Amalgamation Schemes This page intentionally left blank Amalgamation Schemes Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism Jared Sexton University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation schemes : antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism / Jared Sexton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-5104-7 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-5105-4 (pb : alk. paper) 1. United States—Race relations. 2. Racially mixed people—United States. 3. Interracial marriage— United States. 4. Race discrimination—United States. I. Title. E184.A1S563 2008 305.800973—dc22 2008008574 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction: On the Verge of Race 1 1 Beyond the Event Horizon: The Multiracial Project 43 2 Scales of Coercion and Consent: Sexual Violence, Antimiscegenation, and the Limits of Multiracial America 83 3 There Is No (Interracial) Sexual Relationship 153 4 The Consequence of Race Mixture 191 5 The True Names of Race: Blackness and Antiblackness in Global Contexts 227 Notes 259 Works Cited 297 Index 327 This page intentionally left blank I N T R O D U C T I O N On the Verge of Race There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks It’s never enough to shout long live the multiple. —Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions 1 Amalgamation Schemes offers a critique of multiracialism in the post–civil rights era United States. “Multiracialism” here is inclusive of the political initiatives of the multiracial movement, the academic W eld of multiracial studies, and the media discourse about “race mixture” in contemporary culture and society. In this book, I consider both the implications of mul- tiracialism for theorizations of race and its restaging of sexual politics in the name of progressive social change. Against the claims of leading pro- ponents, I W nd that the principal political effects of multiracialism are nei- ther a fundamental challenge to the living legacies of white supremacy nor a de W ance of sexual racism in particular but rather the reinforcement of longstanding tenets of antiblackness and the promotion of normative sexuality. The former effect follows from the advancement of (sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous) ideologies of colorblindness and mul- tiracial exceptionalism, while the latter effect proceeds along with the pro- motion of a (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) repackaged family values platform—extolling bourgeois virtues of domestic coupling, two- parent childrearing, and the nuclear family unit. This ideologically restora- tive work serves to counteract the overlapping critical interventions of black freedom struggle, feminist movement, sexual liberation, and queer activism; and it is conducted under the protective metaphors of natural growth: an extension of civil rights advocacy and an evolution in the politics of antiracism. Yet, if the impact of multiracialism is detectable across a range of political con X icts, its primary target is found nonetheless in historical for- mations of black community, taking aim at the singular antagonism that conditions “racial blackness” as social identity, structural position, locus of identi W cation, and object of desire. 1 The declarations of multiracialism are grounded in a discontent with the theoretical status of the concept of “hypodescent” (Davis 1991), according to which convention the issue of interracial sexual reproduction assumes the status of the black, usually maternal, parent. 2 However, the objection to hypodescent is pursued only insofar as this rule of de W nition is detached from the antinomies of North American slave society. More precisely, a contradictory argument is for- warded that the rule is, on the one hand, autonomous and self-sustaining and, on the other, embedded in the system of racial slavery as its Achilles heel. At once, we are told that the “one-drop rule” of racial classi W cation can be dismantled, de jure and de facto, without the least transformation in the social structures of slavery and that these structures are somehow susceptible to collapse through the redrawing or renunciation of the color line enabled by its suspension. Because one of the most widely cited markers of historical distinc- tion between Anglo and Latin American racial formations regards the respective rigidity/ X uidity of their classi W cation systems and their relative tolerance toward sexual encounter across the color line (Esteva-Fabregat 1995), this reckoning with a multiracial critical mass north of the U.S.– Mexico border is also involved in, and perhaps symbolizes, what some scholars have called “the Latin Americanization of U.S. race relations” (Bonilla-Silva 2004): a situation wherein a binary black–white model of race is said to give way to more a permeable and highly differentiated mul- tiracial arrangement. One component of this change regards increased social acceptance of and participation in relationships of interracial intimacy and the of W cial recognition of a self-identi W ed multiracial demographic. 2 – INTRODUCTION As such, this transformation demands re X ection not only upon the effects it may hold for African Americans and the repositioning it portends for other people of color in the United States but also upon the dissemination of a racist culture fundamental to the legacies of Western modernity and the deeply uneven emergence of global civil society. On this view, the enlargement of multiracialism can be more fully appreciated as an element of the regional integration of the Americas and the formation of a Paci W c Rim economy, what we might call “the cultural politics of free trade agreement,” wherein the United States seeks to win hegemony—and maintain political, economic, and military dominance— by incorporating to its own ends the trappings of an age-old Latin Amer- ican crisis-management strategy. More broadly still, the politics of multi- racialism can be taken as a component of the highly politicized contest over globalization insofar as race remains decisive to its unfolding: from the deregulation of W nancial markets and the privatization of the com- mons to the subjugation and displacement of labor and the recon W guration of strategic military alliances. All such developments should be consid- ered in light of a heterogeneous and countervailing black radical tradition (C. Robinson 2000) that not only contests the ravages of historical capi- talism but takes to task the limits of its left-wing opposition as well. Its constituencies today operate at a remove from the mainstream of the anti- globalization movement, pursuing demands well in excess of the platforms of global justice: from the transnational movement for reparations for slavery to the emergence of black consciousness as a principle of political mobilization, social organization, and cultural production among Afro- Latino populations throughout the hemisphere. The groping solidarity evinced around the reparations controversy at the 2001 United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism speaks directly to the former (McGreal 2001), while the recent formation of the Organization of Africans in the Americas as supplement to the of W cial machinations of the Organization of the Americas is telling with respect to the latter (Minority Rights Group 1995). With our context brie X y sketched, I abbreviate the main objectives of the present study as follows: INTRODUCTION – 3 1. To provide a critical overview of contemporary multiracialism from the emergence of multiracial studies in the 1980s to the fed- eral race (and ethnicity) classi W cation debates of the 1990s. 2. To highlight the relationship between sexuality and racial politics in general and interracial sexuality and multiracial identity in par- ticular in hopes of reinvigorating debates that remain burdened by a set of archaic assumptions. 3. To challenge the conservative tendencies of contemporary mul- tiracialism and confront the recruitment of the multiracial move- ment by right-wing political forces determined to undo the gains of the civil rights movement. 4. To revisit the history and signi W cance of the one-drop rule of hypodescent, the central point of contention for multiracial crit- ics and the improper name of a principle of mobilization within the centuries-long black freedom struggle. 5. To recommend a conception of nonbiological racial embodiment that disarticulates interracial sexuality from “miscegenation” 3 and resituates racialization in a W eld of power: a political ontology of violence rather than a specious genetic inheritance or a dubious phenomenology of perception. While providing condensed introduction to salient points about the re- emergence of a self-avowed multiracial demographic in the contemporary United States, this study aims to problematize the prevailing account of civil rights and liberties and the various deliberations regarding antidis- crimination and af W rmative action that have saturated its development to date. Important as these clashes have been, I argue that multiracialism, as it is framed by such debates, suffers from an assumptive logic that dimin- ishes or conceals altogether the historicity of race and sexuality (Hodes 1999) and, more importantly, that displaces or disavows the protocols of violence that gird the twin pillars of U.S. social formation: racial slavery and genocidal conquest (Blackburn 1998). This is why the extensive, often anxious attention paid to the dynamics of race mixture within the popu- lar fabrication of “ mestizo America” (Nash 1999) is best understood as a 4 – INTRODUCTION confounded meditation on the possibility of multiracial democracy beneath the long shadow of “global white supremacy” (Mills 1998). To enter un- selfconsciously into the fray of multiracialism in the post–civil rights era United States is to take for granted such democracy, whether it is claimed to be extant or nascent. Rather than accept this common frame of intelli- gibility, we might do better to disassemble the architecture of multiracial discourse, itemizing the elementary binaries through which it establishes its operative terms and uncovering the relations of force it obscures in the process. The fêted turn toward multiracialism, or mestizaje, in the United States signals less the salutary force of a historic Latin American inter- vention than an articulation of otherwise progressive political, intellectual, and cultural movements toward competitive comparison with the endur- ing pressures of black liberation struggle. 4 What generates the affective intensity and symbolic purchase of multiracialism in the current conjunc- ture is the capacity of “American mixed race” (Zack 1995a) to both emu- late and undermine—that is, to caricature —the cultural politics of Black Power rather than any propensity to elaborate the laudable contributions of the best of the black radical tradition. In this precise sense, multiracial- ism is a decidedly post –civil rights era phenomenon, taking its immediate tone and tenor from the “conservative restoration” (Shor 1992) of the last thirty years and partaking of the more recent advent of an “intimate pub- lic sphere” (Berlant 1997): conditions under which the political is reduced to the personal, con W ned to the pluralism of “lifestyles,” and citizenship— or national belonging more generally—is increasingly adjudicated on the basis of one’s moral integrity in putatively private affairs. Under these con- ditions, in the tendentious realm previous generations have known as “social equality,” the problematic of interracial sexuality has resurfaced as a topic of national focus and global concern. 5 And it is in these terms that black community—assumedly beholden to a retrograde separatism and there- fore uninterested in interracial intimacy —has been found wanting, to the point of criminality, in the project of “Building One America for the Twenty- First Century.” 6 As that which draws the line not only between white and nonwhite INTRODUCTION – 5 but also, more importantly, between black and nonblack (Yancey 2003), the legacy of the one-drop rule of hypodescent stands out within multiracial discourse as the fulcrum of historical distinction between a supposedly vestigial era of “racial dictatorship” (Omi and Winant 1994) and the dawn- ing of an enlightened multiracial or nonracial democracy in the United States. As noted, it is also supposed to counterpose the racial formations of Anglo and Latin America where the latter provides a propaedeutic for the former. As a result of the vectors established by this spatial and tem- poral mapping, political struggle is located in the relative degrees of free- dom afforded or secured apropos of racial de W nition and identi W cation. On this account, freedom from the one-drop rule is construed artfully (because not without inconsistency) as freedom from the exigencies of being identi W ed, or identifying oneself, with racial blackness. Moderniz- ing the nation—at least that segment of the nation with the potential to be “more than black” (Daniel 2001) or simply to move “beyond black” (Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002)—and liberating it from the deadening weight of the past requires that the signature of its persistence (or perse- verance or preservation) be effaced. In this light, multiracialism can be read, as suggested previously, as an element of the ascendant ideology of colorblindness (Hernandez 1998), but it is not thereby identical to it. Its target is not race per se, since multiracialism is still very much a politics of racial identity (one often enough holding up multiracial identity as exceptional and exemplary), but rather the categorical sprawl of blackness in particular and the insatiable political demand it presents to a nominally postemancipation society (Wilderson 2003). In this precise respect, multiracialism solicits alliances with other political and intellectual efforts to go “beyond the black–white binary”— whether in the current campaigns for immigrant rights or the research agendas of comparative ethnic studies—efforts which, in many cases, have been shot through with an air of antiblackness (Matsuda 2002). In the reg- ister of contemporary racial politics, black identity appears as an antiquated state of con W nement from which the “multiracial imagined community” (Stephens 1999) must be delivered; the negative ideal against which “the browning of America” (Root 1992a) measures its tenuous success. One 6 – INTRODUCTION discovers in this new-fangled admonition of runaway blackness traces of the criminalization and repression of Black Power that subtends the birth of Reaganism (Churchill and Vander Wall 2002). In the longer view, the “communal tyranny” (Kennedy 2003) imputed to the collective black per- sonality in this context appears as a refraction of the pronounced fear of “black domination” that underwrites the history of white supremacist dis- course: whether postbellum alibis for institutionalized lynching, segrega- tion, and disenfranchisement (Hunter 1997) or the propaganda of “reverse discrimination” fashionable today—from “welfare queen” (Roberts 1998) to “coddled criminal” (Mauer 1999) to “af W rmative action baby” (Post and Rogin 1998). Ultimately, it is consternation about being eclipsed by black- ness that articulates multiracialism with the array of political campaigns consolidated under the heading of the New Immigration ( Jaynes 2000) and links them collectively, and perhaps unconsciously, to political projects they might otherwise oppose. Perspicacious scholars in the W eld of black studies (Gordon 1997; Makalani 2001; Spencer 1997, 1999) have already offered similar argu- ments, and I seek to af W rm and extend their insights on this score. How- ever, multiracialism also entails a sexual politics, and revising the history and signi W cance of the one-drop rule is a necessary but insuf W cient response to its formation. This is the case because conceptions of the multiracial cannot help but imply a production of race in the W eld of heterosexuality, nominating, more speci W cally, the reproductive sex act as the principal site of mediation for racial difference itself. In this respect, not only does mul- tiracialism conceptually retain a pernicious system of racial breeding (Zack 1993), a system that announces reproduction as the alibi for a more com- prehensive regulation of sexuality, it also elides the politics of sexuality— its social production—especially with respect to processes of racialization (Bhattacharyya 2002). The latter is accomplished, in circular fashion, by presumptively con W ning the range of (interracial) sexual practices and the vicissitudes of (interracial) desire to a normative heterosexual frame, an interpretive gesture structurally required by the disavowed recourse to race-as-biological that notions of the multiracial put into play. In short, to the extent that one thinks of race as biological (e.g., genotype, phenotype), INTRODUCTION – 7 one thinks of race mixture in heteronormative and reproductivist terms. Put slightly differently, insofar as a W gure of mixed race forms the back- drop for thinking interracial sexuality, the erasure of sexual encounter beyond or outside the heterosexual matrix is a fait accompli. Dislodging biological notions of race becomes, then, a condition of possibility for the queering of interracial sexuality (Warner 1999), including its disarticula- tion from the specter of miscegenation. If we grant Fanon’s famous for- mulation, “the Negro symbolizes the biological danger” (Fanon 1967), then we can sense how black liberation in particular is potentially refash- ioned and revivi W ed here as well. 7 This is perhaps an ambitious exercise, considering the general ret- icence of multiracialism to engage the sexual domain, even within the limited purview of a normative heterosexuality. In seeking to gain moral distance from age-old racist fantasies of interracial sexuality as the realm par excellence of the perverse, the pathological, and the pornographic (Hern- ton 1988), the new multiracial consciousness eschews the sexual dimensions of racialization (and vice versa) in favor of axiological pronouncements on “love,” “romance,” “family,” and “childrearing.” One effect of this distanc- ing from the sexual is to reinforce the imaginative quarantine of interra- cial sexuality to the margins of the public sphere: the political networks of the white supremacist movement and the political economy of global sex industries. Circulating uncomfortably between these marginal W elds, interracial sexuality appears only at the extremities of a traitorous moral failure (for white supremacist ideologues) or an irreverent moral X outing (for captains of the sex trade). Both positions fortify a politics of sexual shame that has long animated racist culture, and both positions contribute to the longevity of antimiscegenation as a result. Interracial sexuality, W g- ured in these terms, stands as a condition of possibility and a condition of impossibility for multiracialism. Another effect of this quarantine is to render a discourse of race as a matter of personal identity despite pretenses toward politicization and the development of historical consciousness. This move concentrates the often diffuse hostility of multiracialism toward black community, a formation wherein the history of sexuality and the prospects for collective political 8 – INTRODUCTION struggle remain items of recurrent, if often truncated, public debate (Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). However, recovering sexuality for racial critique need not salvage dominant frameworks in the process (recuperat- ing the contradictory “normality” of a “subversive” interracial heterosexu- ality would prove a Pyrrhic victory indeed). In fact, so much would not be possible unless and until race could be effectively dissociated from biol- ogy and breeding displaced as the privileged locus for the production of racial difference. Only in the wake of this disinterment could interracial sexuality be understood in its proper sense: a domain in which racial dif- ference emerges as an effect of the power-laden approximations of pleasure and pain, a “mode of enjoyment” ( Ê i ê ek 1989). It is here that the two central aspects of the critique of multiracial- ism converge: to return historicity to race is to understand it as a produc- tion of bodily (not biological) difference at the nexus of violence and sexuality, where the heuristic distinction between the latter terms is often dif W cult to retain at the level of lived experience. That is to say, racial dif- ference issues from direct relations of force—the scales of coercion—and it is only elaborated or institutionalized within relations of power—the scales of consent. What establishes race, what positions one within racial formation, is the relation one suffers and/or enjoys with respect to the state-sponsored social organization of violence and sexuality. Refocusing the historic violence of racial slavery as an “allegory of the present” (Hart- man 1997), on the one hand, and distinguishing interracial sexuality from the heterosexual matrix of breeding, on the other, are indispensable steps toward a rethinking of race and mixed race appropriate to the contempo- rary scene. From this angle, Amalgamation Schemes seeks to repoliticize the unstable juncture of race and sexuality in ways that avoid the pitfalls of rei W cation. Moreover, it works to de-sediment race and sexuality without jettisoning the body altogether, preserving a repertoire of critical terms for the future of black freedom struggle (and, as noted, a host of other overlapping new social movements). This book is driven by the intuition that, perhaps, in the historic frenzy of our requisite political resistance, we have yet to truly encounter the body, to learn precisely what it is or, rather, what it can do, to think creatively about its becoming rather than to INTRODUCTION – 9 pronounce upon its being (Massumi 2002). It is hoped, at the least, that the following commentary invites an unfamiliar rendezvous. Frameworks The present work is interdisciplinary to the extent that it draws concep- tual resources from across the humanities and the social sciences, as most contemporary studies of race have found it necessary to do, however suc- cessfully. It is also transdisciplinary insofar as it W nds an orientation within poststructuralism, an intellectual movement whose impact has registered throughout the academic milieu (Rapaport 2001). More precisely, a recon- structed psychoanalytic theory, or “psycho-Marxism,” provides the single most important frame of analysis for my work (Miklitsch 1998). Of course, there is no single framework called psychoanalysis (much less in its inter- sections with Marxism), its status as a discipline is widely questioned, and the history of its various schools is contested perennially (Brooks and Woloch 2000). My appropriation from the W eld is selective and open-ended and seeks in no way to enter the larger fray. While I may demonstrate an af W nity at times for Freud and Lacan and contemporary commentators like Ê i ê ek (1989) and Copjec (1994), I also bend the intellectual project of psychoanalysis to meet the needs of my own ensemble of questions, an appropriation that includes a certain rapprochement with historicism and deconstruction. The latter move is inspired by the pioneering work of Hartman (1997), Judy (1993), and Spillers (2003) as well as more recent contributions by Keeling (2003), Marriott (2000), and Wilderson (2003). Political and intellectual exigencies have pushed these authors to straddle the bright lines of academic division and fashion innovative linkages be- tween the classic Marx–Freud couplet and other well-known W gures of the postwar French intellectual scene, such as Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. These various theoretical projects are opposed or incommensu- rable on some counts, and keeping them in productive tension is often un- wieldy as a result. However, the ecumenical spirit of Fanon and Du Bois, both of whom exert their in X uence here, pulls otherwise incompatible modes of inquiry into a common horizon of concern. Fanon, in particular, proves deft at moving between the W elds of philosophy, literature, poetry, 10 – INTRODUCTION and history or psychiatry, psychoanalysis, political theory, and anthropol- ogy—often in the matter of a paragraph. I am entirely unable to repro- duce his deservedly famous style, yet his sense of intellectual freedom and professed methodological “dereliction” licenses, I think, a certain shuttling back and forth between disciplines, in and out of entrenched disagree- ments among theorists and critics. Returning to Fanon at different points serves to ground an analysis that might otherwise take X ight. So, if this study cannot be considered a straightaway “psychoanalysis of race” (Lane 1998), it might still be termed, pace Spillers, a “psychoanalytics” of its cul- ture and politics: cultural and political criticism that draws from the psy- choanalytic archive, putting to work its concepts and operating within its broad intellectual sphere but guided by aims “beyond the couch.” Amalgamation Schemes is also situated, somewhat critically, in the W eld of comparative ethnic studies, which is to say it takes up questions of hege- mony in contemporary formations of race and sexuality with a decided interest in how such investigation might enable social movements for rad- ical change (Butler 2001). On that score, it is indebted to feminist and queer theory as well, particularly as they have been developed and deployed by black scholars and other intellectuals of color. 8 I am motivated by a concern for the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and I take for granted a number of insights produced by antiessentialist or social constructionist arguments (Ore 2003). However, I am not satis W ed to simply bring such insights to bear on the matter of multiracialism in the United States. Rather, I work from a notion of race as neither a biologi- cal index of natural kind nor an illusion produced in culture (Shepherdson 2000). Nor do I take race to be simply a social fact or “a complex of social meanings” (Omi and Winant 1994). Of course, race does exist, in some sense, as a reliable social indicator of life chances and as a traceable chain of signi W cations, but its political ontology exceeds the terms of sociolog- ical investigation and the operations of the symbolic order: it is, to try another phrasing, a “division of species” (Fanon 1963) effected and main- tained by the technologies of violence and sexuality that underwrite the social formation, not a discriminatory manipulation of already existing bodily marks (Guillaumin 1995). Moreover, it is in the register of fantasy, INTRODUCTION – 11 a social category of psychic reality described by psychoanalysis (Burgin 1996), that this matrix of forces is most vividly staged and those obliga- tory “scenes of subjection” W nd their touchstones of coherence. In my view, race is “real” in a sense that distends the notion as found in Lacan. By thinking race through and beyond the register of the Real—toward what Spillers (2003) suggestively terms the “socio-nom”—we are able to under- stand better the place of sexuality in the production of racial difference. At the limits of signi W cation—a limit that is both historical and structural — race and sexuality cohabit. On that note, I introduce a guiding idea for the readings offered here: the inverse historical relation between white supremacy’s tolerance for multiracial formations and the relative strength of black liberation strug- gle. When black resistance is thought by state and civil society to be effec- tively contained or neutralized, both practically and symbolically, the color line becomes considerably more X uid. This point is hypothesized from the strong correlations found in most historical treatments of “mulattos” in the United States in which one W nds a relative relaxation and expansion of the rules of racial de W nition during moments of white supremacy’s great- est con W dence alongside a marked constriction of those same categories during moments of real or imagined crisis (Williamson 1984). Typically, that crisis takes form in the prospect of increased black freedom, that prospect is declared a violent threat to the white body politic (the res pub- lica), and that threat of violence is infused with fears of a consuming, vio- lating black sexuality. When faced with the specter of violent black sexuality or sexualized black violence, white supremacy in the United States has consistently con- X ated blacks and mulattos through retrenched enforcement of the one- drop rule. That is to say, when blacks move against the structures of white supremacy, “mixed race” is revoked as a viable social identity and racial blackness is again understood as a broad spectrum. Under the system of chattel slavery, multiracial populations in the United States occasionally served as buffer classes between whites and blacks, both enslaved and free, and these multiracial populations often corroborated and collaborated with antiblackness (echoing dynamics prevalent throughout the slave regimes 12 – INTRODUCTION of the Caribbean and Latin America). However, the resurgence of white supremacy in the immediate antebellum period and, again, in the wake of Reconstruction pressed blacks and mulattos into a relatively common cat- egory and solidi W ed, to large extent, their collective fortunes. Of course, this con X ation did not necessarily ease and certainly never erased distinc- tions of class and color among blacks so de W ned (though it did mediate them), but its reappearance in the face of legal segregation and the insti- tution of lynching was largely af W rmed—not simply pragmatically adopted or cynically tolerated—by those formerly or otherwise considered to be “more than black.” Rather than a naïve or pathological miscomprehen- sion, the historical forms of black solidarity against which multiracialism does battle today is a complex political identi W cation forged most clearly during the century between the circumscription of chattel slavery and the rise of Black Power—the era of Jim Crow. Contemporary multiracialism is enabled by the historical dynamic described previously. It unfolds amid the ebb of black political energies and the resegregation of the United States, which is to say a reforti W ed antiblackness. The chief ideological or rhetorical difference between the discourse of the post–civil rights era and earlier contractions of the color line—the proslavery campaign of the 1830s and 1840s, the mobilization for southern “Redemption” of the 1880s and 1890s, the “massive resistance” to desegregation of the 1950s and 1960s announced by the infamous Southern Manifesto—resides in the ascrip- tion of determinate power: in the present, black community, rather than white society, is said to bear primary responsibility for cutting the border of race. To repeat an earlier point, blacks in this moment do not so much police the traditional boundary between blackness and whiteness as that which obtains between blackness and everything else. Given this backdrop, my interrogation involves a second order of abstraction. In looking to the W eld of multiracial studies and the domain of multiracial identity politics since the early 1990s, I am interested in the ways that present-day authors interpret the extant scholarship on race and race mixture (i.e., their reading of the archive) and the arguments that they advance in response (i.e., their contribution to the archive). I do so less to mark advancements in the production of knowledge than to indicate INTRODUCTION – 13