Table Of ContentTROUBLING THE FAMILY
Difference Incorporated
Roderick A. Ferguson andGrace Kyungwon Hong
series editors
Troubling the Family
• • • •
The Promise of Personhood and
the Rise of Multiracialism
Habiba Ibrahim
Difference Incorporated
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
An earlier version of the Introduction was previously published as “Toward Black and
Multiracial Kinship after 1997, or How a Race Man Became Cablinasian,” special issue,
“The Politics of Biracialism,” Black Scholar 39, no. 3–4 (2009): 23–31. Reprinted by
permission of Black Scholar.
Copyright 2012 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 transmitted, 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
Ibrahim, Habiba.
Troubling the family : the promise of personhood and the rise of multiracialism /
Habiba Ibrahim.
(Difference incorporated)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-8166-7917-1 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN978-0-8166-7918-8 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Racially mixed children—United States. 2. Racially mixed people—United States.
3. Families—United States. I. Title.
HQ777.9.I27 2012
306.850973—dc23
2012008204
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: The Rising Son of Multiracialism vii
1. Multiracial Timelines: A Genealogy of Personhood 1
2. Legitimizing the Deviant Family: Loving v. Virginiaand the
Moynihan Report 43
3. The Whiteness of Maternal Memoirs: Politicizing the
Multiracial Child 81
4. Ambivalent Outcomes: Blackness and the Return of
Racial Passing 121
Conclusion: Dreams of the Father and Potentials Lost 161
Acknowledgments 177
Notes 181
Index 197
This page intentionally left blank
• INTRODUCTION •
The Rising Son of Multiracialism
E
ldrick “Tiger” Woods’s rise to celebrityin 1997 was accom-
panied by a debate about his racial identity—black or multiracial—
that offers a few paradigmatic examples of the multiracial phenomenon.
The multiracial movement was conceptualized and mobilized by stake-
holders who were interested in the well-being of multiracial families. Pri-
marily, the multiracial child became an icon that represented the social
and political horizon, a future in which the full recognition of person-
hood—selfhood unfettered by taxonomic restraints—would be fulfilled.
But beyond its iconic role in the movement, the multiracial child itself
also became the strategic focus of multiracial family organizations. Pro-
tecting the multiracial child became the central strategy for adult stake-
holders, who chose to suppress a variety of political differences among
them in order to keep their safe, welcoming communities of families intact.
Focusing on multiracial children became a key approach for maintaining
a semblance of collective coherence, even as it simultaneously signaled
the narrow limits of such a unifying project. So one particular paradigm of
multiracialism—investment in the family and the centrality of children—
depended on the interfacing of blackness and multiracialism. Historically,
blackness and multiracialism were family: the rule of hypodescent, also
know as the one-drop rule, set the parameters of blackness wide enough
to encompass racial mixedness.
The year 1997 marked a moment when the two identities strikingly
ran up and against each other. The rise of Tiger Woods, which correlates
historically with the rise of multiracialism as a salient cultural and political
designation, calls our attention to another sort of family feud. In 1997, the
future of multiracialism, and the legacy of blackness, both were defined by
the same horizon of a rising son.In other words, the multiracial phenom-
enon produced discourses about race that tacitly situated blackness as
• vii •
viii INTRODUCTION
outmoded and multiracialism as emergent. However, despite this rep-
resentation of temporal succession, both forms of racialization shared a
symbolic interest in the perpetuation of male progeny and in masculin-
ity more generally. Both black and multiracial cultural politics shared an
interest in upholding manhood as the central category around which sub-
jects developed a normative sense of social kinship. For this reason, the
iconic status of Tiger Woods during the late 1990s reveals what discourses
about racialized kinship—or social belonging—emerged when the tem-
poral logic or race was shifting, while the status of masculinity in racialized
communities maintained its centrality.
This temporal narrative of succession signals a discourse in which
blackness and multiracialism make troubled encounters with each other.
If 1997 indicates the trouble between conventional black community and
emergent multiracialism, then what might this problem (within the fam-
ily) tell us? What are the potential outcomes of troubling the line between
multiracial and black political ends? Finally, how might a new kinship
between blackness and mixedness lead us away from the conflating binds
of community and toward a partnership in cultural production, social
justice, or a mutual future? If after 1997 it no longer seems adequate to
imagine our racial blood as the essential ties that bind, then what will
become the passageway into the family? The problem of conceptualizing
racial belonging as kinship reveals the simultaneously obscured and obvi-
ous presence of womanhood. In other words, the temporal passageway
through which black and multiracial subjects imagine the achievement of
personhood in public takes up the grammar of gender.
Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multi -
racialismattempts to reveal a feminist genealogy of the multiracial move-
ment and focuses on the movement’s political and cultural logics between
1997 and 2007. There are many excellent scholarly accounts of the mul-
tiracial movement. Much of the recent work spans a wide spectrum of
disciplines, with primary concerns that include the U.S. Census and demog-
raphy, policy, statistical analysis, and popular culture.1The aforementioned
studies fortify this book by developing a discussion on the intersections of
black racial politics and multiracialism. This book participates in this wider
conversation about multiracialism and treats materials including memoirs,
legal case studies, popular fiction, and journalism that have been treated by
others. However, I attempt to build on this thoroughgoing discussion by
attending to the manner in which multiracialism gains clarity through gen-
der and providing an analysis of the gendered politics of the movement.
INTRODUCTION ix
Ultimately, Troubling the Family considers whether another version of
multiracial temporality—one that incorporated the unfinished historical
narratives of second-wave feminism and black nationalism—could have
produced a more richly interracial, antielitist, and gender- and sexuality-
conscious social sphere. This expanded social dimension would have been
“mixed” in the sense of being intellectually and politically conjunctional.
From out of entrenched public engagement, it would have produced an
array of new knowledge projects.
Troubling the Familyargues that the popular emergence of multiracial-
ism during the end of the twentieth century was highly determined by an
underlying, normatively gendered discourse. However, gender was rarely
acknowledged as providing the foundational logic for what seemed like
a strictly racial dissidence between blackness and multiracialism. In this
book, I consider the manner in which gender—as a cultural formation and
a basis for political analysis—breaks apart the coherence of what an emer-
gent multiracialism became throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In this way,
I open with 1997 as a seminal moment for multiracialism that suppressed
its own gendered foundations. Understanding this 1990s-era suppression
requires a look across historical moments and arguments, first reaching
back to the 1960s, when miscegenation laws were struck down. Such a
historical glance reveals that the notion of gender was the starting point of
an analytics that made categorical multiracialism, and multiracial politics,
possible. Once a genealogy of how multiracialism’s gendered origins
comes into view, it then becomes possible to focus on a range of stake-
holders whose interests often ran against the grain of what the dominant
multiracial movement of the 1990s, which often privileged the sanctity
of the heteronormative family, the labor of child rearing, and more precise
forms of racial tabulation. This book begins with an extended anecdote
about Tiger Woods, the first 1990s multiracial race man, and concludes
with a consideration of Barack Obama, who in this study represents a res-
urrection of the promise that multiracialism extended into the 2000s: a
version of personhood with no memory of its own gendered legacy, and
with no self-account of how it became so masculine.
Training a Tiger and a Lineage of Race Men
The case of golfer Tiger Woods illustrates two key conditions of racial
heroism. First, as a star athlete whose celebrity status was partially derived
from his racial identity, Woods was instrumental in exposing a rift between
