ASA 115 001
25 July 2019
One of the many arguments that Molly Littlewood McKibbin's "The Current State of Multiracial Discourse" parses out is the evolutionary nature of multiracial studies and what it means in this "post-racial" world. Of course, this is not to say that we are in a post-racial society, because our current presidential cabinet is representative of the overt racism that we have been so unwilling to discuss because of former President Barack Obama. Much of our society is still entrenched in racism, more or less internalized, because we are taught in schools that this ended with Martin Luther King Jr. and Obama; however, it is due to this lack of willingness to have discussions about the topic of race that makes talking about multiracial folks even harder. And, I found this quote from McKibbin interesting: "Consider, for instance, that the black-white binary homogenizes experiences, but so too does multiraciality as a race/category (that is, as a group identity it homogenizes multiracial experiences) (186). I think this means to draw out the problems that can come with trying to deem something an 'experience,' because oftentimes we tend to generalize the lives of these folks that we assume fit into these categories. The issue with trying to fit people into categories is that there are always bound to be outliers to this homogeneity, because as McKibbin also mentions, "Now, black identity is not necessarily ascribed through black relatives and is not necessarily claimed monoracially" (188), which also seems to get at this idea in which individuals often relate to black identity without necessarily being black. This in itself is something that we see time and time again like with Rachel Dolezal or even Southeast Asian refugees who have fallen into gang activity due to their poor relocation. But this also asks the question what constitutes black identity and if it is possible to acknowledge the intersectionality between these racial identities without erasing the individual experience?
I decided to attach a photo of Afro Asian solidarity that had taken off in the 1960s when the fight for civil rights was at its peak. Many Asian American movements had been created and modeled after the Black Panther Party, which also allowed for the camaraderie between these two minority groups to come together and share in their oppression as well as fight for better rights. I found that this is an interesting reflection of a multiracial experience because not only did these groups share oppression, they also fought together to stave off the push back from the government (of course until the establishment of the model minority and division between the groups). Regardless, it is important to acknowledge that experiences can intersect and are not necessarily mutually exclusive like society tries to make it out to be.
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