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5 Internalizing Racial Identities

Some people with racially mixed parentage or heritage experience great difficulty asserting their preferred racial identities, especially when others continue to police these preferences and choices. How is it that, at a time of increased freedom of choice, individuals with mixed race parentage and heritage sometimes reject this opportunity to choose all races that apply? Why do some invest in the racial hierarchy that divides yet feel forced to choose “one and only one” race rather than claim the sum of their parts? Why do some multiracial people buy into the false notions of racial realness, thereby effectively disqualifying themselves or believing that they are not “really” the races that they claim? Why do some multiracial people internalize the racial identities affirmed by others rather than the ones that they themselves prefer (if and when differences exist between the two)? When will be the time for multiracial people to freely choose their preferred racial identities without contestation? Why do multiracial people border patrol themselves?

That multiracial individuals support and uphold racial hierarchies and categories based in part on their own racial ideologies and actions means they are not immune from developing problematic, prejudicial ways of thinking and participating in discriminatory action. It may seem counterintuitive that many multiracial people police racial borders, including their own. Their borders stand in contrast to the border blending suggested by statements about multiracial people having “the best of both worlds.”

One need only look at the ways that multiracial people encounter borderism from strangers, family members, and/or friends to understand auto-borderism, or a self-policing, border patrolling. Direct and indirect lines can be drawn socially between the border patrolling people encounter in society and their own perpetuation of that practice as directed toward themselves and others.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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162 The Borders of Race

An observable pattern begins to emerge in which multiracial people experience resistance or opposition to claiming their preferred identities, thereby limiting their own choices (and those of others). In this chapter, I discuss the process expressed by some of my respondents who policed their own racial identities. I provide some explanations for multiracial people choosing to patrol, rather than blend, racial borders.

When Multiracial People Border Patrol Their Own Identities

In 1967, the Loving v. Virginia decision removed the ban on interracial marriages in the U.S. (see Alonso 2000; Noble Maillard and Cuison Villazor 2012). Ostensibly, the increase in interracial marriages and in the multiracial population can be attributed directly to this decision, as well as shifting social norms that accommodates interracial intimacy and families. What these effects of the Loving decision have revealed, and concealed at the same time, are the complexity and varied levels of mixture in interracial marriages and in individuals. That is, that historic moment, coupled with another (the Multiracial Movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s), amplified attention to the existence of racial mixture at individual and familial levels (see Dalmage 2004a). This legislation and the subsequent collective social action of the 90s made much of the previously “hidden” racial mixtures appear. This appearance seemed sudden, rather than a historical residue or a pattern that had been centuries in the making.

While multiracial identities are more easily accommodated in general, some of the research respondents noted the difficulty in expressing and having their preferred identities validated. Instead of being “racial border blenders,” many respondents primarily opted for the ostensibly easier option: singular racial identities. Based on their accounts of borders, they felt unable to assert their preferred racial identities. Instead, they often chose to dissolve their complex, racial realities into tidy, racial categories. As the earlier chapters (3 and 4) reveal, asserting a singular racial identity publicly did not always prove a simple matter. Sometimes, it actually intensified the border patrolling these multiracial individuals faced.

Due to a lack of information about familial histories and racial genealogies; encountering invalidation or opposition from others; or, wanting to evade racial surveillance from others, respondents who border patrolled themselves seemed to internalize and perpetuate the policing of strangers and significant others. I acknowledge these connections between border patrolling from the outside-in, outsiders-

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Internalizing Racial Identities 163

within, and inside-out, focusing here on the last method of border patrolling—inside-out.

As discussed in previous chapters, I found that individuals managed their multiracial identities in many ways. Sometimes they internalized racial borders, imposing the rules of race and racial identity options on themselves. The ongoing process of racial socialization and the persistence of structural racism combined to inform multiracial identity choices and constraints; many multiracial people described how they policed their own racial identities. Rather than resist these racial rules and the racial hierarchy, they sorted themselves into socially appropriate and positively sanctioned categories. Many chose singular racial identities in response to these social pressures instead of enjoying “the best of both worlds.” That is, many multiracial people managed social pressures surrounding their racial multiplicity by choosing singular racial identities. In this chapter, I discuss the way that multiracial people engage in benevolent, beneficiary, and malevolent border patrolling of their own. I begin with benevolent border patrolling.

Benevolent Border Patrolling: “All of My Life, I Was Socialized as an African American”

“Black” is the umbrella term for minorities to kind of come together under because “black,” as it has evolved, does not necessarily just refer to African Americans. On the other side, when you’re saying that you’re black, you’re still keeping the dichotomy of black and white, which aside from not being fair to other groups, I think it’s just not realistic as well. And it also causes some limiting there as well, because even though black is an umbrella term for minorities, it’s still kind of rooted in some notion of an African American identity as well. (James, a black-identified Black and Native American man)

Throughout the interview, James complicated the concept and question of “blackness,” interrogating the term, exploring its many meanings, and noting its expansive reach and inclusive quality. He also shared how specifically it applied to particular people, both including and excluding him at once.

I begin with the above quote from James because he grapples with the multiple meanings of blackness; his narrative attempts to answer the question posed in Brunsma and Rockquemore’s (2002) article, “What Does ‘Black’ Mean?” In offering up his experiential knowledge of blackness, James shared ideas that echo the authors’ discussion of what they call the “epistemological stranglehold of racial categorization.”

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164 The Borders of Race

These authors explore in their investigation of the meanings of blackness. Interestingly, as the category “black” continues to expand today to un/easily accommodate mixture, the category (to James’s point) may reinforce a white/black binary. However, in ways that parallel the “expanding boundaries of whiteness” (see Gallagher 2004), a similar expansion of blackness continues. This draws attention to the mixture embedded in both whiteness and blackness. While this seemingly upholds these two racial categories as two-and-only-two singular and cohesive racial groups, I refer to them to simultaneously undermine the implicit and taken-for-granted singularity and cohesion within their categorical connotations. That is, this multiplicity and variability exists across all racial categories.

Racial multiplicity exists, and hides in plain sight, as “invisible mixture.” Linguistically and socially, the terms “white” and “black” reinforce singularity, not mixture. The terms then make mixture situationally il/legible. Mixture largely becomes legible or visible through usage of the very term, “mixture,” even as it exists in “single” race categories, such as “white” and “black.” While these singular race terms suggest specificity, they also implicitly capture a multiplicity. That is, single race categories suggest just that, singularity, which reinforces the idea of “one-and-only-one” race. The myth of such a racially pure, cohesive, and coherent racial category convinces people that racial multiplicity only exists in people who claim more than one race. Thus, for most of the national population, this multiplicity often remains unnamed and resides under the veil of singularity. Mixture also disappears through the stories that families tell about themselves and their heritage. I discuss these “sins of omission” in the socialization that family storytelling makes possible in racially mixed families.

Mysteries of Histories

In attempting to sort out what I call the “mysteries of histories” in families, James asks “a lot of questions” to disentangle his heritage. He explores his family biography in an attempt to answer his many questions; to curb the curiosities about his identity and to solve some of those “mysteries of histories.” He wants to more fully understand his Nigerian and Native American ancestry, especially in relation to his blackness. Recognizing both his African American and Native American ancestry is a practice that allows him (and other black and Native American respondents) to acknowledge “intermarriage further back in their family history” (Campbell 2007:926). This point follows Jessie Turner’s (2013) work on historical and contemporary mixture and

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invites us to consider what constitutes the old and the new, with respect to racial mixture. To Jenifer Bratter’s (2007) point, “multiracial” identity does not always survive the next generation. But when it does, it may take on new names with old faces, or maintain old names among new faces (see Dawkins 2012; Winters and DeBose 2003).

Despite considering the complexity of his rich heritage, James asserted what I understood as a singular black identity. However, he engaged in “problematizing blackness” by assigning expansive and inclusive meanings to the term, in its chosen (not forced) form (see Hintzen and Rahier 2003). Chosen blackness departs from the forced blackness historically mandated through the “one drop” rule of hypodescent; chosen blackness enriches and expands the meaning of blackness and recognizes more of its liberatory potential, a freedom to choose not fully afforded people with any known black African ancestry.

Other black multiracial respondents who identify as black engaged in this practice. That is, the term, “black,” weaved together a multiplicity of races and ethnicities, as evidenced in other respondents like Jessica, a black and Asian Indian woman, opting for black as James did. In doing so, people can acknowledge historical and contemporary mixtures of blackness (see Khanna 2010; Turner 2013). In thinking about these complexities and contradictions of racial singularity and multiplicity, I draw from the experiences shared by another respondent. Abigail, an African American-identified woman (also of Native American [Cherokee] heritage), shared that she asserts a singular black identity in part because of her illegible identities or racially mixed heritage.

As one of the older respondents in my research sample, Abigail grew up in a time and place that more closely abided by the rule of hypodescent and, therefore, endorsed this “one drop” rule of blackness. That rule canceled out, or denied, her racial mixture, and informed her way of thinking about racial categories. Growing up in a white/black binary supported by society meant that her mixture remained relatively out of reach to her. She explained, “I’m not mixed race. I appear to be more African American than anything else, you know?” Because she believes others see her as black, or that others do not see or acknowledge her mixed race heritage, she claims a black identity. She minimized this mixture to adopt a black identity because she believes that it is her blackness that is legible to others. Abigail “thinks mixture” in traditional ways with history and family shaping her perspective; indeed, she has internalized the “one drop” rule. Abigail’s narrative supports a “seeing is believing,” or “believing is seeing” (Lorber 1993) approach to racial classification in the sense that she relied heavily on

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166 The Borders of Race

the visibility or legibility of race. Doing so invalidates her illegible identities, instead of challenging our collective reliance on (racialized) appearances to categorize ourselves and others by race.

Much like other respondents, Abigail offered contradictions on her own racial location, illustrating how she benevolently border patrols herself:

I racially identify as African American basically but I remember that my mother told me when I was very young, she said, “Don’t ever forget that you are part Cherokee, part Cherokee Indian, Native American.” But all of my life, I socialized, was socialized as an African American or black child, you know, listening to R and B, and you know, dancing and everything was geared towards African American culture…. At the time, I didn’t question it. It meant, as I got older, that there’s something other than African American about me, something different about me…. That I just wasn’t all African. That, you know, there’s a part of me that was the “Other” if you wanna call it that. That wasn’t defined. It made me intercept my thinking I was all black. Well, not all black, your DNA might come back saying you’re all black. My appearance is black. Her words made me question that.

Despite questioning those “mysteries of histories” and her partial knowledge of racial mixture in her own family, Abigail continues to assert a black identity.

Similar to other black multiracial respondents, Abigail learned racial lessons, including that she should default to a black identity despite any “body as evidence” to the contrary (see Hobson 2012). Her story reveals what so many families work to conceal: racial mixture, then and now, and the stories that people speak or silence (see Nash and Viray 2014, 2013; Walters et al. 2011). These stories, and the silences that sometimes surround them, become part of the racial inheritance within all families, not exclusively racially mixed ones.

As Abigail illustrated, and in contrast to people with known Asian, Latino, and Native American ancestry who claim a white identity, people with known African ancestry may feel like they cannot claim a nonblack identity (Bratter 2007; Khanna 2010); otherwise, they opt for blackness as an assertion of their right to choose. In the latter case, the act of choosing is an expression of self-definition or an act of resistance to borderism. In the former case, multiracial people may sense some social constraints to available choices, such that the particularities of the geographies of race expand or limit their options; they may feel like they are “forced to choose” or effectively “passing as black” (see Khanna

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Internalizing Racial Identities 167

2010), or they may actively choose a preferred black identity, experienced not as limitation but in terms of liberation.

The challenge in this choosing involves consideration of the history of individual and collective mixture; current and historical mixture; and, consensual and forced mixture. These considerations thus include acknowledgment of the variations of racial identity and claims to mixture made increasingly broader during the Multiracial Movement of the late 20th Century; they invite people to “think mixture” and reflect on how the concept of racial mixture and who is mixed changes across time and space.

In Abigail’s example above, she thinks mixture through the lens of the one-drop rule. Although she acknowledges the familial mixture of black and Native American ancestry, she does not claim a black and Native American multiracial identity; her “opting for black” typifies the tensions between agency and the legacy of racial rules and paradigms that foreclose choice for people with certain racial combinations (see Campbell 2007). As Campbell notes, many African Americans in contemporary society remain reluctant to publicly make claims to their Native American ancestry, fearing racial invalidations and accusations similar to the ones described by respondents like Abigail. They worked to avoid the charge that they were falsely attempting to diversify or dilute their blackness with indigeneity. Respondents like Abigail opted for blackness but the kind of blackness that incorporates these charges with a positive spin. That is, if the common charge was that African Americans always try to claim Native American ancestry, then “blackness” in this context is always already mixed with Native American ancestry. Rather than risk naming both her African American and Native American ancestry, Abigail effectively wove those ancestries into blackness. This exemplifies my earlier point about the illusion of singular racial categories being cohesive. The narrative of Abigail and others provides evidence of racial multiplicity taking up residence in single race categories.

Another respondent shared the process of her racial identity formation and her experiences with benevolent border patrolling. Wendy, a light-skinned, black Hispanic, described moving from a northern city to a southern one, and navigating impediments to connecting with other Latinos. In that northern city, she felt her skin color and lack of fluency in Spanish disconnected her from other Latinas. During our interview, Wendy further suggested that her limited Spanish-speaking ability prohibited her from getting “that deep” with “the Spanish group” in high school because “every now and then, I wouldn’t know what they were talking about” (when they spoke in

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168 The Borders of Race

Spanish). She contrasted her lack of fluency in Spanish with otherwise being an “articulate person.”

Unlike David (discussed later in this chapter and again in Chapter 6), Wendy does not experience, or admit to, this lack of Spanish language literacy and fluency as a source of tension that generates “imposter syndrome” (see Moore 2015). In contrast to him, she expresses much less awareness of the way the social construction of race and ethnicity are shaping these social dynamics, even as she discusses these and related issues. Instead, Wendy offered up a narrative framed by colorblindness, which minimized the significance of race and racism:

You know, when you’re asking me [about race], it’s weird. I’m trying to think back and I don’t really ever remember race being an issue, whether it was both of the races or either one of them. I mean, I guess I would more relate to being black because I don’t speak Spanish fluently and a lot of the things that I was put into as far as a child were mostly minority-oriented or black-oriented rather than Latino [said with an emphasized Spanish accent]. So I guess I would relate more to black but I mean there wasn’t really any like you know, “You’re black and Puerto Rican,” and I mean “You’re biracial.” I don’t remember ever asking, I don’t think I had an identity crisis or a race crisis about who I was. I remember I said to my mom one time, I um, I said, “Mom, I’m not black; I’m peach.” But that was, you know, like…the extent of it. I didn’t really think about it like that, I think.

Arguably, if race and ethnicity did not matter, it would not matter if Wendy knew Spanish, as people of all racial and ethnic groups have varying language literacies and skills. Ostensibly, she would be able to make connections to even a few other Latinos or to any and everybody based on her logic. However, if the expectation is that Wendy—as a multiracial Latina—know Spanish well (which she admits she does not), she may feel or be disqualified on some level; any markers of blackness may serve as further disqualification to some, or conversely, qualification and authentication to others. That she is read as black, but not necessarily Latina, offers partial explanation for the disconnection she experiences. She conveys a narrative that suggests that she is not allowed to be both and, therefore, border patrols herself.

What Wendy’s experience highlights is the lacuna, or the silence surrounding the racial and ethnic socialization she received in her family. She points to this silence as an absence; in that void, the term “biracial” does not exist. Hearing such a term might have affirmed to her, or signaled, that “black” and “Latina” are not mutually exclusive terms. Despite not learning the language to refer to her black and Latina

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Internalizing Racial Identities 169

identity, Wendy does show how she is able to intercept—and correct— the language others use to describe her: “I’m not black, I’m peach.” Despite noting that she does not think about race and ethnicity, she obviously does. She offers an awareness of her embodied reality, as she experiences the “multiracial” as “multicultural.” Wendy’s innocent and simple description of her color, as it contrasts with the language that speaks only to her “legible” blackness, allows her the agency to contest this and to recognize her reality as a multiracial and multicultural one.

The shift between “black” and “peach,” therefore, is not only a nominal and discursive one but also an important agentic one to the “names we call home” (Thompson and Tyagi 1996). These names are a colorful expression of embodied hybridity and multiplicity of life in the borderlands (see Anzaldua 1987; Canclini 2005). Wendy makes space in her family that the ampersand between being black and Latina creates. The ampersand acknowledges and accommodates her mixture, making space for complexity in her racial identity, and what some see as a contradiction, instead of the identity composition or sum of Wendy’s parts. While she may claim to not think about her life in racialized ways, she is clearly impacted by these dynamics in her family and in society, as they shape her sense of self and the social interactions she has with others.

Other respondents negotiate the ampersand differently. In contrast to Wendy, whose peach-colored skin could locate her in “white,” “honorary white,” and “collective black” categories, darker-skinned black Latinos reported different experiences as individuals more definitely located within the racial category of “collective blacks.” For example, Sanchez, a black and Latino Puerto Rican man, confronted the realities of borderism as a darker-skinned man. This reality includes recognizing the racial hierarchy and classification system that inform people’s perceptions of others and themselves He explained how he embraced the categorization to arrive at a singular racial identity. Growing up in “basically black or white” spaces (schools, neighborhoods, etc.), Sanchez noted how the absence of Asians or “any other race” created a white/black binary that meant he was defined as a black person. “I was like, ‘Okay, I know that I’m a black person. I mean my skin color is dark, so therefore I’m a black person.’ And I never really, to tell you the truth, when I was younger, I never really thought about race as much as I do today.” Sanchez’s understanding of his social location within the U.S. racial hierarchy supports Bonilla-Silva’s (2003) contention that darker-skinned people are sorted into a collective black category.

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170 The Borders of Race

Similar to Sanchez, Frank, a 21-year-old man describes how he arrived at a singular black identity and what I interpreted as benevolent borderism:

I identify racially as African American or Black. Now ethnically, I consider myself a mix and I’m a mix of different races—I mean different groups of people. Ah, Native American; as well as Spanish and oh no, not Spanish. Sorry, Um, German and French. My African American identity is dominant. It’s almost like chromosomes. You have dominant and you have recessive. So the Native American history, the Native American heritage or ethnicity, they’re all the same; they’re all related. The ethnicity is sort of recessive…. I experience being African American. In all honesty, I don’t think it has much to do with how I identify because even if I didn’t identify as African American, I would still be treated like an African American…. Because that’s how I look. I look African American. I guess I’m not light enough or um, of the consistency or what not, or whatever the case may be, to be considered mixed, so when they, for example, see me, the first thing they think of is black. The first thing that comes out of their mouth is “black.”

In borrowing from the language of natural sciences, Frank refers to the “dominant” and “recessive” genomic matter (“chromosomes”) which becomes a metonym of race, though in reverse (see also Bliss 2012; Dawkins 2012; Hochshild 2014). Frank observes that his “African American identity is dominant” in this society which means that he sees his African American parentage and heritage as phenotypically dominant, a point that inadvertently reinforces the one-drop rule to some degree. It suggests that because it is most visible (among his racial mixture), blackness trumps any other race, and that said racial mixture must be visible in order for it to be claimed.

In contrast to this dominance based on physical features or appearances, and based on the racial hierarchy in the U.S., the opposite proves true about social and structural dominance. In terms of power and privilege, whiteness, as a group position and ideological framework, dominates (see Blumer 1958; Feagin 2009). The taint of “contaminating” black blood (see Douglas 2002), borrowing from the biology of race discourse and racist ideologies about the polluting qualities of this blood, has historically been used as evidence of black inferiority; this discourse also supports false notions of race as biological, effectively essentializing and naturalizing it (see Spencer 2010; Bridges 2011).

Frank contrasted his self-image with others’ perceptions of his race, pointing to the pattern in which others see him as black. Because of his

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Internalizing Racial Identities 171

(dark skin) appearance, Frank (like Abigail) believed that asserting a mixed identity would prove arduous, a point echoed in the work of Khanna (2011) and others. The absence of discernible markers of mixture dissuaded Frank from incorporating mixture immediately into his identity.1 He regarded visible mixture a requisite criteria for claiming a mixed identity, despite discursively recognizing a “multiethnic,” if not multiracial, heritage. He explained his rejection of the label “mixed,” citing these reasons:

The diversity is not allowed to exist. That’s why it’s recessive. The resistance is everywhere. It’s in institutions, with your peers…Institutionally, for instance, you, until recently, weren’t allowed to identify as anything more than, either, you’re African American, you’re white, you’re not European American, or you’re Asian American and so forth. Even if I put on (forms), considering that I have Spanish and German, Native American, African American, I could put on there “white” but if I get stopped by a police officer, shoot, no matter what, pick one, no matter what happens if, they’ll look at you, and you say white, they’ll say, “Yeah, right. Yeah, stop lying.” You know. You could have a black person immigrate from Germany to America and they say, “Okay, you’re German. You’re black. You’re African American.” Which they don’t know how far back you have to go to get to Africa in this heritage but it’s got to be back there somewhere because you’re black. And “African American” to my peers is devalued. It is considered an insult, like you’re denying yourself or you’re insulting your race or your heritage to say, “Okay,” that you’re not just black because you have the oppressor and you have the oppressed and the oppressor.

Frank’s comments illustrate what Audre Lorde (1984) discusses in Sister Outsider, that we are all the oppressed and oppressor together, at once. Because he has encountered borderism from others, Frank opts for black:

I mean, I like the African American ethnicity. I think I identify with it. I think I would also, however, at least identify with my Native American heritage, I’m not so partial to my German and French heritage in that, it’s basis is on people being forced to come. It’s not like they had a choice in the matter. If you get over here and you don’t like it, there’s a chain and you get whipped up. I mean, so, granted I am very much an admirer of Germany’s brilliance and France’s, you know, medical and scientific advancements, as well, you know, in that I have great respect for them.

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172 The Borders of Race

Frank recognizes his Native American ancestry, respects his German and French ancestry, and connects to his African American ethnic heritage. He also decidedly interprets race and arrives at his own racial identity on the basis of hypodescent (Khanna 2010; Brunsma 2006a). During our interview, Frank rejected the possibility of a person’s mixture being “clearly invisible” (Dawkins 2012; see also Buchanan and Acevedo 2004), which ignores the number of multiracial people “hiding in plain sight” because they do not appear to be what I call, “clearly mixed.” In a way, this logic upholds the racial hierarchy and system of racial stratification. By doing so, he border patrols his racial identity choices. This creates a chain of events, reflecting others limiting his racial identity options and illustrating his own imposition of that limitation; this potentially extends to how he supports or denies others in their preferred racial identities. That is, as he is denied choice, he likely internalizes that constraint and, in effect, denies others with invisible mixture their own freedom to choose. Frank also overlooked how many visibly multiracial people face similar kinds of identity invalidation, if they too, like him, do not look sufficiently mixed or are not clearly ambiguous.

Like Frank, Kelly (a black-identified woman with French Guyanese, French, Asian Indian, Blackfoot Indian, Black American, German, and a “splash of Irish” ancestry) racially identified as black or “Black American because…that’s how the general public perceives me.” Both felt that they would be treated as black by the public and in public; this implies that 1) they anticipate or fear facing antiblack racial discrimination and devaluation (see also Yancey 2003), alienation, or differential treatment because of their perceived blackness, and/or 2) they would benefit from collective conscience and experience black solidarity and racial kinship if and when perceived by other black people as sharing a similar black identity.

Though Kelly thought she “would claim a multiracial identity if society allowed,” she made clear her satisfaction and “comfort with being black.” Rather than adopt an “anything but black” position (Bonilla-Silva 2003b), Kelly and others actively challenged such antiblack ideologies by purposefully opting for black. Despite persistent antiblack racism, that includes maneuvers away from blackness in this society, Kelly, Frank, and others moved towards blackness by embracing African American racial and ethnic identities.

With racial mixture in her family that was “more distant…not direct (since) it’s not like my mom’s one mono-race and my father’s one mono-race,” Kelly described the intergenerational negotiations of race. This accounts for both mixture shifting as well as a change in racial

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Internalizing Racial Identities 173

categories and the meanings attached to them across generations. In socially constructing her parents as having singular races, while recognizing their racial mixture as “distant,” Kelly conveyed the way that distance made claiming a multiracial identity feel inaccessible to her. This distance, however real or imagined, made multiraciality that much more off-limits given the absence of immediate, visual markers of racial mixture. Although Kelly’s mixture is both contemporary and historical (Turner 2013), she remained ambivalent about claiming a multiracial identity.

Kelly’s reluctance, much like Frank’s, rested on her perception and understanding of what counts as mixed; it also illustrates Bratter’s (2007) concern about the survival of multiracial identification to “the next generation.” It may also relate to the construction of a black family. To some, the maintenance of a “black” family may be predicated on all its members asserting black identities versus departing from that expectation. The implicit concern is that a single departure would signal a departure from blackness (or be read as antiblackness) as opposed to a problematizing of blackness, in recognition of its richness and categorical complexity, across the diaspora.

Having grown up in and been socialized as part of a family that collectively asserted blackness (or whose members individually and/or collectively asserted black identities), Kelly did not exactly view herself as a “first-generation” multiracial (Daniel 2002) and felt she would not be able to claim a validated border (mixed) identity (see Campbell 2007). In fact, one-quarter of the respondents (with black heritage or parentage) asserted a singular black identity, evidence that supports existing literature indicating that a very small portion of blacks claims a multiracial identity (Lee and Bean 2004).

Notably, Kelly mentioned others’ interpolating or hailing her (Althusser 1971) as “more than black” (Daniel 2002). “I mean I’ve had people ask me, ‘So, what are you?’ And…for simplicity sake, you know, I say, ‘I’m black.’ ‘No, but really, what are you?’” That some people see her in this way suggests that, should she choose, she could assert a multiracial identity that others might validate in those moments (rather than fear imminent invalidation and contestation). Nevertheless, Kelly seemed to resent and reject the intended “compliments” others provided in presuming her to be Brazilian (mixed, not black); or, when saying, “‘Oh, you don’t look fully black.’ Or ‘You know you have…a little bit of oh, something else in you.’” She suspected that others may have intended their comments as compliments but she failed to see them as such. Instead, she implied that she saw them as sociologist Heather Dalmage (2000) describes: “racist compliments.”

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Had her parents’ looks contrasted each other more, such that they were more “obviously interracial” or visibly mixed, and/or had they chosen multiracial or black identities, Kelly might have felt more compelled to choose such an identity for herself. I suspect this might be the case for other black multiracial people. Without these verbal or visible markers of mixture in significant others, those who get to claim such a validated multiracial identity remain on exclusive and contested terrain (Morning 2000), a point Khanna (2011) also makes in her book, Biracial in America.

For Kelly and others, choosing blackness also serves as an expression of racial solidarity and/or an explicit rejection of “multiracial” privilege. As some black multiracial people move towards, not away from, blackness, they challenge the antiblackness that prevails in the U.S. Many black multiracial respondents expressed views similar to Kelly. They found that the “absence of a presence” (Fine 2002), in this case a racial presence, or a “clearly mixed” phenotype or physical appearance, denied them the chance to choose a “mixed” identity. The absence of racial mixture in the form of a visibly recognizable or legible interracial family (nuclear or extended) remained present in their lives. They negotiated this absence by expressing their desire to explore more of their family heritage and racially mixed ancestry. Their choosing blackness then can be understood as both constrained and concerted: their “too dark to not be black” skin color marked them as black, because of the one-drop rule (Khanna 2010), but also allowed them to actively, positively embrace blackness.

In the next section, I consider the ways in which multiracial individuals make strategic identity moves to increase their mobility and facility in the world. I illustrate the ways that some multiracial people curiously produce colorblind narratives or deny the reality of race, yet appear to be managing their multiracial identity in ways that ensure their access to some racial privilege.

Beneficiary Border Patrolling: A Matter of Choice, Convenience, or Privilege?

For some of my respondents, acknowledging a racially mixed heritage proved easier than asserting their own mixed race identity. Naming a multiracial heritage enabled them to preserve the privileges associated with the identities they chose. Unlike benevolent border patrolling of identity, beneficiary border patrolling involved respondents generally claiming a singular race that ensured greater social status than the races not embraced or acknowledged. Most examples of beneficiary border

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patrolling came from white-identified individuals (including White and Asian and White and Latino respondents, and one White/Native American respondent). In these cases, I saw these respondents as avoiding a multiracial identity (based on the perception of its lower social status and value in the racial hierarchy), and opting for white (based on the perception of the benefits that accrue from whiteness).

Sociologists such as Mary Waters (1999) found that white people reveal and conceal their ethnicity as they so desire. They may claim one ethnicity based on its popularity in a particular historical moment, social setting, or context; or, they may reject or deny parts of their ethnic heritage. They claim or reject contingent on a set of variables including the popularity of an ethnicity, or any animosity directed at certain ethnic groups in particular social settings or historical moments. In my research, I discovered that some multiracial people engage in practices parallel to exercising their “ethnic options” by making a series of racial options. This ongoing process of negotiating identity involves revealing and concealing the composite parts of their (multi)racial heritage.

Consistent with the ways a white person interprets their “ethnic options” (Waters 1990), Dakota, a white-identified white Asian multiracial woman, treats her racial identity similarly. She explained: “I do identify as Korean when it is convenient,2 I guess…I always say that I am White on the standardized tests and things like that but, in social situations when I am talking to people, I always say that I am half Korean. I guess it makes things more interesting and I don’t feel that I am a boring White girl.” This last observation suggests that Dakota was “thinking the border” strategically—opting for white and/or Asian, depending on which identity benefits her. As she suggests, she benefits from being “half Korean.” Being able to brighten the borders of race, she highlights her Korean identity to spice up what she might see as “vanilla” whiteness.

Formally identifying as white on applications can prove materially beneficial for white multiracials, as evidence suggests “opting for white” (Rockquemore and Arend 2002) is a currency in today’s racial hierarchy (Bonilla-Silva 2003a,b; Hunter 2005). These and other sources show the material benefits of and the possessive investment in whiteness (see also Lipsitz 2006; Harris 1993; Roediger 2003). Consistent with discussions of the emergent multiracial “identity grab bag” (Rockquemore, Brunsma, and Delgado, 2009), Dakota defaulted to whiteness because her physical appearance does not deny her that option. Alternately, one could interpret that she formally opted for whiteness, while having her (“half Korean”) mixture operate as an added “flavor.” However, some people read her as ambiguous, which places her in white and honorary

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white categories (and accounts for the different groups to which others perceive her as belonging to). The identities she chooses remain contingent on the situations she finds herself in and the perceptions of others.

As a general observation, I noticed that this and other white Asian multiracial individuals situationally employ their racial literacy to strategically shift their mixture to acquire the most privileges—the social and material benefits—attached to whiteness and increasingly to multiraciality. This ability to shift mixture operates as a material benefit not only of whiteness then, but also of white- or light-skinned multiraciality. That is, visible mixture affords some multiracial individuals material benefits comparable to white privilege in white- looking multiracials (see Bonilla-Silva 2004; Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003a,b; Gans 1999).

Finally, Dakota’s convenient deployment of her Korean parentage and identity allowed her to spice up her vanilla existence and reaffirm her whiteness. This speaks to the point that cultural theorist and literary critic, bell hooks, makes in her work; this “illustrates a commodification of the racial otherness as ‘a spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.’ The white woman does not seem to seek a broader cultural appreciation, but rather a brief cultural appropriation…She can perhaps have the fun of pretending to be black for one night, but can soon return to her privileged white appearance and style” (hooks 1992:21). Specifically among white Asian multiracials, many of them “spice” themselves up with their Asian “Otherness,” which reaffirms their predominantly white racial identity and white privilege. They normalize their choice for whiteness through these “Othering” discourses (Frankenberg 1993) and Orientalizing moves (see Said 1978), which fetishize rather than respect and celebrate difference. This fetishism of difference can also be a self-Orientalism when the “Other” is the self. This became evident in Dakota’s interview, when she said the following:

I see really cute Asian girls and sometimes I do wish that I looked Korean because, I don’t know why, but I just think they are so cute. But there is nothing I can do….I look at myself and I don’t feel like really Korean a lot, other than my hair color and a little bit my eyes. You know, like typical Korean girls have really small bodies, too thin.

By using language that supports the fetishism of Asian women, apparent in her reference to “really cute Asian girls,” Dakota could be viewed as admiring and/or creating a racialized spectacle of them.

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Though not mutually exclusive categories, these ways of seeing Asian women dislocates Dakota from sharing that identity. In my interpretation, it not only dislocates but distances Dakota from the category, “Asian American woman.” Perhaps as Dakota continues her education, she will consider ways of seeing herself as a part of the group of women she finds cute. How she constructs or imagines racial boundaries, specific to Asians, will reveal where she positions herself over time accordingly, be it at the margins or the center.

Some respondents, reluctant to embrace a mixed identity, also illustrated that they were transitioning into an incipient multiracial identity, much like Dakota. By learning more about their family’s racial diversity and starting to solve their family’s “mysteries of histories,” some of my participants began to more readily recognize their own multiraciality. They cultivated these nascent identities, growing their dimensions as they acquired knowledge of their family’s racial mixtures.

During our interview, Dakota stated, “I always feel White.” She experienced the feeling of being disqualified for not looking “Asian enough,” and described a disconnection to Korean culture, language, and people (resulting from being border patrolled by significant others, as previously discussed). These feelings of disconnection and encounters with borderism partially explain her racial identity options. Rather than reject Korean culture altogether, she seems ambivalent towards it: “I mean, it’s not like I am trying not to engage my Korean culture or anything like that. But I just think it’s that my mom didn’t really force Korean culture onto me…I mean I feel strange going to the Korean market.” Because she looks more white than Asian (and Korean specifically), Dakota feels out of place in predominantly Korean settings. Were she to be both darker and smaller, Dakota noted, she might feel more entitled to actively and publicly claim a Korean identity. This is so largely because people essentialize ethnicity and race, proscribing what counts as Korean or not. Believing that she fails a variety of authenticity tests, Dakota instead opts for white.

In ways that echo traces of Dakota’s narrative, Rose offered some of her experiences as a white-identified white and Native American multiracial woman. Rose readily acknowledged some Native American heritage and partially did so by recognizing the racial differences between her grandfather (who she described as having dark skin and being part Cherokee) and other relatives (who she described as white). Registering this racial difference discursively distances and disconnects Rose racially from the physically or phenotypically different relatives, thereby keeping her “whiteness” intact. Such discursive practices stabilize the category of whiteness without compromising its mythical

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purity, despite the acknowledgment of racial mixture. That is, Rose asserts and maintains a singular white identity comfortably, though she “spices up” her vanilla whiteness with the difference of “Otherness,” in this case, her Native American ancestry3 (see hooks 1992; Rubin 1984). She offers different details than other respondents who see their multiracial heritage as a flavorful addition to their chosen whiteness, although Rose effectively does the same. Rose offers, “My mom’s dad, he was a quarter Cherokee. They didn’t have a good relationship. I never knew him. I think he’s dead. I really couldn’t say. There’s no documentation [proving his Indian identity], it’s just what they’re telling me.” At once, Rose remains skeptical of her family’s “mysteries of histories,” and diminishes any connection she feels toward her maternal grandfather. Her discourses work to do what I call “disappear difference.” She disappears difference in herself by erasing mixture through the speculation (instead of certainty) of her grandfather’s death, and then by questioning his racial identity in life.

Because her family socialized her as white (rather than multiracial), Rose learned to identify as white. At some point, her mother “just kind of brought up that there was Indian blood in us,” and said, “‘Oh yeah, we have some Indian in us….I think it’s Cherokee. Yeah, it’s Cherokee.’ And I’ve always been interested in Indian heritage. I think it’s neat. I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t know the ‘P.C.’ way to put it.” Like Dakota, Rose employs language that infantilizes and fetishizes difference not in whites, but in Indians or Native Americans. In fairness to Rose, she acknowledges her limited racial literacy when she admits to not knowing the socially appropriate expression.

Following Bonilla-Silva (2003a,b), I wonder if Rose would regard her whiteness as “neat” as well. Her ways of describing “difference” in relation to whiteness reinforces the spectacle that so often surrounds Native Americans and other racial groups of color, and normalizes the centrality and invisibility of whiteness as well (see DeLoria 1999; Dyer 1992). Concerns about people “playing Indian” surface in instances where Native American people and culture are regarded as more interesting than white people and culture (DeLoria 1999). This is another way of understanding hooks’ concerns of “spicing up” whiteness with “Otherness.” This is especially notable in instances where multiracial people who choose whiteness regard their “Other” racial identity as something of an accessory; this Otherness can be put on when desired and disregarded when not. This fashioning of race speaks to the “optional” quality it takes on, as I discussed earlier (see also Goldberg 1997; Waters 1999).

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Amidst her curiosity about her “one-sixteenth” Cherokee “blood,” Rose indicated, “I think I would still identify as white, depending on the situation.” Because of this, and the fact that she knew precisely what “fraction” Native American she was, she appeared to me to be a beneficiary border patroller. The border patrolling that she experienced from outsider within (significant others) partially related to her own border patrolling of identity. This is not indicative of the racial treason that scholars have described (see Segrest 1994; Wise 2008). Instead of having traitorous identities that reject “whitely scripts4,” Rose and her family embraced white privilege and engaged in racial redistricting to remain race evasive and privileged (Fischer 2006; Frankenberg 1993; Thompson 2001; Warren and Twine 1997). Her uncertainty concerning her grandfather’s mortality and identity exposed racial ideologies that partially explained his peripheral position in her family and memory.

I can’t exactly remember…I was just looking at pictures, and I saw a picture and apparently it was my grandfather but he didn’t look related to me at all, like he was very dark skinned, with dark hair. His nose was a little bit bigger, I guess. And just looked mean to me. He just looked angry, but my grandfather and grandmother weren’t together for very long so it could have been likely that he was really mean….You know, he drank too much; he was not necessarily physically abusive but definitely verbally abusive, and um, kind of a slacker. Wasn’t around, didn’t want to work.

One can speculate that the rocky relationship between Rose’s maternal grandparents colored and contaminated her perception of her grandfather. The negligible relationship that Rose had with him seemed soured by others’ unfavorable accounts of his personality. This illustrates the importance of the stories people circulate within families, that “our stories matter” (Nash and Viray 2013), in terms of how they shape and support our identities.

Additional interpretations of Rose’s narrative and experiences exist. One possible interpretation of Rose’s attitude towards her multiracial heritage draws attention to her inability (or reasonable unwillingness) to recognize herself in her grandfather. While it is difficult to say whether or not her perception of differences in terms of gender, color, physical features, and other characteristics largely stems from the disparaging remarks of others, I do think Rose’s discussion of these differences dances around the idea of “real” racial differences, as evidenced through her description of her grandfather as “only” one-quarter Cherokee. That Rose indicated that it would be easier to opt for white in any (casual or professional)5 situation, suggests her desire to possessively invest in

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whiteness (Lipsitz 2006). Her narrative reveals both the relative ease with which multiracial people with whiter or lighter skin can assert their whiteness, and some of their reasons or motivations for doing so.

Rose implied that others might not take much of an interest in the details of her mixture and, that in those inquiring moments, she would not “want to overstep my boundary of information.” She suggested that sharing information with strangers would be contextual, restrained, and relevant to the social situation or particular interaction (Waters 1999). However, it is more instructive to consider what information Rose is willing to share about herself racially, namely that she is white. Interestingly, when she mentioned lacking evidence of her racial mixture, she did not feel this dearth in relation to proving her whiteness. That is, she did not speak of the need to prove whiteness in ways that contrast with her need to prove her Native American ancestry. It is as if she has internalized government requirements to “document” or legitimize her identity, not only to herself but to others as well. Rose shared:

I think, you know, if I found out undeniable proof then I would probably say White and Native American, just that I would give an explanation. But if I couldn’t prove it, then I wouldn’t want to give false information. I’d just say White. I wouldn’t want people to be like, “Oh, well, tell me about your history.” Like, “Gasp.”… I think it’s also, I don’t know, I would sort of be proud if I was a part of that history that’s been pretty much demolished. I’d be proud to have the opportunity to carry on some part of that because I know that there isn’t a whole lot of it being passed on. Um, I don’t know.

Rose’s example suggests that when people lack racial literacy in a general sense, they often still possess enough working knowledge of the racial hierarchy to understand the wages of whiteness (Roediger 2003). They experientially know the material and social benefits of whiteness which require little proof of light- and white-skinned multiracial people. White (looking) skin becomes proof enough, with the body as evidence, but how does one prove something one ostensibly cannot see? Rose’s comments expose the differences in racial group membership status and socialization. What seems apparent is that she was likely socialized, through colorblindness and colormuteness, to maintain the “invisibility of whiteness” while recognizing her indigeneity as the “Other.” Consistent with white racial socialization, she claims whiteness, while remaining ambivalent about her “authority” to claim any indigeneity. As a result, she reinforces both the idea of whiteness as property and her invisible mixture.

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Another interpretation of Rose’s identity articulation relates to any fear she has of facing further invalidation as a white-looking person trying to acknowledge a racially mixed heritage. As a multiracial woman with white skin color, Rose knows that asserting a mixed race identity marks a risky proposition; doing so jeopardizes any white privilege that Rose accesses and enjoys, which also runs the risk of inauthenticating her mixture. As with other respondents, Rose reported that her phenotypical whiteness motivated her singular white identity. Negating her mixture and affirming her whiteness could be her way of border patrolling herself for her own benefit and, as I discuss shortly, for self- protection.

Unlike those White and Asian multiracial respondents who opted for white or tentatively claimed more of an incipient multiracial identity while enjoying their honorary whiteness, Peg rejected her honorary whiteness by increasingly attempting to assert a validated Korean identity. As a white Asian multiracial woman who was adopted into an interracial family of the same racial mixture (white and Asian), Peg increasingly embraced her Asian identity, even as she wrestled with not knowing much about her birth family.

In the South, she found relative ease in emphasizing her Korean heritage. She had no “concept of, like, being identified as white.” However, her move away from her adoptive family and from one part of the country to another facilitated some of these changes in her racial self-perception. She noted that her racial sense of self shifted, such that she no longer saw herself as primarily Korean. Peg tired of others’ inability to not see her as Korean. As she moved away from and became increasingly ashamed of being Korean, she remained bothered by this misrecognition.

This moving away from being Korean did not translate into intentionally moving towards whiteness. As Peg explained, she was essentially becoming white; the white culture, and mostly white friends in their “completely white world,” made being Korean “different” but also “honorary white.” Even though she “blended in very well” into these whitespaces (Horton 2006), Peg described feelings of racial alienation. Though “it was understood that I was Asian because I was different,” many of the white people in Peg’s life treated her as white. This behavior included making disparaging comments about other (than white) races. This exposure to how her white friends felt about her as an Asian solidified her honorary white status but also caused her to feel alienated from these friends. The ease with which they revealed ugly truths concealed in their race talk (Houts Picca and Feagin 2007) drew a wedge between them and Peg. She felt increasing dissonance over her

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friendships with whites, who accounted for and then effectively denied, her preferred racial and ethnic sense of self. By not expressing criticism of their racism, Peg maintained her honorary white status with them, using it to her advantage.

Following the rules of racial etiquette, or the “polite silences” of colorblind racism, none of the multiracial individuals admitted to wanting to access white privilege. This, however, does not mean that they do not want to enjoy the privileges of whiteness. Denying white privilege allows the beneficiaries of this “invisible knapsack of privilege” to continue enjoying earned advantages while maintaining the view of deserving them (McIntosh 1998). The literature on white privilege echoes this point by illustrating how whiteness and its invisible knapsack of privilege remain sights left unseen.

Many respondents who claimed a white identity also spoke of the nonwhite (or part-white) parent as highly assimilated. Also, they espoused a rather colorblind view of society and centered whiteness throughout the interviews. In that way, many of the part-white respondents engaged in beneficiary border patrolling of their identities because they knew they could access or had already accessed, the unearned privileges of claiming a white, honorary white, or multiracial identity versus a singular or collective black identity. This strategy reaffirmed the new racial hierarchy (Gans 1999) in which most multiracial individuals enjoy honorary white or white status in society. That is, respondents with part-white parentage or ancestry could and would more easily acknowledge their partial whiteness and its attendant privileges, while those with part black parentage or ancestry were more likely to claim a biracial or black identity than a singular white, Asian, or Hispanic one.

Protective Border Patrolling: Choosing “Black” When Others Don’t Understand “Biracial”

Prevailing racial hierarchies and ideologies shape the choices people make regarding their racial identities and romantic partners. These forces inform many differences between the public and private presentation of their racialized selves. When people encounter opposition to the racial identities they choose, they may become increasingly self-protective. They opt for public identities that differ from their preferred (and private) identities to minimize this invalidation. They also do so anticipating that it will make more facile the social interactions with others (including strangers, family members, and friends). This does not always prove true.

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In order to buffer themselves from reactions, including surprise, amusement, rejection, and so on, many respondents reported expressing public identities that they could convincingly “get away with” (see below). This observation underscores the performative aspect and expectation of social interactions (see Goffman 1963, 1967). It also highlights how much those interactions are racialized (see Khanna and Harris 2014). Not all multiracials felt they could give a convincing performance of their preferred identities. Consequently, they opted for simpler, often singular options, in an effort to achieve this legitimacy (in their own eyes and that of others).

As Gloria, one black and white biracial respondent recognized, whiteness was out of bounds or out of reach for her, despite her golden skin and curly blondish hair (as affirmed in people’s comments about her appearance). Her experience illustrates that the boundaries of whiteness seldom expand to include black/white multiracials, a point made by Gallagher (2004a); Lee and Bean (2004); and others. This explains why she asserted a protean identity (black and white, biracial, “Other” [her term]), but never a singular white identity.

The identity grab bag that Rockquemore, Brunsma, and Delgado (2009) discuss does not afford all multiracial individuals the same number of racial identity options. In part, the racial hierarchy privileges whiteness and, thusly, allows multiracial individuals with white parentage an arguably more diverse range of options. Ironically, as my research illustrates, multiracial individuals often reinforce the racial hierarchy and the current racial classification system by border patrolling their own identities. While many multiracial individuals expressed a preference for shifting mixture, others preferred to collapse their complexity into singular categories. However, multiracial individuals with white and black heritage/parentage, for example, did not feel that they could choose whiteness, in the same ways that some white and Asian multiracial participants did. Despite the relative ease with which the latter may claim a white and/or Asian identity, most respondents of this combination chose to assert a mixed race or white racial identity, not a singular Asian identity. No respondents claimed a singular Asian identity.

This contrasts with Gloria’s observation about the limitations to racial identity choice. She felt the option of whiteness was socially denied her, as exemplified by her response when asked about it (if she ever opted for whiteness): “I don’t think I could get away with it (whiteness).” “Getting away” with whiteness involved looking white, not simply having a white parent, or claiming a white identity and having others affirm and validate such a choice rather than regard it

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suspiciously or dubiously. That Gloria has “never thought about that, honestly” shows the extent to which whiteness expands selectively, careful to exclude part-black multiracials in the process. Her reportedly having never thought about this issue could also be read as “not having to think about that.” That suggests that Gloria either enjoys enough white privilege to not have to think about race and racism deeply or meaningfully, or the option to claim to not notice race through the twin discourses of colorblindness and colormuteness. This colorblind and colormute kinds of explanations exemplify the dominant patterns of people seeking to avoid conversations about race and any acknowledgment of racial difference.

Deploying colorblind explanations deflects attention away from any unearned privileges she enjoys as she approximates whiteness. Her comments that directly engaged racial matters in the interview contrast with some of her colorblind narratives. For example, she communicated that she claims a protean multiracial identity and has thought about that enough to equate whiteness and blackness combined with mixture. A more likely explanation again rests in the racial hierarchy that places Gloria more centrally in the collective black category, and more decidedly outside of categorical whiteness.

Chloe, an African American and Native American-identified woman (with Irish and Italian ancestry), also discussed how she defended her racial identity to family members. When some of her black relatives made disparaging comments about whites, Chloe, “out of defense,” reminded them of her Irish and Italian parentage (mother). Chloe recognized her behavior as a “defense mechanism” when she took those comments personally because of her white mother. She observed, “If you [relatives] think this about white people, well then, what do you think about me, or my mother, or her side of the family?” Despite her understandable agitation, Chloe acknowledged that she mostly asserts a black or Native American identity. Doing so replicated others’ invalidation of her racial mixture, making her identity align with how she appears to others: “more black” than any other race(s). Chloe’s choice captures the reverberation of invalidation.

Even as she recognizes her multiplicity, she asserts a simpler or singular identity. This illustrates how many multiracial people may choose racial identities that reflect borderists’ logic, or may become border patrollers themselves, in these cases, of their own identity options. This also illustrates the impact that border patrolling from strangers and familial others has on multiracial individuals and the identities they choose (or do not choose). When multiracial individuals internalize this borderism, they begin to perpetuate it themselves.

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Though not her intention, Chloe (in opting for a black identity) also alienated some white relatives who saw her as multiracial and not black. She chose blackness to “uncomplicate things” and challenge the societal devaluation of blackness. However, doing so confused others’ ways of seeing her, even as these other family members worked to affirm her multiraciality.

The above example underscores the predicament that places a burden on multiracial people who have to manage both the luxury and the liability of racial identity options (in contrast to people who feel altogether denied this choice) (see Rockquemore and Lazloffy 2005). Despite having more luxuries, in terms of choices or racial identity options, Chloe highlighted one limitation of that choice: opting for white. She offered:

I definitely don’t think I can get away with saying I’m white. “What? Did you just come back from vacation?” But yeah, I mean it’s not something that I’d do. But you know, I’d love to say, I’m Italian, too, but what Italian community is really going to accept me? And the rest of the world, you know, maybe one community might accept me, but the rest of the world, when I step outside, they’ll be like, “Italian?” Yeah. “She’s Irish, you know?”

Chloe also linked how she arrived at her racial identity in relation to the racial socialization she received primarily from her father who “definitely wants us to identify as black” because of “decades of conditioning.” Chloe’s father prepared his children for the possibility of facing racial discrimination resulting from others’ misperceptions of them (as black and stereotypically so):

He definitely wants [us] to know that…when we step outside, nobody really cares that our mother’s white…. He’s done it subtly you know? He hasn’t actually sat us down, and said, “Well, you do know that you’re black.” Or “There’s some things that comes along with being black.”…. He’s subtly reminded us countless times that we can’t expect the rest of the world to, like, buy into this biracial wonderland that we have at home, maybe.

In her “biracial wonderland,” Chloe expressed a dichotomy between the public and private selves (Goffman 1967) or what others have called “public identity” and “internalized identity” (Khanna 2010). In Chloe’s public presentation of self (Goffman 1963, 1967), she performs blackness yet, while in the comfort of her wonderland, she can more

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easily claim her racial mixture (though not without occasional contestation from some relatives) (see Brunsma 2006b).

Chloe’s description of the backstage into which she retreats, or perhaps luxuriates, connotes the comfort she experiences there. This comfort eludes her in public in instances where others question or even challenge her identities. Like many other multiracial women with black parentage or heritage, Chloe draws this distinction to show the racework that many multiracial individuals engage in, during these public interactions with strangers; Steinbugler (2012) discusses this in her work with lesbian, gay, and straight, interracial relationships. These circumstances and social conditions reveal this racework and also make more visible the extent to which multiracial people manage their racial identities. The management of these identities involves auto-borderism, a self-policing of one’s racial presentation of self in public and, sometimes, in private settings as well.

Opting for black for simplicity’s sake did not, in fact, always simplify social interactions. Instead, they sometimes created productive tensions or intensified conflict between multiracial individuals and others, including strangers, significant others, other family members, and friends. Vanessa, a black-identified woman, explained why she too asserted a singular black identity as a protective mechanism: “I say I’m black because it’s easier. I don’t get a lot of questions that way.” Opting for black enabled her attempts to evade borderists’ racialized attention or the racial panopticon (Foucault 1977; Mirzoeff 2011) on the visuality and spectacle of bodies (see also Markovitz 2011). In a way, her choice to collapse her multiracial parentage into blackness can be interpreted as a kind of self-border patrolling. Her choice also shows how “multiracial” does not always survive to the next generation (Bratter 2007).

My father is Cherokee Indian and African American. He identifies himself as African American. My mother is Caucasian and African American, and she identifies as African American….My family also identified us as African American because that’s how we are seen by society and that’s how they see themselves. They feel like they’d be able to relate to, they can deal with issues they are given by identifying as African American instead of something else.

Similar to other black multiracials, Vanessa gets asked if she is “anything besides black.” People often say that they think she looks “different” and “exotic,” as if there is “something there that I don’t see.” I suspect that they see signs of racial mixture (Cherokee Indian, African

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American, and Caucasian) that Vanessa only partially acknowledges but does not incorporate into her identity. Her mixture is her habitus and thus it remains, relatively speaking, “clearly invisible” to her. To others, her mixture appears always already visible.

Her desire for privacy and simplicity does not always dissuade others who continue to wonder about Vanessa’s racial identity. Identifying as black then backfires to the degree that it does little to deflect these inquiring and curious gazes. What Vanessa draws attention to here contrasts with her desire to not draw attention to herself. The legibility of race—the in/visible mixture—relates here to racial literacy and betrays the way people ignore, deny, or minimize the continuing significance of race (Feagin 1991).

Another black-identified multiracial woman respondent, Juanita, explained her own complicated racial parentage and reasons for choosing her preferred racial identity:

I say that I’m black but I’m not really sure how to say it, like when people ask me that question because I don’t know how to include everything and so I just leave it (she laughs). “Everything” is of course African American, Native American, Creole, Puerto Rican, I think that’s it. There’s maybe something else…Some Caucasian but it’s just further out (generations back).

Like Vanessa, Juanita opted for black, to elude attention and evade others’ (un)spoken expectations of her to elaborate on her racial identity. She strategically employed this tactic to manage public interactions with strangers but effectively erased her racial multiplicity, or at least attempted to, when she is in public. She suggested that opting for black proved easier than elaborating on her racial mixture to strangers, “because I get less questions that way.” Eliding inquiries and evading racial interrogations is possible by collapsing her multiracial identity into blackness. That way, Juanita avoids comments claiming that she is “confused” or a modern day “tragic mulatto” who struggles with what she called “the Tiger Woods problem.” This persistence of a problematic narrative, the troubled, confused “tragic mulatto,” must be managed by many multiracial people even those who claim a singular racial identity and even if they are not the ones experiencing confusion over their racial identities.

Juanita collapsing her racial complexity into a single category is a variation of Rose’s practice of “disappearing difference,” as I discussed earlier. In my estimation, Juanita does not work to deny or avoid her mixture but rather simplifies it. She displays knowledge of the social

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interactional rules; the ones that nudge her to abbreviate her responses to strangers’ questions (see Goffman 1967, 1963). This contrasts with Rose, who appears to intentionally “opt for white” to avoid any penalties she might otherwise incur for naming her Native American heritage (despite her discussion of how interesting this detail of her heritage makes her).

Like other black multiracial respondents, Jessica, a black-identified young woman of black and Asian Indian parentage, discussed having a black habitus6 which largely influenced and explained her singular black identity. She shared her negotiation of the space in between (feeling and “acting black”) and the way she patrolled her own identity:

I’ve always felt black but I’ve always identified myself as biracial so it’s kind of weird, you know what I mean? Like I—I know it’s not proper to say this: I act black, you know, because that’s how I grew up…. That’s kind of what I identify with, you know, but if like, I’m filling out a form or something, you know, I’ll put multiracial. Whereas when I was younger, I’d used to always put black.

Jessica’s response captures the conflict of racial identities in tension with one another and in flux over the life course (Doyle and Kao 2007, 2004). Though Jessica wanted to “recognize both parents,” she opted for black. Jessica’s border patrolling worked to both affirm and problematize blackness (Hintzen and Rahier 2003). In celebrating her pride in being black and her love of black people, Jessica overshadowed her Asian Indian identity while deferring to it in order to nuance her black experience. As with other respondents, Jessica had not thought about or noticed any unearned privileges she enjoyed because of her multiraciality and racial ambiguity. In not noticing, Jessica enjoyed her singular black identity in ways that preserved her occasional colorblindness. This colorblindness and colormuteness prevented her from registering how her skin color and beauty operates as a currency in this pigmentocracy (Bonilla-Silva 2003a,b).

Like Jessica, Jamie also asserted a black identity even though her light skin tone piques others’ curiosity about her heritage. Based on Jamie’s accounts, people interested in her racial identity and ambiguity often confrontationally commented, “No, you’re not black. You’re black and something else.” These comments troubled Jamie because she grew up in a small Southern town and in a community and a family where people abided by the racial binary: a person is either black or white. She dogmatically denied the racial mixture that was the result of a white man’s sexual exploitation of a black female relative that occurred

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generations ago. Here, her denial of mixture is actually a refusal to acknowledge mixture; a strategy or stance mimicked in her family, who worked consciously to preserve blackness by negating and erasing the trauma of rape (and the forced inclusion of whiteness into families) (see Gray-Rosendale 2013; Spickard 1989; Walters, Mohammed, Evans- Campbell, Beltran, Chae, and Duran 2011).

When I asked her to elaborate on her reasons for choosing “black” over other options (i.e., “white,” “mixed,” “biracial,” etc.), Jamie replied: “Because it wasn’t a choice that they (black female relatives) slept with them, slept with the white people. It was rape. It wasn’t by choice…. To be honest, if I could pass for white, I probably would say that I’m white but I couldn’t pass for it, so I wouldn’t say it.” Since Jamie felt too dark to be white, she resented relatives who passed as white and enjoyed “the advantages you get just by being white,” or what Peggy McIntosh (1998) refers to as “white privilege.” She recalled having heard stories of white-looking black relatives trying to assert black identities and encountering resistance and invalidation: “They told her (a relative), ‘No.’ That she wasn’t, they told her that she wasn’t black. That she was white…. Oh, I have some pictures—they look exactly like white people but they’re not white. They’re black.”

While Jamie acknowledges why her family actively preserves blackness by denying and eliding the painful racial reality of how whiteness was incorporated into the family, she remains conflicted over racial identity choice. Her narrative captures the ways that the meanings people attach to racial categories often encapsulate or get informed by the messiness of historical traumas. Claiming anything other than blackness could be a trigger, resuscitating past individual, familial, and collective traumas. Sensitivity to these matters involves attending to the historical residue of trauma, and the traumatic residue of history, as Jamie acknowledges and alludes to in her narrative (see Walters, Mohammed, Evans-Campbell, Beltran, Chae, and Duran 2011).

Curious about her conviction to reinforce the black-white binary, I asked Jamie to reflect on the term “biracial.” We shared this exchange in discussing her views on the term:

Jamie: I don’t like it. I don’t think there’s such a thing (as biracial). It’s either one or the other. Because you can’t be both. You just can’t; I just don’t see how you can be both. You’re either black or you’re white, whichever is more prominent, that’s the one you are, to me.

Author: If one is more prominent than the other, then that means that the other still exists?

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Jamie: It exists, but you don’t have to acknowledge it. You can’t identify with both. When somebody asks you what race you are, you can’t say, “Oh, I’m multiracial,” or “I’m mixed.”

Author: Why not?

Jamie: You’re just not. I just don’t see it. I don’t understand how you could say that. Like I have a cousin and my uncle, he’s very light skinned, green eyes, and he’s black but identifies either way though. But he had 2 kids by a white lady and they look white. Like you couldn’t tell they have any black blood and they don’t say that they’re black or mixed. They don’t say that they’re black or mixed. They say that they’re white. Because if they say, “Oh, I’m mixed,” or “I’m black,” people gonna look at them like they’re crazy.

Jamie regarded racial mixture as impossible, relegating it to the body (but not something that should be socially claimed in reality, as a possible identity). She found multiraciality largely incomprehensible. She lacked an awareness of the social construction of race, failing (or refusing) to see how her community and family reinforced a black/white racial divide in her life and mind. “Where I grew up at, you’re either black or you’re white. No in-between. And those are the only two races: black or white.” Although some scholars argue that members of the same family are of different races because of the ways we socially construct race in this country (Ferrante and Brown 2001), Jamie rejected that reality. Instead, she insisted on her black identity.

This insistence was compromised by some of her classmates (“white girls”) who considered her white. Once on a class trip, one classmate commented, “I wanna get a tan like [Jamie].” Stumped by this white girl’s perception of her, Jamie thought to herself, “White with a tan?” She explained her conflicted feelings about racial passing and the politics of skin color:

Skin tone is a big thing for me; I’m just getting over it…. I don’t want to be dark, like this is too dark for me. I don’t know, I don’t think that dark skin’s pretty. [I got that idea from] my grandmother….She always used to tell us not to be out in the sun, and you know, that’s not pretty. You don’t wanna get black. There was some saying she used to say, I don’t even remember it.” (Emphasis hers).

Even though her maternal grandmother was light-skinned enough to pass as white, she chose not to do so. Despite her choice, the grandmother conveyed the importance of lighter skin to Jamie, who observed that “they were seen to be a little bit better than the other black

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people…and it was mainly because of their skin tone.” Jamie’s mother also emphasized the importance of light skin and discouraged her daughter from darkening by similarly admonishing her and advising her to stay inside (see Golden 2005; Rondilla and Spickard 2007). While Jamie’s mother cleverly couched her advice in gendered terms, “Don’t go outside, or you’ll get dirty,” and initially deflected attention away from a racial hierarchy, Jamie’s reflection on her mother’s (and grandmother’s) comments suggests that despite these attempts at racial displacement, she knew better than to ignore the significance of race in these narratives.

In order to avoid or minimize this border patrolling from strangers, black multiracial respondents asserted a singular black identity. In part, they hoped to elide this attention (Frankenberg 1993) and avoid being a racial spectacle (DeBord 1995), however benign the racialized gaze (Foucault 1977). Choosing blackness as a means of circumventing interrogations and the usual inspection, or what Gloria Wade-Gayles (1997) calls “eye questions,” then could be interpreted as protective border patrolling.

A few “honorary white” respondents had similar experiences. David, another respondent (white Hispanic) discussed his blended experience in terms of a “two-ness.” In borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois (1903), David described himself “racially as white and culturally as bicultural.” In his elaboration, he explained how being both white and Hispanic meant enduring authenticity testing from various sources. In feeling these pressures, David works to protect his multiracial, bicultural identity.

Because I grew up identifying as biracial but as I came to explore what race means, it became more and more evident to me that um, it’s, it’s much more of an identity that’s assigned by the outside rather than a sense of self and it’s, it’s linked to um, how I’ve experienced the world because of privilege and things like that, and so, of my siblings, I’m the whitest one and, and I, you know, came to realize at some point that perhaps this was not just, “Oh, I worked really hard.” That I’m the only one with a Ph.D. and the other two, one just has H.S. and she’s the darkest of us, the one that’s most immediately recognized as Spanish or “spic” (he says with a Southern accent; imitating a Southern accent) or Latina, however she’s clearly recognized as something other than white and my youngest sister is kind of in the middle. And so I identify racially just sort of out of my awareness of um sort of oppression dynamics, power, privilege issues and my lens, my outward-looking lens, that’s pretty impossible for me to define. I, I realize that, I know that I do not see the world as, um, people that I know that are white from both parents, um. It’s very clear to me that,

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that I see the world very differently than they see the world. Even those who have had more awareness around racial constructs and things like that. And so it’s a cognitive distinction that I’m easily able to make and in terms of Latino people, I, I don’t experience a sense of belonging from the inside but as a legitimacy I guess is a better word. And so I clearly don’t see the world from the perspective of people who are completely Latino because, or even Panamanian specifically, because my whole life, I’ve, I’ve sort of been given that, that sort of, you know, reminders that I’m the gringo, that I’m the white one. So I have no idea how I would, you know, describe…. my racial identity from the inside, because I can’t, I can’t—to me I can only say there’s something about this blended perspective.

For this and other white Hispanic/Latino/a respondents, being blended offers a unique vantage point for experiencing the world. While they situationally enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, they also experienced social life as “optional people of color” (Gonzalez 2016) or “white people of color” (Alvarez 1998). As such, they may be read as “a different kind of white” due to their Spanish language ability, but they are also often read as “not quite Hispanic enough” and disqualified accordingly. Having many of his white American father’s physical features and appearance, David endured authenticity testing throughout adolescence and young adulthood as others evaluated his legitimacy as a “real” Panamanian. He even appeared to internalize some of this disqualification. He said:

It was a strange reverse because the power dynamics of our, the racial dynamics of our society were reversed in my family. My mother, the Latina person, was the dominating figure and I grew up in a household that devalued white people. Everything from “Their food has no rhythm” to “They’re imperialist bastards.” You know? And so, I grew up in a world where white was the bad guy, and um, for me, you know, I was never, you know, I was adored but it, it and so the bad guy didn’t apply to me, um, in any of those ways. It applied to me in, “[He] doesn’t like mangoes.” I don’t like mangoes. (Here he enunciates, mimicking/mocking whiteness through “hyperarticula- tion”). “Mango,” (pronounced with noticeable or emphasized Spanish accent, presumably the “proper” pronunciation), whatever you wanna call it. And you know dancing, I can’t do salsa…. I dance like a white guy. Yeah basically, that kind of stuff. And um, my older sister, has the, in addition to her physical features, she also had this notion, she was actually born in Panama, and so she is a “real” Panamanian and I am not. And so since my mother was the idolized figure in the family, I have her personality traits, but I, I was raised with the notion that I got stuck with my father’s physical traits.

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As a point of clarification, and in my estimation, the comment, “There food has no rhythm,” loops back to my discussion of vanilla whiteness, and (stereotypically) speaks to this point by casting whiteness as boring or bland. It endorses a different stereotype, that of “spicy” or exciting Latino culture. As Dalmage (2000), people reinforce race and police racial borders through the use of stereotypes. The narratives that circulated in the interviews, and in the daily lives of my respondents, make this clear.

The extent to which David participated in performing his racial and ethnic identity intentionally at some points and unintentionally at others is interesting, particularly given his geographical location: the South. Khanna (2010, 2011) discusses the ways in which multiracials form and perform their racial identities in the South. As someone living in the South (at the time of our interview), David was not only reflecting on his experiences forming and performing race from his blended perspective but also within the particular geographical context of the South. The bifurcated system of race that prevails there does not easily accommodate his “two-ness” and keeps his mixture relatively invisible to others.

Throughout the discussion of disqualification and authenticity testing, he deploys his cultural knowledge and capital in a way that authenticates the very identity that others have disqualified. When he pronounced certain words such as “salsa,” and “mangoes” he used a decidedly Spanish accent as if to stamp these words with his identity, to inflect them in ways that native Spanish speakers would, to solidify his position as a “real” Panamanian who speaks Spanish well. His hyperarticulation, the deliberate enunciation of both syllables, offered up whiteness as hyperbolic and hegemonic, as well as a reference with which to contrast his Panamanian identity. When he said, “I don’t like mangoes,” he was almost mocking whiteness, and himself, as he recognized that he is white and not white; his tone of voice also inferred that he is not the kind of white that others suggest he is. He tentatively embraces whiteness or reluctantly identifies with what whiteness connotes to the people who see him as only white. Another possible interpretation of this enunciation and interaction is that he may disidentify (see Muñoz 1999) with this kind of hyperbolic whiteness.

To make his whiteness visible, David makes his performance of whiteness intentional and recognizable in its clichéd form (starchy, “proper English” speaking). Doing so comfortably centers him in the interstices or the borderlands and affirms that he is both white and Spanish (see Anzaldua 1983). This affirmation results from his ability to “do” race and ethnicity well (see Khanna 2011 for more on forming and

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performing race). He can “sound” both white and Spanish in its most recognizable essentialized, even hyperbolic, forms. This racial (and cultural) performance not only validates his knowledge of both but cements his position in-between. This performance also begins to explain the blended perspective of which he spoke in the interview.

It wasn’t so much liked or did, because I liked and did. It was more of just the way I was; the most vivid example that comes to mind, I haven’t thought about this, and I’m realizing there’s some emotion in all of this as I am talking about this. I haven’t talked about this in a while. Um, ah, I, I did not drink when I was a teenager, you know; I wasn’t getting laid with as many women as possible. I wasn’t you know, I wasn’t a tough macho guy. I played the piano and so… I still, I remember my cousins, because I lived in Panama when I was in high school, and I remember my cousins you know, on the balcony of their, of their porch in Panama City, you know, and they each have a glass of scotch and soda and they say, “C’mon, you have to drink. You cannot be a Gonzalez unless you drink.” I remember distinctly thinking, “Shit.” You know. “Now I’m even more white because I don’t like the taste of scotch and soda.” And um, it wasn’t until later in life that I looked back on that memory, which is a vivid memory, but it wasn’t until later that I realized, you know, they were linking being Panamanian, um, with drinking, and toughness, and things like that. My cousins, every once in a while, would could home, like with a black eye, because they got into a fight. And I could hear my mother— “Over a girl!” and yeah probably, you know, or because they stood up for themselves, talking trash to some larger guy; and you know, I remember my mom contrasting, “[David] would never do that; he’s smart; he’s going to college” and all of that stuff. And so the very traits that were different were also somehow linked to the fact that I was going to achieve. And the only positive things my mother ever said about my father, um, there was a lot of playful, um, insulting as I was growing up, at him, she was, the most repeated thing was, “I only married him because he had blue eyes and fair skin.” And that was a big accomplishment for a Panamanian woman in the 1960s.

As the lightest sibling in his family, David stood out as different. His skin color made him a target of ridicule and teasing, but also made him a symbol of “potential,” a sign of inevitable success. For him and other respondents, protecting one’s preferred racial identity proved important. While most were recognized as mixed, they were not always validated as such. In maneuvering around and manipulating mixture, they opted to protect this mixture. For many of the black multiracial respondents, especially those with darker skin color, they attempted to

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protect themselves from racial interrogations and identity invalidations by choosing blackness.

Some portions of David’s narrative suggest a more insidious or condemning tone than he registers. In some of his examples, he notes the way people use humor to defuse the charge of some racialized comments and observations. If one could understand this practice as a kind of “racetalk” (Myers 2005), one might consider how this discourse impacts others. What is the impact of these discourses on multiracial people like David? Does the existence and circulation of these discourses link to the kinds of border patrolling behavior of multiracials themselves? In the next section, I discuss malevolent border patrolling, drawing particular attention to the patterns that emerge in terms of people policing their own identity choices.

Malevolent Border Patrolling: Black, but Not That Kind of Black

Many people, including multiracial people themselves, believe that multiracial people cannot express individual racism. This section challenges that view, offering up many examples of multiracial individuals negotiating their participation in racism and precarious positions of privilege in the racial hierarchy. As multiracial people internalize racism, they participate in malevolent border patrolling when they express any variety of problematic stereotypes that situate them as “better than” other groups of people. In addition, malevolent border patrolling insists on a singularity. It reifies racial categories and generally denies mixture and, thus, racially mixed identities.

Some respondents who confidently asserted a multiracial identity deployed somewhat stereotypical thinking in affirming multiraciality. Take Sanchez, a black Puerto Rican man:

I’m not one-sided on my race in any degree. I’m basically like in the middle. I like Spanish food, like paella. Stuff like that. Platanos are really good. Reggaeton. Merengue. And stuff like that. I love that music. And of course, I’m black. I love hip-hop and all that other stuff, like hip hop, rap, R and B, and of course fried chicken. And all those stereotypes.

Here, Sanchez presented himself as a divided (versus composite) self, enumerating his mixture as one part Hispanic, the other black. Each part obediently follows what hegemonic culture dictates. These discursive practices cement the idea that to be black is to like rap and hip-hop or that to be Hispanic is to eat paella. Interestingly, Sanchez

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acknowledges how his friends were affected by the policing racial discourses of their parents, who held stereotypical views of blacks as violent, criminal, “shacking up,” uneducated, incarcerated sex fiends (see Davis 1981; Collins 2005).

Jessica, who engaged in both protective and malevolent border patrolling, explained that growing up around black people both prompted and pressured her to identify as black because “that was really all I was exposed to.” She continued,

I identify with black culture. I listen to, you know, traditional black culture, stereotypical music, you know, hip hop, R and B, all types of music like that, and I mean, I guess just being around all black people helped me identify more with that side of me.

Jessica also described not knowing “a lot about Indian culture,” since her mother, who “you can’t tell is Indian just by talking to her” and is “pretty much fully Americanized,” has “assimilated toward it, regular culture.” In addition, “She cooks American food. She doesn’t cook Indian food.” With both sides of her extended family in the Midwest, Jessica noted that she has little contact with her parent’s relatives and other extended kinship networks.

Jessica’s reference to “regular culture” speaks to the way that “American culture” becomes the dominant reference point, despite her growing up in a multicultural family (see Takaki 1993). Her logic extends to matters of race as she relied on troublesome tropes of race to situate herself in society (see Gates 1986). Jessica deployed similar stereotypes in explaining how she arrived at a black identity. Her contradictory comments above suggest that blackness was imposed on her (the racial identity to which she should default), even though she was aware that “when people see me, they don’t see a black person because I don’t look black. I look like I’m mixed.” She actively chose and embraced blackness “because I love black people.” She did so amidst being teased by other black people:

If I say…an urban comment, you know…“What’s up??” or something that’s really urban, people will make fun of me and they’ll be like, “You ain’t black. Stop acting black.”…. Like my boyfriend. He’s black. Um, he grew up a certain way. Of course, he grew up with the mom who used to punish him, and beat him whenever he did something wrong. And he knows that the way I grew up, it wasn’t like that because I didn’t have a black mother, so you know I didn’t get punishment all the time.

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Here, Jessica participates in racetalk. Following Toni Morrison, Myers (2005) describes racetalk as permeated everyday life with “racial signs and symbols” designed to oppress black people. In earlier work, Myers (2003) contends that racism is always already present in social interactions, whether or not black people are present; racetalk is “symptomatic of a racial structure in which some racial/ethnic groups enjoy more privileges than others.”

In some ways then, racetalk allows Jessica to deploy racial stereotypes of black people, despite her own blackness and her admission, “I love black people!” The deployment of these stereotypes (that black mothers physically punish their children as discipline; or that “real” black people “have it rough” growing up) is a curiosity in that Jessica used it to both mark blackness and differentiate her blackness from the recognizably stereotypical form. Much like Sanchez deployed racial code words, tropes and stereotypes, so too did Jessica. To Jessica, to be “urban” is to be black; it is to grow up a “certain way” (which included examples associating verbal and physical punishment and discipline with black people). This racetalk reflected the troublesome tropes that persist which can be used to perpetuate racial stereotypes and to authenticate race.

Others seemed less aware or equipped to deal with their own stereotypical thinking about race and racial identity. For example, Toni, a young African American-identified woman with Black, White, and Native American ancestry, also faced invalidation of her racially mixed heritage. “When I say I had a white great-grandfather,” some refute her assertion by saying, “Everybody did. Who doesn’t?” Toni explained, “I acknowledge that (mixture) because that’s just my history.” Ironically, while confronting the racial ideologies of others and elaborating on others accusing her of “acting white,” Toni reified many stereotypes about blacks:7 that they “go around with nails and hair” [presumably long and loud]; and look “ghetto” and expressed some problematic ideologies of her own.8 When I asked her to clarify what “acting white” meant to her, she offered the following:

People think I “act white” because I don’t act like that. (Emphasis hers). You know what I’m saying?.... Well, I know I’m very reserved. I guess by the way I speak, that I don’t speak slang, I guess. The way I carry myself…. The way I dress; the things that I wear…. And also because I, I’ve never, I don’t hang around just black people. I’ve never gone to an all-black institution, like schools. I’ve always been around whites (attended racially diverse schools)…. Except for one. I started off at an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), and it was a culture shock for me…. Because they were African American

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through and through. They weren’t like me…. They were a little bit wild, more outspoken.

By “wild,” Toni meant “just flying off the handle about everything; cursing.” Her comments about being “African American through and through” suggest an authenticity or “realness” about blackness. She knows these authenticity tests from experience yet supports them in her observations of “real” black people. She also suggested that many had “strong personalities, not saying that that’s a black thing. But it was just different than what I’m used to.” After a year, Toni transferred to a predominantly white university. Her experience “wasn’t as bad as at the HBCU [because] everyone acted like they were supposed to.” Toni’s comments illustrated that not only do some whites subscribe to racist ideologies but often blacks do as well. The comments also contrasted blackness by differentiating between “good” and “bad” blacks. Toni was not alone in her deployment of these discursive practices.

The racetalk that Toni engages in supports the point that Bonilla- Silva (2003a) makes in his work, Racism without Racists. He argues that blacks increasingly adopt the style of colorblind racism many white people rely on in this society. Bonilla-Silva (2002) also addresses this covert operation in his article, “The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism.” This article details the new face of racism—the softer, subtler kind. While some people continue to keep racial epithets in circulation, they have recently introduced a gentler style of racism into their repertoire. The stylistics of this new racism have begun to seduce not only whites, many of whom feel “outnumbered” or otherwise crowded out by immigrants and/or people of color, but also by some of those very immigrants and/or people of color. In an ironic but perhaps not altogether surprising pattern, members of the honorary white and collective black groups have coopted whites’ styles of racial discourses, which replicate and reproduce dominant racial discourses and racial hegemony.

Toni’s comments suggest some internalized racism which provides a partial explanation for her perception and description of some black people as “wild.” The result of this internalization of racism could also offer explanation as to some of the contradictions that emerge in her narrative, relating her contradictory admiring and disparaging comments about black people (see Bailey, Chung, Williams, Singh, and Terrell 2011).

In contrasting shades of blackness, these respondents promoted themselves as having ostensibly “better” kinds of black versus “not that kind of black” identities by juxtaposing themselves with the more

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mythical, hyperbolic blackness. Alternately, black-identified respondents with multiracial parentage may experience border patrolling as an attempt (by others) to dis/qualify their blackness. Invoking stereotypical images of blackness can position one as an insider because it suggests an intimate familiarity with such mythologies. Conversely, circulating these stereotypes discursively could position one as an outsider, thereby compromising their blackness even further. Perhaps one could argue that a little bit of both are at play here. Toni, Jessica, and others show how racial ideologies in a post–Civil Rights Era remain contradictory at best.

That Jessica performs her blackness by getting “a little ghetto” or “putting a little accent with my speech” suggests that she is both a racial insider and an outsider to blackness. Her racial performance remains problematic in her evocation of or reliance on stereotypes to express her blackness publicly. Feeling pressured to prove her blackness (versus both her black and Asian Indian identity), Jessica border patrols herself. To alleviate some of the pressure of this border patrolling, she notes that increasingly she acknowledges that she is mixed, with plans to travel to India “to try to learn a little bit about that side of me.”

Jessica’s narrative deviated slightly from that of Sa, who pointedly felt a sense of entitlement to freely explore a number of experiences and cultures that her Black, Brazilian, and British relatives introduced and exposed her to throughout her life course: “That’s why I’m kinda like dipping into every little thing because it’s just like from one side I have my (white British) grandmother showing me this (etiquette; tea parties; ‘ballet, opera, classical music…and museums’) from the other (black American) aunts and cousins introducing me to rap music and stuff like that (‘jazz’ and ‘Luther Vandross’).”

In describing this freedom to choose, Sa not only contrasted (and racialized) the interests of family, she classed them as well, at least implicitly, with references to the “ballet” and “opera” signifying high culture and “rap” signifying low culture, in the dominant imagination. The class connotations intersect with race to suggest that ballet, opera and the like are “white” pastimes while rap music and jazz are “black” pastimes. On a related note, respondents like Sa expressed an appreciation for being able to blend racial borders by exploring their interests cross-racially (“dipping into every little thing”). Ironically, as they did so, they described different activities in bounded and race- specific ways. This reified the racial connotations (and their attendant limitations) of various social and cultural activities such that they equated ballet with whiteness or jazz with blackness (see Steele 2011). These dichotomies are false but, paradoxically, when mixed, they can

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signal blending, border crossing, and affirm multiracial mixture. Indeed, they signal mixture.

Respondents who were border patrolled by significant others did not seem to be as easygoing about border blending. In general, they appeared more tentative and policing of their own interests as a result. Respondents whose families encouraged border blending, then, more easily seemed to embrace their racial composition. Unlike respondents who felt regulated and disciplined by others’ borderism, Sa, for example, felt unrestricted. Since she had not internalized others’ borderism, she felt free to explore her interests without being a docile body pressured to follow racial scripts (Foucault 1977).

Another expression of borderism involved respondents articulating antagonism about or frustration with being misread or misrecognized racially and ethnically (see Harper 2005 and Harris-Perry 2011 on misrecognition). While some respondents regarded such misreading as complimentary because it facilitated their ability to blend into different racial groups, other respondents responded less favorably to this misreading that they felt was pejorative. This ambiguity sometimes increased their social access to more groups of people.

Zach, a white Asian multiracial man, revealed more interesting, almost incitable ideas about his reactions to being misread as Hispanic. Because he jokingly referred to himself as a “flip,” which some Filipinos do (see Francia and Gamalinda 1996), I considered his experience in transitioning from “‘flip’ to ‘spic’” a provocative way to draw attention to his ostensibly internalized racism and the white privilege he enjoys as an “honorary white” or “not fully Asian” person. Bailey, Chung, Williams, Singh, and Terrell (2011) discuss internalized racism or racial oppression as it relates to black individuals, but one could argue similar patterns may be observed in multiracial individuals of various racial combinations. The aforementioned transition from one racial location and consciousness to another occurs when his friends fail to grant him honorary whiteness by problematically pointing out Zach’s difference through “jokes.” They do not make fun of his Filipino identity, notably, but rather the racialized ethnicity for which he is often mistaken. Speculatively, Zach’s friends tease him about this, knowing of his displeasure in being mistaken for a Latino. He expressed this displeasure in misrecognition to me at various points in our interview conversation. He provided this explanation and observation of the humor his friends deploy to deal with the differences between them. Note their use of the dimunitive, “little,” to describe a Mexican person; this is indicative of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003a) argues is one of the primary styles of colorblind racism:

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It seems like it’s just a big joke, like my friends that are white, they’re like, “Ah, you little Mexican, come here.” I mean, they don’t mean any harm by it. I know they’re just kidding; they’re just messing with me. Like I have one friend who’s, he’s a white guy, and I call him fatty, because he’s a big guy. And he’s like, “Come here, you little wetback. Will you come cut my grass?” That kind of stuff, and it’s all fun and games so I don’t take any offense to it. Like the thing that really irritates me though is when I go to a Mexican restaurant or someplace and like a Mexican, or a Latino generally, will come up to me or my girlfriend and just assume, right off the bat, that we speak Spanish. And I’m like, “Dude, I don’t speak Spanish” and they have this look like, “Why not?” and I’m like, “Because I’m not Latino. I don’t have to know Spanish.”

His racial attitudes about Latinos are insensitive, if not abrasive. They are not, however, altogether uncommon, particularly in the national and local context of intensified public debates and discussions regarding the (legal and/or illegal) presence of immigrants, especially Mexicans in the South (see also Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997). His vehemence becomes more visible and striking in opposition to the racist jocularity he exchanges among friends, most of whom identify as white.

Rather than enjoy the multiple honorary memberships he is granted because of his ambiguity (that some mistake him as Hispanic), Zach reacts with frustration. Ironically, he remains tolerant, if not accomodating, of the racist jokes and race talk his friends casually deploy in his presence (see Houts Picca and Feagin 2007; Myers 2005). Arguably, when he joins in the joking, he might even be viewed as encouraging their behavior. Whether he forgives them for joking or actually does not even seem to find any offense in this type of humor, he takes obvious offense to strangers misperceiving him as Hispanic or presuming that he knows Spanish. He appears insistent on distancing himself from Latinos or Hispanics, so much so that he disregards that others may see him as multilingual (a speaker of Spanish and English), rather than Spanish-speaking only. So palpable is his aversion to this perception that he rejects this possibility and firmly celebrates that he primarily knows and speaks only one language.

This, in some ways, exposes not only how his white friends view him as “honorary white” or “not really Asian” (except for the “good food” his Asian mother is able to prepare), but also suggests that he 1) may see himself similarly, as “honorary white,” and 2) may harbor potentially prejudicial views of different racial/ethnic groups (except whites and Asians).

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What is ironic about Zach’s opposition to honorary Hispanic membership, or more generally to being perceived as of a group to which one does not claim membership, involves the lack of information that people have about the very groups to which they do or could claim membership. For example, because one could understand Filipino as a mix of Chinese and Spanish (Root 1997; Espiritu 2001, 2003, 2004), one could read Zach’s frustration with or rejection of being misperceived as Spanish as a form of internalized racism—or a lack of literacy or knowledge about the complexity of multiraciality among Filipinos. One might suggest he is border patrolling himself, except that he appears unaware of what Filipino mixture includes (historically and in contemporary society) (see Ocampo 2016).

To not know the composite parts of his identity prohibits him from seeing that disliking or distancing himself from Hispanics/Latinos could be interpreted as disliking or distancing from himself. While I cannot draw this conclusion, I share part of his narrative as an example of how easily some multiracial people can access white privilege, revise their own family histories to maintain this privilege or enjoy “honorary white” status, and reinforce socially constructed differences between racial and ethnic groups. His example also reveals a certain fragility or precarity in that honorary position.

Zach’s experience echoes that of Tracy whose friends reportedly directed a lot of racetalk at her as well. As I discussed in the last chapter, Tracy also enjoyed an honorary white status in her mostly white friendship group. However, because she reportedly ate rice and “Chinese food, or Asian food, everyday just about,” she faced a similar set of insensitive and racist remarks or “jokes” from her friends. In both examples, Zach and Tracy espouse colorblind narratives throughout the course of our interviews yet these moments they offer punctuate, if not rupture, their colorblindness. Their narratives reveal a far messier negotiation that they must make, as they may want to preserve their honorary white membership in the friendship circles and their integrity. Reacting “too strongly” could easily jeopardize their status and reinforce racial divisions that otherwise get ignored or minimized. Their experiences suggest that these negotiations can much more easily be framed through humor because that interpretation is more forgiving. To interpret the jokes as more malicious, or racist, would require emotional work and communication that multiracial individuals and their mostly white peers may not be prepared to handle effectively. This sobering reality suggests that more work must be done to equip people with the tools to talk more openly and honestly about race, racial difference, and racial discrimination on individual and institutional levels.

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Just think about the impact and injury that these “jokes” have on young people crystallizing their racial identities (see Collins 1998b; Myers 2005). Is it any wonder that multiracial individuals engage in racial border patrolling, denying parts of their parentage to blend in, instead of blending borders?

Conclusions

What many of the narratives of multiracial respondents revealed is the sobering reality of racism. That is, as some multiracial individuals acknowledge the way that they are targets of racial discrimination and differential treatment and that they are positioned at a disadvantage in the dating and mate selection process, others participate in and produce what Kristen Myers (2005) calls “racetalk.” Sometimes, the same individuals may be targets of discrimination and also participants in perpetuating it individually. This participation upholds and circulates the problematic racial ideologies of members of various racial groups. As multiracial individuals negotiate their potentially shifting mixture, they may manage their multiplicity by border patrolling themselves.

Policing or constraining their own choices, instead of enjoying and exploring these choices, reflects a trend that reinforces Bonilla-Silva’s (2004) contention that anyone living in a racial pigmentocracy and hierarchy will learn to participate in the process. Multiracial people may choose to present themselves in ways that bring them better access to racial privilege, positioning themselves in closer proximity to some color lines and further from others. Doing so also upholds the antiblack racism that persists in this country and the dis-privileges that collective black members experience.

In Chapter Six, I build on my discussion of borderism to show how people who are policed, in terms of their racial identities, produce new ways of seeing race. Through their own literal and figurative journeys, many multiracial people cross racial borders as well as geographical ones. What does this multiracial movement do to our collective conceptualizations of race when we are encouraged to take into account different racial paradigms? How do these migrations facilitate racial transformations and reconfigurations in the racial classification system and the way people locate, dislocate, and/or relocate themselves within this system, in this society, and others?

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Notes 1 He held this belief despite saying, “Almost everybody’s a mixture of the

oppressed and the oppressor because when you look at how many children were the children of sexual, I mean, I hate to say it but, sexual molestation of the white master on the black slave. A lot of kids came from that. And so you are a mixture of the oppressor and the oppressed.”

2 Dakota revisits this term and provides the following elaboration: “My mom’s best friend is also Korean and married to a White man. They have two daughters which are half Korean and so when we are out, we are like whatever, but when they are at home with us and mom, and they are speaking Korean, we can start to be like little Korean girls or whatever, but only when it’s convenient like that. That’s what I meant when I said ‘convenient.’”

3 More evidence of this “spicing up” of whiteness occurred with Rose’s discussion of exploring more of her Native American ancestry: “I think it would be fun, something to learn, about my culture…. Um, I think I would try to promote the heritage more, if I could, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t promote it, I think it’s great to promote other cultures but I think if I knew I was definitely a part of it, then I would try to participate in more things that were culturally from that sect of Indian culture.”

4 Rosalind Fischer (2006) described these as “rules and roles that support and maintain the domination of people of color.”

5 “I think if it was like in a class, where people were asking about it, I’d want to share more about it, but maybe professional situations where they don’t want to know details, just they want to know, ‘What are you?’ Okay, move on. I would probably just say white.”

6 By this, I mean that she mostly grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods and “black settings”; and established black friendship networks.

7 Toni also reified stereotypes about whites, noting their reserved demeanor, proper speech, and polished appearance and dress. These examples illustrate racetalk (2005).

8 Bonilla-Silva (2003a,b) discussed how some nonwhite groups possess more prowhite attitudes than whites themselves. The converse, then, involves blacks having anti-black attitudes that match or exceed that of whites.

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