LTE: Maya’s Label Hypocrisy

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 15:59:03 -0800 (PST)
From: Maya N. Smallwood
Subject: Letter to the Editor

Dear Mr. Landrith, I consider myself well-versed on multiracial/interracial issues, as well as the history and legacy of race in the United States. In fact, I am a graduate student in communication studies who is interested in identities, especially those that are linked to race. I understand what your organization, interracial parents, and their children are fighting for. I understand that, in a world that seeks to classify people using racial fallacies has muted the avowal of multiracial identity. I wish to, however, point out the danger associated with the avowal of a racial identity of any kind, no matter how jusitifed it may be. To label oneself “multiracial” or to say that one is one half of an “interracial” relationship is to legitimize racism in any form. Why? Because one has, in effect, accepted that one’s parents, who are presumably both human, should be seen as racially different from one another. One admits, regretably, that one’s significant other is a racial Other. One cannot bemoan the existence of race and decry its oppressive application to individuals of mixed cultural heritage and some intercultural marriages while attempting to create an identity based on race. How does your attempt to classify the children of two people with “racialized” differences as multiracial or biracial differ from the traditional classification of human beings according to monoracial categories? Upon what is the avowal of a multiracial or biracial identity contingent? Must I look at my parents and see one as “Black” and one as “White?” If I cannot – if, in fact, my
“multiracial” heritage has been obscured by intracultural marriage between “Black” people with varying degrees of African, Latino, Native American, and European heritage, may I not avow a multiracial identity? If I look at my significant other and see the cultural imprint of centuries of “racial” intermixing, yet that face is unambiguously “Black” in the eyes of most (even multiracialists), if I say that I am involved in an interracial relationship will I be wrong?

If the “multiracial” label is an attempt to give the children of “interracial” parents a non-racist identity, it falls far short. Furthermore, the attacks launched by multiracialists on monoracial labeling as “racist,” are naive at best. We lived in a racialized world. We tend to see ourselves in racial terms, all of which are culturally derived and change from culture to culture. No one is exempt from the “sickness” of race, and no one may stand on self-righteous ground when defending racial categorization of any kind. To do so is to admit hypocrisy. I think that some (mainly African Americans, a quintessentially “multiracial” group) who oppose the multiracial LABEL (they cannot oppose multiracial identity – people choose to be what they want to be) are attuned to this hypocrisy.

In closing, I would ask you, as you so often ask of American society, to think of the children. If you truly want them to live free of racism and racial lables, creating another label based on race only contributes to the continuation of racialist thinking. Loving a person of another “race” does not exempt you or your partner from advancing racialist rhetoric. Will you teach your children to think inside our racist box, or will you encourage them to transcend it? To me, if you goal is truly to rid us of racism, you should oppose racial labels of any kind. Any other goal is complicitous, and, as such, may not launch criticism that attacks the “racialist” goals of others. if you think about it, their goals are similar to yours: creating and sustaining a collective racial identity. I am the AFRICAN AMERICAN descendant of “interracial” ancestors on both sides. “What” does that make me? Would you call me multiracial? Could I check that special “multiracial” box? Probably not. The labels seems to be a societal apologia for the problematic racial identity of children of “interracial” parents, rather than a more “accurate” conception of multiracial identity. Are you merely trying to carve out a special identity for your own “multiracial” children, or do you seek to classify your descendants as well? I would advise you, as a collective, to examine the history of African Americans, a “multiracial” collective created by the one drop rule. African Americans chose to enhance a cultural identity rather than remain divided by their diverse “racial” background. Will your multiracial label legislate a similar collective in response to racism? I can’t stop you, but know that personal identities of future generations will be oppressed by this label because it has been cut by the same racialist cloth. Labels OF ANY KIND never liberate, they only suppress diversity and oppress difference. Fight for your “liberation” if you must, but please do not do it in the name of freedom from racial categorization.