Beyond Racial Exceptionalism: Explaining the Convergence of Mixed-Race Census Categorizations in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain |
Beyond Racial Exceptionalism: Explaining the Convergence of Mixed-Race Census Categorizations in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain
Canadian Political Science Association
81th Annual Conference
2009-05-27 through 2009-05-29
Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University
By examining racial classifications in national censuses this paper will explore moments of policy convergence that defy domestic explanations of the state’s regulation of racial identities. During the same time period, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada all moved towards ‘counting’ mixed-race on their national censuses; given their previous divergences in other areas of racial regulation, even in terms of previous modes of racial classification, this recent convergence is puzzling. In the United States, this move is largely attributed to the existence of a mixed-race social movement that pushed Congress for the change – but parallel developments in Canada and the U.K. occurred without the presence of a politically active civil society devoted to making the change. This begs an interesting question: Why the convergence? When domestic explanations prove insufficient, what can comparisons tell us? This paper will demonstrate the political salience of global trends surrounding race and racialism – specifically, the transnational discourses of multiculturalism and recognition that have pervaded ethnopolitics since the 1990s. Ultimately, it seeks to challenge conventional domestic explanations for institutional racial categorization, rejecting ‘exceptionalism’ in the sphere of problematic race relations and demonstrating the ways in which race can be studied in comparative context.
Tags: Debra Thompson