THERE'S a classic line in the political comedy "Bulworth" where protagonist Sen. Jay Bulworth offers an untraditional solution to the issue of race in America. "All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction," he offers. "Everybody's just gotta keep [reproducing with] everybody else 'til they're all the same color."
It's an amusing idea, and not quite a completely unfathomable one either. Though we're far from all being the same indistinct shade of beige these days, the past few generations have seen both an end to an embarrassing era of interracial marriage bans and anti-miscegenation laws and a consequent rise in the phenomenon of multiracialism.
On Monday night, Harvard Professor Kim Williams spoke about this trend in her lecture titled "Rise of the Multiracial Movement in America." Williams outlined the political consequences of multiracialism, namely the effect of the U.S. Census allowing individuals to mark more than one racial category on a census form. Though at face value this decision seems like a victory -- after all, where's the flaw in allowing individuals to document their multiracial heritage more accurately? -- its reality has disturbing implications. Civil rights groups have warned of a "dilution" of minority strength, and the change means that we now have to discuss racial groups not in terms of concrete constituencies, but in nebulous ranges of maximums and minimums. Conservatives have capitalized on such vagueness and adopted multiracial politics as a way of undermining race completely. If race is so abstract a concept, why include it in political or sociological discourse at all? Williams is quick to defend the intentions of the multiracial lobby, but explained that their movement has been "appropriate by right wing groups with such an agenda."
The point is a disturbing one. Why is it that conservative figures like Newt Gingrich, who long received 0 percent approval ratings on civil rights issues, began suddenly rallying behind the cause of multiculturalism in the 1990s? Rep. Thomas Sawyer, D-Ohio, oversaw the House Subcommittee on Census, Statistics and Postal Personnel during its 1993 "Review of Federal Measurements of Race & Ethnicity" hearings. He explained the effects of racial categorization in his statement that "congressional districts rise and fall with the shifting demographics of the country and program funding of all sorts is a function of how many people are placed in each category -- the numbers drive the dollars."
So the new right-wing champions of multiracial language are actually championing an end to race as a means to undercut equal-opportunity programs and paralyze the government's monitoring of civil rights laws and voting districts. A perfect example is Proposition 54, a failed California Ballot initiative that would have forbidden the state from collecting data relevant to the racial and ethnic characteristics of its citizens. Its proponents claimed that the measure would create what they called "racial privacy," but the Sacramento Bee referenced the compelling opposition from "an array of civil rights groups, health care professionals, teachers and law enforcement officials" that Prop. 54 would make it impossible to address issues of "discrimination, disease or the education gap without data showing which groups are most affected."
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund spokesperson J.C. Flores noted that Prop. 54 would not create a race-less California, but instead a California where discrimination could flourish unchecked by legal limits. "Everybody hates having to check those boxes," Flores explains, "but for a lot of African Americans or Asians, race is not private. A lot of people can't hide their race -- the initiative just takes away the paper trail that allows agencies to track potential discrimination."
A race-blind America is the platitude of those who would rather ignore racial issues than find solutions to the obvious fact that race does matter, and race will continue to matter until the poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics is less than three times that of whites. Race will continue to matter until minorities represent less than half of America's prison population and more than a quarter of its college students. And race will continue to matter until a minority student such as Amey Adkins, at a bastion of higher education such as our own, can wake up without finding racial slurs smeared across the windshield of her car.
Multiracialism is a facet of life for many, but not an excuse for the obstinate ignorance of racial inequality among us all. Ask former Student Council President Daisy Lundy just how well her multiracial background insulated her from racism. America still fragments along racial lines, and it is disingenuous to promote multiracialism when the real objective is to obscure the truth of that fragmentation.
Politics and race has always made for strange bedfellows, but those who might seek the furthering of the multiracial agenda would be wise to avoid the false alliance with those who would claim "colorblindness" while turning a willfully blind eye toward racial reality.
Katie Cristol's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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