{"id":30822,"date":"2013-05-05T03:28:54","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T03:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30822"},"modified":"2017-04-21T02:33:26","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T02:33:26","slug":"i-encountered-a-challenge-to-my-beliefs-about-multi-race-studies-when-i-began-to-read-rainier-spencer%e2%80%99s-1999-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30822","title":{"rendered":"I encountered a challenge to my beliefs about multi-race studies when I began to read Rainier Spencer\u2019s (1999) ideas."},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\u2026I encountered a challenge to my beliefs about multi-race studies when I began to read <a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.unlv.edu\/spencer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rainier Spencer\u2019s<\/a> (1999) ideas. He is boldly critical of multi-race theory, which pushed me to think critically about my own understandings of multiracialism. In his book, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=1039\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States<\/a><\/em>, Spencer (1999) starts: \u201c\u2018You\u2019re not worried about me marrying your daughter,\u2019 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/James_Baldwin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">James Baldwin<\/a> told a White southerner during a television debate. \u2018You\u2019re worried about me marrying your wife\u2019s daughter. I\u2019ve been marrying your daughter even since the days of slavery\u2019\u201d (p. 1). This quote re-ignites the reality of White superiority directly into one of society\u2019s most personal, yet significantly political, spaces: marriage. Spencer does not hesitate to be confrontational about how historically oppressive and unreliable notions of multiracialism are, if we are ever to become a society without racism. He discusses how multiracial and antiracial ideologies could disrupt the U.S. racial ordering of society by asking \u201chow can mixed-race or multiracial persons place themselves with consistency and meaning within that system?\u201d (p. 5). The pain and frustration associated with multi-racialism remains as long as the myth of race remains. Spencer believes it is well past time to begin problematizing race categories altogether. He believes we must move away from classifications of people and promotes the ideology that we are all members of the human race&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sonia Janis,\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=30758\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Am I Enough? A Multi-Race Teacher\u2019s Experience In-Between Contested Race, Gender, Class, and Power<\/a>,\u201d <em>Journal of Curriculum Theorizing<\/em>, (Volume 28, Number 3, 2012). 134-135. <a href=\"http:\/\/journal.jctonline.org\/index.php\/jct\/article\/view\/386\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/journal.jctonline.org\/index.php\/jct\/article\/view\/386<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I encountered a challenge to my beliefs about multi-race studies when I began to read Rainier Spencer\u2019s (1999) ideas. He is boldly critical of multi-race theory, which pushed me to think critically about my own understandings of multiracialism.<\/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":[14596,45,26880,14595],"class_list":["post-30822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-journal-of-curriculum-theorizing","tag-rainier-spencer","tag-sonia-e-janis","tag-sonia-janis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30822","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=30822"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53605,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30822\/revisions\/53605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}