Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth.

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

To date, the multiracial movement has helped make great strides for multiracial individuals striving to define their own racial identity and made valuable contributions to a broader conversation about how we might reconceive of race and its role in society. It has also presented a danger—in the hands of those who would use it for specific political ends—of undermining other important movements. Here, I suggest that while the ability to define one’s own identity and adoption of a more fluid understanding of race are positive developments and should be embraced or at least explored, we should be wary of immediately reconfiguring legal doctrine in response. And while the debate of how and whether racial classifications can be used by the state will rage on post-Fisher, we should protect identity from being used as a tool to advocate for any doctrinal approach. Issues of racial identity need not necessarily be perceived as incompatible with the goals of the civil rights movement. A more cautious approach would divorce the quest for identity from the use of racial classifications, allowing for individuals to define their own racial identity, but also for the state to act, when deemed appropriate, based on a broader view of racial dynamics. While a post-racial world may be the ideal for some, for now, it is also aspirational; to ignore current realities in favor of future hopes may disguise regression as progress.

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, “Undoing Race? Reconciling Multiracial Identity with Equal Protection,” California Law Review, (Volume 102, Number 5 October 2014), 1302. http://www.californialawreview.org/6undoing-race-reconciling-multiracial-identity-with-equal-protection/.

Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth.

Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth. We mark each other by complexion. We assign meaningless stereotypes to people according to skin color. We adore and fear and hate people on the basis of how light or dark they are.

Race, as many scientists will tell you, is not real, but racism is.

Darryl Fears, “Racism twists and distorts everything,” The Washington Post, July 8, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/racism-twists-and-distorts-everything/2016/07/08/d0f03364-4542-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2016 at 01:55Z and is filed under Excerpts/Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Mixed Race Studies

Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth.

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta