But I think this is pointing out the whole multi racial issue is being picked up and over intellectualized by a few blow hard’s that seem to think the world was created they day they were born. Having a collage degree doesn’t make you right; though it will help you get a job, just like being Mixed race can.

I was a budding multiracial college activist in the early nineties, when the first student groups were establishing themselves on the East Coast. The first M.P.P. Root edited anthology had just come out, and the Bill of Rights was years away. This was before the first intercollegiate conference, before we could’ve dreamed of anything like Mavin or Swirl or MMW. We saw ourselves as the first post-Loving generation to come of age as multiracial, and the college campus was our crucible. I started our campus’ first “Multiracial Heritage Week” as a first-year student, and I clearly remember having “put a multiracial box on the 2000 census” petitions out for people to sign at events. We were in our own struggle with the Admission office to figure out a way for us to identify and track multiracial prospective students, and we were giddy with the feeling of being with a critical mass of others with whom, for the first time, we could talk about these issues.

But then, well, we grew up. We took our interests in race, diversity, and social justice from the club meeting to the classroom, took whatever passed for “ethnic studies” (till we were able to get a major a few years later), read “Racial Formation” and other books, cobbling together what can now legitimately be called critical multiracial studies. And you know what? Putting what we learned in the classroom together with what we were experiencing in our lives as campus activists in the college community of color—and yes, we were deliberately constructing multiraciality as a politically aligned subaltern identity within the community color—we decided that what we were being asked to support, by organizations like Project RACE, by a leadership made up of predominantly monoracial parents of small children much younger than us (and yes, they were mostly white women) with a smattering of older multiracial adults who had come of age in an era much different from our own, didn’t make sense.

We took to heart Lisa Jones’ proposition, proferred in “Bulletproof Diva” but made orally at the very first intercollegiate gathering that we had at Wesleyan so many years ago, that unless “multiracial” meant “anti-racist,” then it really didn’t mean anything. We figured out pretty quickly that color-blindness was not a practical or practicable, or even desirable, situation, that institutional racism’s continued existence demanded our ability to track and collect data, and that the last thing we needed right now was another damn box. It wasn’t what some of our elders wanted to hear coming from the next generation—but education’s always a doubled-edged sword, ain’t it?

Fast-forward to the present day, literally–prompted by this post, I just checked out Project Race’s website, and Susan Graham has a “letter from the director” dated June 16, 2006 up, decrying the current multiracial movement’s leadership’s support for California’s legslation that, following federal guidelines, would allow respondants to check multiple boxes on data forms but would not add Project RACE’s holy grail of a separate multiracial box. Yeah, JC and CVK, she’s talking about people like y’all–and she doesn’t have very nice words for ya, either. Still at it, still stuck in the kind of mindset that leads otherwise sensible people in the public eye to suggest that the best way to fight racism, if it still exists, is to basically pretend it doesn’t (you know who I’m talking about).

Furthermore, the disingenous maneuvers to eliminate racial categories on government surveys, forms, etc. is just a sneaky way of dismantling civil rights laws. How is it possible to know if there is statistical discrimination against Asians or Latinos in housing or racial profiling against Native Americans or African Americans by highway police officers? No one likes being labeled and categorized for racially scripted trains of thought. However, noting individuals race in certain areas is vital to preventing and stamping out discrimination.

Recently, Wall Street financial firms have seen a number of gender discrimination cases where women have shown that because of their gender they were denied jobs and equitable compenstation. Being able to show data comparing hiring practices and wages of men vs women is important for those cases.

Unfortunately, France has tried to play the game of “every one is equal and there’s no discrimination; so we won’t collect data on the race or ethnicity of applicants or employees.” The result of this has been widespread discrimination against people of color. (Read up on the riots of last summer in France and the problems youth of color have getting into university and obtaining professional employment. It’s really disturbing.)