Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, And the Politics of Multiracialism (Essay)

IN THIS ESSAY I assess in what ways the political discourse of multiracialism has changed in the roughly twenty years since an organized movement of mixed race identified people and interracial families arose in the United States. The "multiracial movement" includes the broad array of cultural projects oriented toward the social recognition and de-stigmatization of mixed race subjectivity and interracial families in the U.S. Since self-identified multiracials began organizing in the late 1980s, what was once largely ignored (how the children of interracial unions identify racially), treated as taboo (interracial sex and intimacy), or thought not to exist (multiracial community) is now becoming part of the cultural mainstream. The evolution in American discourse on race and mixed race has its latest and most symbolically potent example in the ascendancy of Barack Obama as President of the United States. As a racially mixed person (as race is currently conceived in the U.S.), who was raised in an interracial family and identifies as a black man, Obama has reinvigorated debates that the multiracial movement of the 1990s began. In debating questions like "Is Obama black? Is he black enough? Is he too black?" we are engaging in a debate about the contemporary salience of the one-drop rule--the practice of categorizing as black persons with any known African ancestry no matter how little. But whereas multiracial collective organizing for much of the preceding two decades sparked these debates among a relatively limited range of people, (1) Obama's presidency has forced a broad spectrum of Americans to grapple--in very public ways and for an extended period of time--with issues that are seldom the topic of a national dialogue and which have tradition ally been the province of groups most directly impacted by them, namely racial minorities, and African Americans in particular.