Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

Despite being heralded as answer to racial conflict in post-civil rights United States, principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiculturalism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality. In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from splintered political initiatives of multiracial movement to academic field of multiracial studies, to melodramatic media declarations about the browning of America. He contests rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that true target of multiracialism is singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in new multiracial consciousness. An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo gains of modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics. Jared Sexton is assistant professor of African American studies and film and media studies at University of California, Irvine.