Toward Black and Multiracial "Kinship" After 1997, Or How a Race Man Became "Cablinasian" (Essay)

LET'S THINK OF "1997" as an index for significant tensions that show between "blackness" and "mixed racialism" at the end of the twentieth century. This is not a problem of the color line, but neither is it a problem "after" the color line. Rather, what "1997" indexes is the way the "race" itself is operatively two things: stable and hierarchical on the one hand, contingent, dispersive, and idiosyncratic on the other. During the twentieth century, "the color line" referred to cultural and legal segregation between black and white racial communities, attenuated by the quasi-biological logic of distinct bloodlines. In this scheme, "blackness" and "mixedness" shared the same subordinated relation to hegemonic whiteness. Our long, national, open secret of interracial intimacy also conflates "black" and "mixed" identities: we know, for instance, that the anti-Civil Rights, pro-segregationist senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, never became public about his "biracial" daughter. Considering this tendency of conflation--this kinship of condition--perhaps "1997" indicates that, while racial categorization still is recognizably arranged around dynamics of power, "blackness" and "mixedness" begin to diverge within these dynamics. There are two seminal events that make "1997" a useful metaphorical marker: Tiger Woods' said he considers himself "Cablinasian" on the Oprah Winfrey Show, following his record-breaking win at the Masters Tournament, and the decision to include the categorization "mixed" on the 2000 Census.