Tanya Hernández wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News about ongoing discrimination faced by multiracial individuals and those in interracial marriages.
Interracial marriage has been legal for nearly half a century. But the products of those marriages are subject to discrimination that reveals a great deal about race in America, and the cultural status of those unions.In my own examination of civil rights cases across employment, housing, public accommodations, education and jury service, I find an increasing number of claimants who identify themselves as multiracial and biracial. The cases frequently describe acts of discrimination accompanied by pointed, derogatory comments about nonwhiteness — and blackness in particular.The commonality in all of these cases is that even though the complainants identify as multiracial, they face standard discrimination rooted in nonwhite and black bias that is not novel or particular to mixed-race persons.
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…I have come to conclude that multiracial discrimination cases are helpful in highlighting the continued need for attention to racial privilege, and for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial hierarchy and the lingering legacy of bias against any form of nonwhiteness.This insight is especially salient as the growth of a mixed-race population in the United States that identifies itself as multiracial has commanded public attention. The U.S. Census Bureau began permitting respondents to simultaneously select multiple racial categories to designate their multiracial backgrounds only with the 2000 Census. In that year and then 2010, first 6.8 million people, then 9 million people, selected two or more races. The Census Bureau projects that the self-identified multiracial population will triple by 2060.But the public fascination with multiracial identity, no doubt accelerated by the presidency of Barack Obama, has promoted the belief that racial mixture will, in and of itself, destroy racism.The equating of racial mixture with racial harmony is often quite explicit. In a 1995 Newsweek article, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson stated: “If your object is the eventual integration of the races, a mixed-race or middle group is something you’d want to see developing. . . . The middle group grows larger and larger, and the races eventually blend.” Good theory. In practice, at least so far, the multiracial heirs of the Loving decision continue to experience discrimination — not because they are mixed-race, but because they are not white.
The growth of a multiracial-identified population does not portend the end of racism but rather a broader landscape for imposing difference.
