{"id":14862,"date":"2013-03-20T03:56:24","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T03:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=14862"},"modified":"2013-09-21T05:46:45","modified_gmt":"2013-09-21T05:46:45","slug":"14862","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=14862","title":{"rendered":"Reinforcing, rather than challenging prevailing notions of racial difference"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Yet, just as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Frederick_Douglass\" target=\"_blank\">Douglass<\/a> had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted in pejorative assumptions about blacks as angry or inferior.<strong> In other words, this idealised view of \u2018bi-racial\u2019 people reinforces, rather than challenges, prevailing notions of racial difference, of white superiority and black inferiority.<\/strong> The fascination with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barack_Obama\" target=\"_blank\">Obama<\/a> as a seemingly \u2018raceless\u2019 mediator, once praised by a news presenter who gushed after a major presidential speech, \u201cFor an hour, I forgot he was black,\u201d is a far cry from the resentful perception in some quarters of his wife, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michelle_Obama\" target=\"_blank\">Michelle<\/a>, as an \u201cangry black woman.\u201d <strong>The belief that a mixed race president heralds an era of racial harmony seems not just na\u00efve, but misguided\u2026<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kevin Gaines, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=10390\" target=\"_blank\">Vision Turns to Division<\/a>,\u201d <em>American Review<\/em>, Issue 2 (May 2010): 12-15. <a href=\"http:\/\/americanreviewmag.com\/opinions\/Vision-turns-to-division\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/americanreviewmag.com\/opinions\/Vision-turns-to-division<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yet, just as Douglass had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4577,4576],"class_list":["post-14862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-american-review","tag-kevin-gaines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}