I approached American Mixed Race with a bit of hesitation. I was more familiar with Ms. Zack's earlier work Race and Mixed Race, and from that I got the feeling that she was so fed up with the concept of racial category at all that she just refused to acknowledge it anymore. Whether or not that was her intention, it exasperated me because even if I also refused to acknowledge race there were plenty of people around who were willing to 'correct' that attitude. Then I heard about her latest collection of essays entitled American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity. Microdiversity? That sounded new and intriguing, so I put aside preconceived notions (I hate those, anyway) and jumped right in. We are given a working definition early on: "Microdiversity refers to the reality and scholarship of racial difference within single individuals." For purposes of argument, race is still a fairly outmoded notion but in examining seriously the fact of the racially unique individual, we have something with which to fight against the monolith of race.

Whoo, was I rewarded for getting rid of preconceptions! The variety of contributors to this collection really gives us a range of views that are rarely gathered in one volume. Artists, journalists, professors, poets, and activists all sharing opinions political and personal and it makes for very involving reading. I am a film fan, so I was swiftly captivated by an essay devoted to the image of the Tragic Mulatto that didn't condemn the characters for being mixed in the first place. There is a similar essay about the use of Asian and Eurasian characters in theater/film which makes you re-examine the issue from a new perspective. A woman talks about the construct of American racial identity as it differs from that of Trinidad,a country where being multiracial is so common that color is not the defining issue and has largely been replaced by class, caste, and other similar categories. I learned that the one-drop rule exists for Blacks but is almost completely opposite of the blood quantum rule that exists for Native Americans.