen Barad, 1998

These epigraphs should be considered heretical to the project of the contemporary multiracial movement in the United States Insofar as its proponents and intellectuals speak of the ‘the end(s) of race’, the concept of multiraciality prides itself on the trouble it supposedly causes to the white supremacist rage for order, that is, its ostensible violation of racial discipline and its alleged threat to spurious notions of racial purity. The multiracial, as it were, cannot be fixed in place; by definition, it eludes the capture of a pernicious schema of racial classification. Nevertheless, this reputed disturbance of the colour line bears a cost.

A self that is internally heterogeneous beyond repair or resolution becomes a candidate for pathology in a society where the integration of self is taken to be necessary for mental health. (Alcoff, 1995, p. 261)

The multiracial is, then, fundamentally convoluted—essentially difficult and complicated without end—yet the seemingly inevitable link between such radical ‘otherness’ (other even to itself) and the pathology of disintegration is, in fact, an effect of the labour of articulation. That is to say, the relation between the terms can be re-inscribed in a gesture of more thoroughgoing…

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