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This chapter will describe the social development of people increasingly identifying as multiracial, and introduce the social and legal implications of this. It will then identify the concept of multiracial-identity scholarship and its premise that the multiracial experience of discrimination is exceptional and not well understood or handled by present anti-discrimination law. It will set out the theoretical inquiry of the book as addressing the questions 1) does the increase in the number of individuals who identify as mixed-race present unique challenges to the pursuit of political equality; 2) how should law respond to multiracial racial identity in a manner that enables such persons to protect themselves from domination; and 3) does the advent of multiracial racial identity necessitate a new vision of what racial equality means?

This chapter will closely examine the context of employment discrimination as it is the arena in which the greatest number of multiracial discrimination claims are filed (as compared to other areas of discrimination law examined in later chapters). It will open with the story of Jill Mitchell, a light-skinned black and white biracial woman who experienced a dramatic change in workplace treatment after her supervisor discovered that his presumption that she was a mixed Hispanic white woman was erroneous. The chapter will delineate how Jill Mitchell’s story and the vast majority of cases filed entail allegations of non-white and specifically anti-black bias rather than prejudice rooted in hostility towards racial mixture itself. Moreover, the existing cases display judicial clarity in the administration of multiracial claimant allegations. The courts treat the claims as viable and apply anti-discrimination law in a conventional manner that permits claims to succeed unless the available evidence fails to meet legal standards. Additional onerous evidentiary burdens are not placed upon multiracial complainants. The chapter thus concludes that the cases do not justify the multiracial-identity scholar conjecture that multiracial claims are inadequately addressed.

Because the educational context was the site where the movement for multiracial identity recognition was launched, one might expect the school environment to have the clearest articulation of the contours of multiracial discrimination. Yet like all the civil rights areas discussed in the previous chapters, the multiracial complainants of racial discrimination in school settings raise concerns about being treated differently to white students based upon their non-white status rather than their mixed-race status. One paradigmatic case (of the several I will discuss in the chapter) is of a biracial high school student in La Plata, Missouri alleging in 2005 that she was not afforded the same educational opportunities as white students, was disciplined in a discriminatory fashion, and was racially harassed by white students. In short, the educational context is yet another civil rights area where self-identified multiracial complainants give voice to the continued relevance of a white/non-white racial binary of discrimination rather than the development of a unique mixed-race form of discrimination.

Distinctive from the context of workplace discrimination where multiracial complainants articulate their own legal complaints, the housing context is characterized by an absence of such direct complaints. The issue of multiraciality in housing discrimination is instead raised by partners in interracial marriages with multiracial children. Yet, like in the employment context discussed in Chapter 2, the content of the complaints are focused on the hostility with non-whiteness and blackness in particular (as all but one case encompassed non-black racial groups). One paradigmatic case (of the several discussed in the chapter) is of a white mother’s challenge to a 2003 eviction in Ohio based upon the landlord’s expressed prejudice against her two biracial sons of white and black ancestry. The landlord expressed concern that “two black boys” lived with the complainant and stated “I don’t want your money, I want your. … niggers out of my house.” While the mother may have described her sons’ personal racial identities as biracial, the discrimination she described was rooted in societal anti-black bias.

When mixed-race persons are removed from society because they have either been arrested or convicted of a criminal offense, the criminal justice system they enter is not devoid of racial hierarchy. In fact, there are ways in which the criminal justice system is even more explicitly racially stratified with whites as the bulk of law enforcement officers and non-whites as the disproportionate portion of arrestees and inmates. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states are black and/or Latino, and convictions for drug offenses have been identified as the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States. It is thus noteworthy to observe that mixed-race arrestees and prisoners describe their experiences of discrimination in ways that parallel the white versus non-white binary found in all other multiracial discrimination contexts.

This chapter will delve into the question of what fundamentally concerns multiracial-identity scholars about the discrimination cases despite the fact that the empirical record does not by and large show anti-mixture animus. For multiracial-identity scholars, the primary locus of multiracial discrimination is in any societal resistance to the assertion of multiracial identity. The chapter calls this “Personal Identity Equality” and discusses its dangers. This is because the exotification of racial mixture is something that is now being drawn upon to undermine the pursuit of racial equality public policies. Tracing the challenges to race-based affirmative action over the last ten years, this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Supreme Court litigation has referred to the growth of mixed-race persons as undercutting the legitimacy of affirmative action policies. The chapter will also demonstrate the ways in which the Supreme Court affirmative action litigation references to mixed-race persons parallels the public discourse notion that the growth of multiracial identified persons signals the decline of racism. The chapter concludes by identifying how the association of multiracial identity with the decline of racism poses challenges to addressing the continuing discrimination against all non-white persons including those who are mixed-race.

This chapter focuses on the subset of black-white couples who were parents to examine: expectations of their child's racial classification; how parents categorized their children after birth; and the implications for eligibility for university affirmative action. Carioca parents often expected to have black children due to mixture with a black parent. However, after birth, a child's phenotype determined the category they fit into, such that a child could be white, black, or less commonly, “mixed." Affirmative action did not cause Carioca parents to waver in their assessments of their children's race; white children were ineligible. Angelino parents described their child's race as additive: both black and white. They maintained the biracial categorization before and after their child's birth, regardless of the child's appearance. In light of affirmative action eligibility, Angelino parents became more flexible in their assessment, emphasizing blackness if they considered it advantageous. Sometimes they understood “biracial” as a unique minority status adding to institutional diversity. This chapter demonstrates parents' part in the social construction of new ethnoracial boundaries, strengthening of pre-existing ones, and the effect of public policy on understandings of ethnoracial boundaries.

Chapter one sets the context by detailing the various laws and restrictions imposed upon Southern free people of color over the course of the antebellum era, and particularly the 1850s, when moves to expel or enslave free blacks reached a crescendo. “Voluntary” enslavement legislation and debates therefore represented the culmination of a pro-slavery rhetoric which assumed slavery was a positive good. Such legislation also facilitated the shift towards an “idealized” biracial South of black slaves and free white people. The chapter contextualizes the ever-more restrictive legislation towards free people of color enacted prior to the 1850s. It then considers those laws debated and passed during this decade and the early 1860s, and suggest broader implications of their severity. Comparing and contrasting legislative action across the South, despite somewhat imbalanced surviving evidence and different degrees of legislation against free blacks, reveals the motivations behind expulsion and enslavement laws. Moreover, while the coming of war meant some laws were never enacted or enforced, debates over expulsion and enslavement offer a stark reminder of the direction in which the American South was travelling - towards the enslavement of all free people of color.

The 1964 transfer of Reverend W. C. Dobbins to an Alabama church changed the nature and the focus of the continuing black freedom struggle. Reverend H. K. Matthews asserted himself as the leading spokesman for area blacks and confronted the persistence of de facto racism in an increasingly hostile racial climate, despite formation of the Pensacola Biracial Committee in the aftermath of the downtown sit-ins. The local movement evolved after the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) ended de jure segregation to address minority employment, poverty, and the institutionalized forms of cultural discrimination that permeated county schools. The biracial committee, which became the Pensacola Human Relations Commission in 1966, intensified the class-based divisions which plagued the black community in Northwest Florida. As the 1960s concluded, Rev. Matthews formed the Escambia County Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and focused the organization’s attention on the alleged racism of the Escambia County Sherriff’s Department and the existence of Confederate imagery in area public schools.

The sixth chapter, following Chloe, details how a biracial student misrecognizes the violence embodied in socially approved normalcy and fails to connect her social problems to the structural violence endemic to the race and gender subordination documented in this book. Statusitis and her insatiable quest for hegemonic normalcy, especially regarding her hair, leads her to a kind of depression that is so severe she often finds it impossible to go to school.