THE MONORACIAL MILLENNIUM (a parody)

It sucks to wake up and realize that you’re back out of style–viewed as a promising development in one decade, viewed as an impediment to racial justice in the next.

It was the 1990s. Racial pure breeds were fading to beige, and ethnic ambiguity was starting to matter. The public was interested in topics like the biracial baby boom, the browning of America, and Tiger “Cablinasian” Woods. Time magazine issued its “New Face of America.” Maria Root published her “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” And multiracial grassroots activists were lobbying the state to account for the growing multiracial population via a new multiracial identifier for Census 2000.

Many in the old vanguard of the US Civil Rights Movement were troubled by this development. They responded by propagating new sayings about the new mixed people: “I’m mixed is another way of saying that you want to be white” and “the multiracial movement is anti-black.”

A high yellow Civil Rights Movement child, Danzy Senna expressed her consternation about the sudden rise to relevance of the new mixed people in her widely-read article, “The Mulatto Millennium.” Her article inspired many more critics of the multiracial movement, and before anyone could say President Obama, defining oneself as mixed had become a new social justice faux pas. Before long, ethnically ambiguous bodies that once signified new racial types and emergent third cultures came to be viewed in academia, in the media, and in the social justice field as a potential threat to the gains, memory, and morality of the US Civil Rights Movement.

All of which was so disheartening to those of us who realized that what was also being pushed into oblivion was a common postmodern sensibility that helped in creating multiracial identities of various ethnic and racial combinations in addition to black and white. Far from being a ploy of systemic racism, the corporate media, or conservative post-racial politics, creating and asserting a multiracial identity was about rebelling in postmodern fashion against the classic laws of thought. It was about saying FU to the one-drop rule, and to other traditions of hypodescent, and to all the powerful institutions that suppress multiraciality; it was about saying NO to the tradition of racial passing, and demonstrating that race is always already constructed, unstable, and permeable.

Asserting a multiracial identity was also about performing and writing your mixed self into existence. It was about telling your own messy mixed up stories, and believing in the capacity of personality and imagination to forge unique forms of expression that resist the superimposition of prefab racial and ethnic identities, images, and scripts.

Asserting a multiracial identity was also about seeing and treating race as a toxic, addictive concoction that can be interrogated, deconstructed, and damaged to the point where all racial misfits would feel at home in the world.

But alas…

The possibility of an imminent mulatto millennium led to the founding of the Alliance for Racial and Ethnic Stability–ARES for short. The primary mission of ARES is to un-blur established racial and ethnic lines so that the 21^st century will be remembered as the first century of the monoracial millennium.

To achieve this outcome, ARES and the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) implemented Educational Directive 15 (ED 15) to manage the possibility of unruly Census data and other unintended consequences following the strategic adoption of the check-more-than-one-race option for Census 2000. Couched in the language of respect for the dignity of individuals to choose and name their own identities, ED 15 promotes an alternative agenda: re-suppress, degrade, intimidate, confound, and monoracialize the growing multiracial-identified population—that is, re-educate mixed folk so that they will eventually choose to align their personal identities with official, corporate-approved, state-designated racial/ethnic identifications.

Those who continue to identify as mixed or multiracial as if this were 1999 are monitored by ARES affiliates comprising traditional civil rights organizations, neoliberal think tanks, racial justice social media activists, AA activists, and avowedly white liberal allies like Tim Wise—collectively known as the Professional Social Justice Activist Class (PSJAC). Rather than disregard the existence of mixed folks like in the past, the PSJAC happily acknowledges them so that they can be more easily managed and encouraged to publicly present multiracial identities and stories that advance, rather than undermine, the moral authority of ARES.

Academic members of the PSJAC were successful in their efforts to rewrite the history of the US multiracial movement as symptomatic of white supremacy. The Interracial Voice, a popular online hub of the movement in the 1990s, was renamed the Inter-racist Voice, and Charles Byrd, its editor, is now known as that naïve, racist tool of post-racial, colorblind ideologues like Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly. Pro-multiracial identity advocates from the 1990s, Susan Graham and Francis Wardle (a father and a husband) were conflated into the stereotypical white woman in an interracial marriage who feels more than entitled to transfer her white privilege to her biracial black children. College students interested in the multiracial movement now learn that Maria Root and Ward Connerly were political allies united in their desire to demoralize and dilute POC communities.

Former pro-mixed-identity scholars from the nineties who remain in academia find themselves obligated to worship at the altar of Eduardo Bonilla Silva. Once they sang Kumbaya at pan-multiracial collegiate conferences alongside hapas and other mixies of various backgrounds, but now they join the chorus of conference-going white liberal academics that seems to never grow tired of condemning the media for constantly trying to lynch President Obama. They nod in agreement with those who say that white supremacy works through the hearts and souls of foolish, confused, and misguided mixed folks. They join other antiracist academic activists in chanting: Ah, Whiteness—thou art the primum mobile, the blinding overhang, material and essential—race and racial projects, always and forever, until, and only until, that day comes when all the official races of the world have achieved balance, justice and equality. Amen!

Those mixed-identified scholars who flat out refuse to admit that they had been aspiring to whiteness all along typically find themselves on the fringe of academia, or outside of academia altogether. Some have moved to Greece, Albania, Bahrain, Belize, Kurdistan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Slovenia, Slovakia, and South Africa to study, live, or work. Some have gone on to teach in public high schools and in private boarding schools. The practical ones went into different fields altogether like cyber security, software design, accounting, flipping houses, or driving for Uber. Some are very happy to have left academia for good.

Indeed…in this Age of Obama, it just doesn’t pay to be racially or ethnically fluid anymore. It pays to assert a monoracial identity and to pledge your allegiance to ARES.

In other words, in the Age of Obama:

And/both and neither/nor came to be known as sophisticated forms of whitesplaining.

Mixed became a wrongheaded, backward-looking descriptor.

Mixed chicks became light-skinned black chicks once again.

Pan-ethnic multiracial idealism was classified as a new form of white coveting.

Mixed folks are no longer One-Dropped; they are Yaba or Zeba Blay-Dropped.

But these victories were deemed inadequate by the pragmatic faction of ARES, which maintained that additional measures were needed to permanently seal the Pandora’s Box of mixed race.

In response this concern, ARES partnered with the Obama Administration and the Clinton Foundation to launch the Ethnic DNA Global Initiative, awarding an initial 1.2 billion dollar contract to Skip Gates Inc. to market and administer Ethnic DNA tests in all free-market countries, so that by 2050 people will no longer be confused about their racial identity, thanks to science.

In phase 2150, after more than a century of world-wide Ethnic DNA testing, ARES and the UN Global Census Bureau will fabricate a new set of Ethnic Quantum Rules (EQR) that will effectively re-aggregate all peoples of the world back into four quantifiable race cultures: Black, White, Asian, and Indigenous.

ARES predicts that by 2250 it will achieve its primary mission–one world under race indivisible with liberty, justice, and equality for all official races.

However, the Age of Obama is now coming to an end. Could mixed folks outperform in the future? Could an upsurge in the meeting and mixing of various peoples from all over the world destabilize the global-capitalist-mono-racializing agenda of ARES? Will there emerge a new generation of hard-to-exploit mixed folks that will shout out to the global establishment: NO to Ethnic DNA marketing, NO to race addiction, and NO to the vision of ARES?

Perhaps. But in the meantime…

Let us invoke the spirit of Jean Toomer and pray to the Gods of Change for the becoming of a new generation of world mixed folks that is difficult to commodify, analyze, control, and consume–a new generation that LOVES in-external racial-ethnic ambiguity; a new generation that says YES to knowing History; YES to communicating in languages besides English; YES to fighting for the oppressed, silenced, and impoverished; YES to a universal basic income; and YES to the long and patient collective labor of creating a new IDEA of TRANS-national-racial-ethnic democratic humanity.