Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism

347 Pages·2018·5.066 MB·English

by  Molly Littlewood McKibbin

Shades of Gray
borderlands and transcultural studies
Series Editors:
Pekka Hämäläinen
Paul Spickard
| Molly Littlewood McKibbin
Shades of Gray
Writing the New American
Multiracialism
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London
© 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Portions of chapter 1 and the conclusion were previously
published as “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”
in Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 183– 202.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018016616
Set in Sabon Next LT Pro by Mikala R. Kolander.
To the memory of my beloved M. and W.

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Race and Mixed Race in the United States 1
1. “What Are You, Anyway?”: The Social Context
of Racial Identity 37
2. Wonders of the Invisible Race: Negotiating Whiteness 95
3. “Black Like Me”: Negotiating Blackness 145
4. Mixed Ethnicity: Multiracialism as Multicultural Identity 215
Conclusion: The (Continuing) Work
of Multiracial Literature 253
Notes 267
Bibliography 299
Index 323

Preface
This book is the result of many years of thinking about race and a per-
sistent intellectual desire to grapple with the slippery subject. Examin-
ing multiracialism struck me as the best way to work through issues of
race, since in order to do so we must address our beliefs, assumptions,
and practices with regard to race. In other words, in order to talk about
mixed race, one has to be able to talk about race. As a researcher of Af-
rican American literature, I am specifically interested in blackness and
its relationship to whiteness. But the way in which concepts of white-
ness and blackness have developed in the United States—and the way
the relationship between the two has defined so much about American
society—is the reason this book focuses specifically on these two races
and on American racial identity in particular. This book is intended
to hold the black and white “races” up to the light and understand, via
multiracialism, how they are conceptualized and how multiracialism
might change those conceptual beliefs. It is, of course, also about how
we conceptualize multiracialism in the twenty- first century. The title,
Shades of Gray, is meant to signal not only the illogic of “black” and
“white” categories but also the shades of “gray,” or the unclear nature,
of the racial binary that has for so long been thought of as definitive.
I discuss black– white multiracialism exclusively because black and
white exemplify the most deeply embedded and passionate beliefs about
race concepts in the United States. Because of their roots in the ori-
gins of the nation and in the very long history of racial slavery and
inequality— based specifically on the “color line” between them— black
and white offer the quintessential example of how racialism and multi-
racialism have developed and are understood in the United States. That
the relationship between the two categories is still the most politically