INTERRACIAL VOICE - Guest Editorial

Guest Editorial

Looking Back to Find a Future
By Maria K. B. Kolby

I begin with a story about Law and Governments. Politics. And Race.....

In the 1890s many well-read and influential men and women in America believed that the races of the world were naturally antagonistic. Black, White, Red, Yellow, each race (so the theory went) was in competition with the other. It was believed, in those days, that as races came into contact each one would seek to destroy the others -- economically, politically, sexually, violently -- until only one race remained standing. It was to be survival of the fittest. And it was a zero sum game.

Thus, in 1896, when the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson the justices, with one dissenting voice, let stand the Louisiana law which mandated "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." Chief Justice Henry Billings Brown offered the majority opinion, declaring that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts." The justices, you see, chose to believe the social theory that "racial instincts" naturally led to racial violence. In the name of public order and social theories "Equal but Separate" was declared constitutional for 58 years.

At the end of 58 years came a new social perspective regarding race, and with it a new Supreme Court decision. Brown vs. Board of Education seemed to overturn Plessy. In actuality, as Charles Lofgren points out in his book The Plessy Case, not only did the Warren Court fail to officially overrule Plessy vs. Ferguson, but neither did they "reject reliance on racial 'facts'" in coming to their legal decision. Thus, Lofgren continues, when affirmative action programs began in the 1970s "their advocates had to show that Brown did not mean that all racial classifications were per se unconstitutional." These advocates were, in large part, highly successful. And like every other racial reclassification that had gone before, affirmative action dramatically altered United States racial politics.

It is now only a few years shy of 58 years after the Brown decision. And perhaps the number is significant, for a new voice is crying out to the federal government to take a fresh stance regarding racial classification.

Ours.

So, my mixed race, multiracial, multi-ethnic readers! Our voice speaks to Washington! And what are we saying?

My theme today focuses on these issues. What ARE we saying to D.C.? Why are we looking towards the federal government as an important part of our movement's focus? I am also deeply concerned here with whether we have the strength and the guts to honestly look at where our goals may lead us. I am wondering if we will continue to dare to transform America's racial landscape as others have done before us. Because it does seem to me, my friends, that if we succeed in achieving our goals we may very well do just that.

I believe the multiracial community in America has a profound message to send to Washington, as well as to every other major forum for public opinion available. Politically we must continue demanding that the federal government redesign its racial classification system. This is not merely so that we can all feel good about finally checking off the correct box or boxes that actually coincide with our known racial backgrounds. Our goal cannot be group therapy via census forms. Make no mistake! The struggle for racial reclassifications is an intensely political fight -- as the reaction from established groups against our small (though growing) movement have made quite clear. History itself has demonstrated that altering racial boundaries and definitions at the federal level has a profound impact on ordinary American lives. No one is more aware of this than the monoracially-oriented political bodies like the NAACP. So do not forget, as my essay meanders on, that racial classification is deeply political.

While the push for the Census change is a vital practical goal in our fight for recognition, multiracial Americans have even more to do than forcing the federal government to reclassify the racial makeup of several million people. I feel that the "mixie" community must stake out a position in the racial minefield of American politics that is more clearly delineated. We must then forward our position into as wide an arena as possible.

We must announce our bigger dreams (if we have them), both to ourselves and the opinion organs of mainstream America. Whether our visions of ourselves and our families turn up in op-ed pieces in the local paper, letters to the editor, or the "My Turn" column in Newsweek is immaterial, but churn them out we must do. We all have more things to say to mainstream America, I'm sure, than simply "We'd like a different census, please." A practical goal is essential. Ideological groundings, however, can often rally even more support.

For instance, I believe that one of the ideas we must work with and get publicized is the connection the multiracial community has with the ideals of previous civil rights movements -- especially those that dealt with race. I would like it known that there is absolutely no question that we offer a vision of racial understanding well in keeping with Frederick Douglas in the vast majority of his writings, or Martin Luther King, Jr. in many of his speeches, or even Malcolm X in his final years. Certainly our ideals of common human bonding regardless of color seems more in line with these traditions than the quasi-segregationist ploys presently advocated by groups that really ought to know better. This is a part of our story I feel has not made it into mainstream consciousness. We must be more vocal and outspoken.

Reclaiming our roots in civil rights agitation of the past does NOT, however, mean that we begin claiming certain individuals as "Multiracial like Me!" (Although I admit to times when I am sorely tempted). We do not need genealogy experts sent out to discover the mixed race heritage of America's greatest heroes. Instead, I speak here of our claim to a legitimate political heritage -- one as clearly ours as anyone else's. I would like it if we claimed our roots in the Montgomery Bus boycott, the world of Mexican immigrants, the privations and struggle of the Japanese in WWII internment camps. I feel that the acknowledgement of our varied connections to previous struggles for human rights are as vital to the momentum and meaning of our activism as they are to the NAACP or the students who are agitating for Asian American studies programs on university campuses.

Furthermore, in clearly and adamantly proclaiming the traditions on which we base our activism, the multiracial community does not just access important ideals and intellectual strains in our own movement. Such actions also have the potential of attracting Americans who are NOT multiracial to our fight for recognition. Our perspective could easily spiral out to concern centrally vital questions regarding American law and the Constitution, perspectives and ideas that many Americans might find compelling. Indeed, the legal and Constitutional impact of a multiracial category has struck me as a core issue for some time. And this is what I've been thinking....

I am wondering whether a multiracial category forces the federal government -- and all those whose political lifeblood is kept pumping by racial division and competition -- to begin addressing at least one section of American society on a "color blind" basis. I am thinking that this issue of "color blindness" in the world of law and the federal government may, in fact, be the real issue at stake, and one we should confront together.

Let us take the assumption that a multiracial category which stands alone is placed on the census. Suddenly several million Americans are racially unclassifiable, at least to the federal government. Because this group has no political record or weight that falls into any particular "minority" group the federal government could either place multiracials into a separate (but equal) minority status OR it could be so baffled on how to handle this polyglot group of citizens that many of those in politics might just ignore us as a politically relevant racial category. I am secretly hoping for the latter because, for the first time, a racial category could have little to no political meaning. For purposes of health or counting all would be well. But as a political entitity in and of itself our racial mixing would make those used to politics as racially inscribed inherently uncomfortable. I suspect that the government would resort to "color-blindness" when dealing with the multiracial "community."

Do not scoff at this notion. It is deadly serious, and I think it is crucial that we in the multiracial community finally look hard at what we are asking for. As the opponents of this category made clear, this fight is about how political power for some is based on the racial division of all in this country. By rejecting the idea of racial instincts, by refusing the idea that the races are in constant competition for power, the multiracial community is forcing America to return to Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education and finally MAKE A DECISION regarding this crucial question: Are the races in America in competition with one another? Is the role of the federal government to arbitrate between those racial factions? Is America still playing at a zero sum game that assumes only one race can win?

It seems to me that America is still playing this game over 100 years after Plessy. We in the multiracial community must offer another option -- the option not to play the game at all. We are, in fact, demanding racial categories that make our belief in this option increasingly clear. But while we are doing this we are stirring up far greater questions than we have heretofore closely addressed. Are we asking, indeed, for a color-blind government? I feel strongly that a continuing push for a multiracial category that stands alone edges us headlong into this question. Are we prepared, do you think, to open the maelstrom of Constitutional perspectives on race? Are we ready to redesign America's racial and political landscape?

While I am doubtful that I see a day when race means nothing, I can state that I believe America is starting to shake the scales of race-based politics from its eyes. The acknowledgement of the multiracial community in the political realm gives me some encouragement. But I also have hope because of words like those of Stanley Crouch in his book Always in Pursuit...

"[W]e are a nation of mutts...we have been miscegenated by blood and taste for a few hundred years...We forget that we could not have had the cowboy without the Mexican vaquero. We don't know that our most original art, Jazz, is a combination of elements African, European, and Latin. Few are aware of the fact that when Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung came to this country he observed that the white people walked, talked, and laughed like Negroes...."

Crouch strongly implies that the acknowledged multiracial community is not alone in its mixed-ness, nor in its potential interest in remapping American racial politics. He invites all Americans to celebrate the uniquely mixed heritage of these United States. This aspect of the multiracial movement -- the one that reaches out in all sorts of ways to the rest of America is, in my estimation, our most vital new project. We must present -- to our newspapers, our radio programs, our T.V.shows, our friends, our families, ourselves -- a vision of an American cultural heritage that has begged, borrowed, stolen and married into itself and produced great multicultural children. Multiracial people are one of these children. And in our pursuit for greater acceptance of our various and sundry combinations, we should remember to tell the rest of America that they are one of those children, too.