miscentrism

There is a smugness associated with this valorization of contemporary racial mixture that is palpable if one is not party to the celebration, a smugness that is a complement to the rejection of the mulatto of history that I considered toward the end of Chapter 6.  It is in that regard a double insult to American mulattoes today and to their voiceless precursors of past decades and centuries.  I am therefore moved to provide a name for what has thus far been only a feeling, something I have responded to and reacted against, but until now has remained nameless.  I therefore introduce the concept of miscentrism, by which I mean an ideology that holds multiraciality to be superior to all monoraces with the exception, naturally, of whites.  This exception is necessary to note, for the American Multiracial Identity Movement is invested at a deep philosophical level in the perpetuation and the veneration of whiteness as purity and superiority.  In a perverse way, the American Multiracial Identity Movement’s clear stances of mulattophobia and Negrophobia are counterpoised against its own miscentrism in a kind of isometric logical fallacy.

Rainier Spencer, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner, 2011), 167.

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