Mixed Race Studies

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order

Temple University Press
December 2001
280 pp
7×10
1 figure
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-909-8, ISBN: 1-56639-909-2

G. Reginald Daniel, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

In the United States, anyone with even a trace of African American ancestry has been considered black. Even as the twenty-first century opens, a racial hierarchy still prevents people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. In this book, G. Reginald Daniel argues that we are at a cross-roads, with members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality.

Tracing the centuries-long evolution of Eurocentrism, a concept geared to protecting white racial purity and social privilege, Daniel shows how race has been constructed and regulated in the United States.  The so-called one-drop rule (i.e., hypodescent) obligated individuals to identify as black or white, in effect erasing mixed-race individuals from the social landscape. For most of our history, many mixed-race individuals of African American descent have attempted to acquire the socioeconomic benefits of being white by forming separate enclaves or “passing.”  By the 1990s, however, interracial marriages became increasingly common, and multiracial individuals became increasingly political, demanding institutional changes that would recognize the reality of multiple racial backgrounds and challenging white racial privilege.

More Than Black? regards the crumbling of the old racial order as an opportunity for substantially more than an improvement in U.S. race relations; it offers no less than a radical transformation of the nation’s racial consciousness and the practice of democracy.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: White Over Black
1. Eurocentrism: The Origin of the Master Racial Project
2. Either Black or White: The United State and the Binary Racial Project

Part II: Black No More
3. White by Definition: Multiracial Identity and the Binary Racial Project
4. Black by Law: Multiracial Identity and the Ternary Racial Project

Part III: More than Black
5. The New Multiracial Identity: Both Black and White
6. The New Multiracial Identity: Neither Black nor White
7. Black by Popular Demand: Multiracial Identity and the Decennial Census

Part IV: Black No More or More than Black?
8. The Illusion of Inclusion : From White Domination to White Hegemony
9. The New Millennium: Toward a New Master Racial Project

Epilogue: Beyond Black or White: A New United States Racial Project
Notes
Index

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