[*PG231]THE SHIFTING RACE-CONSCIOUSNESS MATRIX AND THE MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY MOVEMENT: A CRITICAL REPLY TO PROFESSOR HERNANDEZ
In this article, the author posits that race as an idea begins with consciousness that reinforces that race is real and immutable. The Multiracial Category Movement can shift our race consciousness away from traditional ways of thinking, talking, and using race. The Movement moves us beyond binary race thinking, and this new thinking shifts the extant race consciousness matrix. It also frees our consciousness so that we can personally and politically acknowledge our biracial and multiracial identities, and it perforce alters the traditional political meaning of race. Legal scholars like Professor Tanya Hernandez argue for the political meaning of race against a remediating balm against the color-blind jurisprudence, weakening of civil right protections, and pigmentocracy. While these new identities can promote color-blind jurisprudence by conservatives and pigmentocracy by those fleeing the oppressive constraints of traditional racial categories, the author argues against Hernandez and for the Movement’s paradigm shifting possibilities.
[*PG232]The Matrix—the combined current energy field within any given parameter—is a powerful vibe. It can directly impact, affect, and create physical objects and events.
(“Wherever two or more are gathered in My name . . .”)
Your popular psychology has termed this energy Matrix the “Collective Consciousness.” It can, and does, affect everything on your planet: the prospects of war and the chances for peace; geopolitical upheaval or a planet becalmed: widespread illness or worldwide wellness.
All is the result of consciousness.1
Although we socially, historically, and psychologically co-create racism and white supremacy,2 race is not biologically factual. It is not [*PG233]real.3 As such, race does not have any meaning that survives its social and historical context.4 Race exists, if ever, in our individual and cultural consciousness.5 If we do not constantly and consciously meditate on it, race cannot exist. Unfortunately, we fuel this social construct with our mental kindling and intellectual logs.6 Race, racism, and white supremacy exist because we—individually and collectively— [*PG234]create it, enforce it, and sustain it.7 Thus, it is our race consciousness and its attendant behavior that remain the apt locus for racism and white supremacy.8 We consciously create race by externalizing what we think about, for example, blacks.9 This race-thinking—or externaliz[*PG235]ing—constructs our liberal world,10 and this world in turn constructs us.11 As Jerome Bruner would perhaps argue, race for all of us is the “out there” that first exists “in here.”12 In this way, race is not only constructed but is also a consciousness matrix.13
[*PG236] Basically, if race arises from a consciousness matrix, does race necessarily have an essential meaning outside of how we think, use and talk about race? I think not! Thinking, talking, and using give race its life force, content, and meaning (e.g., racism).14 Without our thinking, talking, and using, race loses its practical, social function, and we need never experience the individual and collective pain that follows consciously or otherwise when we force people to separate unnaturally from each other.15 Unfortunately, if we continue to think, talk, and use race, we—blacks, whites, and others—co-create these venal experiences. And then we become drunk and sickened by the nasty mead we have created, and in this drunken stupor, we forget that we originated race and racism, proclaiming instead that race and racism not only reside in a great unreachable beyond but also remain external, objective, and real.16
We rarely ask if race’s meaning exists beyond our consciousness,17 and we rarely ponder how absolutely central our role is in race’s oppressive meaning. Ultimately, then, it is as if we—blacks, whites, and others—walk into a well-lit room, turn out the lights, forget about the light switch, and then curse the darkness. Because we turned out the light, the idea of darkness must already have existed within our consciousness. By dimming the light, we sought the dark. After we create darkness, then we alienate ourselves from each other by becoming vested in our racialized roles,18 all the while blaming the liberal state [*PG237]for solely creating race and for deliberately giving race its particularly venal content. Hardly! For dark, fearful reasons, blacks and whites prefer a race consciousness.19 Why? I think blacks and whites prefer thinking, talking, and using race and race consciousness because each group seeks power, innocence, control, irresponsibility, etc.20 Worst of all, we foolishly believe that “blackness” or “whiteness” represents our true, spiritual identity and our true beingness.21
What nonsense! Again, blacks and whites act as if they cannot respond to how they have allowed themselves to think, talk, and use race.22 In the end, we become the “blackness” or “whiteness” and its venal content. If we account for a given culture’s collective consciousness, no great, oppressive force exists beyond our own consciousness.23 Perhaps Pogo was right: we have met the racists, bigots, and [*PG238]fools, and they are us.24 In this way, race’s meaning is always first “in here” (i.e., matrix consciousness).25
This matrix of race consciousness—race thinking and its meaning—comes under direct attack from the Multiracial Category Movement (MCM)26. With this MCM, we can weaken our narrow fixation on a singular racial identity, and by broadening our racial lenses, we can achieve at least five goals. First, we can shift our race consciousness. Second, we can destabilize racial categories completely. Third, we can think, talk, and use “race” categories toward a higher, Spiritual end. Fourth, we can eradicate all racial categories. Fifth, we can begin to relate to each other as Spirit beings, despite the different “color” garb we may choose in a given lifetime. In this critical essay, I evaluate Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández’s article, “Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence,27 and I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly flesh out the problem of a race-consciousness matrix. Then, I argue that the MCM does not in and of itself privilege white over black. Third, the MCM creates a challenge and an opportunity for perhaps yet unimagined social liberty and le[*PG239]gal equality. Fourth, the MCM does not perforce invigorate color-blind jurisprudence and thus white supremacy.
Blacks, whites, and others allow a race-consciousness matrix to powerfully control how they think about themselves and others.28 The words “allow” and “control” are crucial here. In the race game, these terms suggest that neutral energy flows both ways. First, “allow” suggests that blacks, whites and others actively participate in self-alienation, and second, “control” suggests that blacks, whites, and others consciously turn their power to discern over to other people or things.29 In this dynamic, then, blacks, whites, and others commit their energies to thinking, talking, and using race. Basically, then, each side needs the other.30 Together, blacks, whites, and others con[*PG240]tribute such intense energy to race-thinking that they underwrite race at conscious and unconscious levels.31 By consciously or otherwise focusing mental energy on race, blacks, whites, and others create the individual and collective consciousness that forms a race-consciousness matrix.
To this extent, a race-consciousness matrix is a “pre-given form of life.” This form of life literally awaits all of us.32 We are born into it and become imprinted with racial symbols, codes, and language (e.g., culture).33 Before too long, we variously adopt these symbols, codes, [*PG241]and language,34 and we live as if we have never been without them. With cultural practices, then, we have a “mind-set,” one which takes inalterably to rigid race-thinking.35 With race-thinking, we internalize race’s limitations—self-hatred, alienation, and segregation.36 Although each new generation alters how it race-thinks,37 the father’s [*PG242]sins visit the children. And although children can change how they race-think,38 they still exist within a race-consciousness matrix.39 For example, in the late 1800s, whites used lynching as official and unofficial violence against blacks, whites, and Asians.40 Today, society publicly rejects racial violence.41 At the same time, most white Americans quietly fear blacks and other minorities42 and unconsciously [*PG243]practice racial exclusion.43 Although our society gradually improves on the race question, why then do blacks, whites, and others still prefer to think, talk, and use language within a race-consciousness matrix? I would argue that we wish to end not a race-consciousness matrix but nasty displays of racism.44 As such, we would prefer not the end of race consciousness but the privileging of racial tolerance.45 I think this point holds because blacks, whites, and others cannot imagine a Self outside of a race-consciousness matrix.46 As such, this matrix functions as an institutional form of life through which we “know” ourselves and limit others,47 and unfortunately, under this form of life [*PG244]called a race-consciousness matrix, any limitation on blacks by necessity also imprisons whites.
This race-consciousness matrix deeply concerned William Du Bois, and I think he understood how deeply connected it was to black and white identities. In Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois observed that:
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.48
Du Bois’s observation captures a race-consciousness matrix, and few of us would doubt his words. Du Bois’s double consciousness reveals itself in two specific ways. First, Plessy v. Ferguson’s49 white America must imprint blacks with a deep sense of inferiority.50 As such, America reminds blacks that they can never truly be sons and daugh[*PG245]ters to the Founding Fathers.51 In reacting to this lesson, blacks who sought integration were rebuffed by the truly inherited and distrusted by black Africans.52 Second, while thinking of themselves as Americans, blacks simultaneously accepted that they are indeed less than whites.53 Blacks thus were Americans and Negroes. With a dogged will, blacks sought “self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”54 This deep desire to reach her “latent genius” did not require that blacks reject their cultural heritage for “white Americanism.”55 In order to aid all citizens in finding their essential selves, merging the double self—or consciousness—became Du Bois’s obsession. Like Du Bois, blacks lived with the tragic irony of this double consciousness. For example, America would patriotically call her darkies to war, but she would also obsessively instill a superior racial identity in her whites. Day by day, whites valorized practices on which the double self depended, and by the by, blacks internalized this double consciousness.
As such, a double consciousness becomes a racial identity that undermines self-awareness, true freedom. If blacks internalize a double consciousness, they must perforce think against a backdrop of white supremacy in which they are inherently inferior. This thinking suggests that blacks have a racial identity that rejects their essential selves. With this existential crisis, blacks cannot know themselves, except within this double consciousness—e.g., a race-consciousness matrix.56 As a result, blacks race-think. They become their race and its [*PG246]inherent limitations. By limitations, I mean that they cannot imagine an essential Self that lives without racial isms. Race-thinking declares war on true freedom, and it denounces spiritual liberty. If we weaken a race-consciousness matrix and if we strip away its meaning, people who were once categorized as “black” can seek comfort in their essential self. In this way, we attain freedom and liberty by questing for a self awareness, a true self-consciousness that cannot only be mediated by race.57 For Du Bois, a people’s true self-consciousness rested in culture or aesthetics (e.g., art).58 By using aesthetics, blacks could rise above how dominant institutions had constructed them and whites. Unfortunately, aesthetics may prove useless in dialectically yielding an epistemological knowing that frees blacks to acquire true self-consciousness—not as African Americans but as divine humans.59 For[*PG247]tunately, aesthetics (e.g., multiracial categories) tear race-thinking’s thin fabric, and it could shift a double consciousness—i.e., a race-consciousness matrix. In so doing, if blacks use aesthetics to pursue a true self-consciousness, they could take precious steps toward self-awareness, true freedom.60
In weakening a race-thinking and in pursuing self awareness, blacks must recognize that a double consciousness also affects whites. When we account for white racial identity, Du Bois’s double consciousness (e.g., race-consciousness matrix) remains incomplete. He failed to note that whites operate within, and are limited by, this double consciousness, too.61 Whites only “know” they are “superior” if [*PG248]they compare themselves to blacks.62 In America, society reinforces this “knowing” by racially erecting symbols, codes, and language.63 And with this reinforcement, dominant cultural practices publicly mark blacks as offending Niggers, Asians as yellow slopes, Native people as red savages, Hispanics as brown beaners.64 As a result, whites privately live in deep doubt and perennial fear of the offending other.65 To suppress this doubt, whites “gaze” consciously and uncon[*PG249]sciously at blacks.66 This gaze literally means heightened police presence67 and mandates naturally housing segregation.68 In this way, white racial cultural practices obsess over blacks and other racial minorities.69 Ever vigilant, whites must ensure that blacks accept their [*PG250]inferiority. For example, Hopwood v. Texas and Adarand v. Peńa70 can be viewed as white, middle-class attacks on black access to lucrative, perhaps historically white, market opportunities,71 and this attack perhaps serves to reveal how whites need the myth72 of racial superiority so that they can function in a world where race constantly faces not only critical reading but also deconstructive analysis.73 Another example occurs in legal academe. Critical Race Theory suffers attack within law schools74 because whites wish to reassert their privileged role in [*PG251]controlling how blacks, for example, use critical theory to “trash” legal doctrine and its racist implications.75 In this way, whites exist within a double consciousness, and they too deny themselves a “true self-consciousness.”76 Whatever whites know about themselves, they derive it from what they are not. Whites have not been enslaved. Whites have not been Niggers, Negroes, Colored, Blacks, or African Americans. In any event, “blackness” and “whiteness” purport to connote distinct racial categories.77 Regardless, blacks and whites suffer similarly miserable and dysfunctional lives in a white racist America,78 and they both function within a race-consciousness matrix.
In this way, Du Bois’s double consciousness likens itself to his “color-line” problem, and this problem too constitutes a race-consciousness matrix. Du Bois posited that in the twentieth century, the “color line” would divide blacks from whites.79 Since he made these prophetic remarks, whites have defined themselves by their racist claims against blacks and others with more melanin. And despite civil rights gains, blacks still define themselves by how whites think, talk, and use words like “Nigger.” As such, even though he did not look critically at blacks and what role they played in their own oppres[*PG252]sion, Du Bois’s color-line problem stems from both blacks and whites. That is, blacks and whites become their racial categories, even though “black” or “white” are purely arbitrary labels.80 Neither blacks nor whites have empowered themselves to reclaim their true self-consciousness, and as I have already argued, blacks and whites use the color line, which they collectively built and consciously maintained, to avoid weakening the manner in which a race-consciousness matrix denies them what they truly seek—a spiritual life in which they can experience their true self-consciousness.81 To this extent, the color-line problem not only wrongly divides us but also neurotically imprints us with a dysfunctional and limited imagination.82 This limitation warns us away from challenging the sanctity of race.83 As one of my colleagues recently proclaimed, “You may not think you’re black; but I know I’m a black man.” At the very least, this declaration suggests that the speaker adheres rigidly to structuralist notions of race,84 [*PG253]and thus he disdains any deconstructive projects that might unsettle apparently stable unitary and meaningful racial categories.85 Perhaps blacks and whites fear risking madness86 if they venture beyond, for example, the sexual color line,87 beyond a raced Self, thus experiencing a spiritual life beyond a race-consciousness matrix—an essential Self.88 If true, then blacks and whites not only vest themselves in a color line but also commit themselves to a race-consciousness matrix.89
[*PG254] In this way, our race-consciousness matrix informs how we race-think.90 Recently, I called this consciousness a white cultural matrix.91 If we intend to combat a white cultural matrix, then radicals, liberals, and Race Crits must willingly acknowledge that each of us has been reared in a racist culture, and that we have likewise been imbued with racist thinking and consciousness. As such, we, including those who advocate for social justice and equal rights, engage in race-thinking.92 To this extent, we all reinforce race-thinking, and we unwittingly give [*PG255]energy to racism and white supremacy.93 Race-thinking represents the old logic of Plessy’s American Apartheid,94 and this old logic reifies the great lie about how the so-called races have found sexual union with each other and have continued the human family95 since they perhaps first encountered each other.96 Race-thinking confuses us into believing that race will forever be a permanent feature of American life,97 [*PG256]and thus we accept the false notion that we should not, or can not, change our race-consciousness matrix.
Although blacks, whites, and others have committed themselves to a race-consciousness matrix, we have gradually changed how we think, talk, and use race and its meaning.98 Basically, race and its meaning are not immutable forms of life. We alter them slowly and culturally, sometimes invisibly or imperceptibly.99 This slow change suggests that we can shift our thinking, our consciousness. For example, during the Jim Crow era, so-called blacks and whites individually and collectively participated in open displays of racial violence.100 [*PG257]Whites mostly played the role of violent haters; blacks mostly played the role of violated victims.101 Today, we reject violent displays of racial violence. What has changed? How we think! Although blacks and whites still believe in race and racism, they have shifted their consciousness about how effectively to deal with each other. At present, blacks talk about how whites subtly practice their racism.102 They call it “unconscious racism.”103 Likewise, whites talk about how affirmative action unduly burdens their life chances and unnecessarily benefits blacks.104 They call it “reverse discrimination.”105 If we have changed our minds about how to construct race and how to practice racism, then have we decided that racial oppression is bad?106 Have we re[*PG258]jected a race-consciousness matrix? Or, have we decided that we can only find a solution to race and racism by gradually, with each successive generation, locating new, socially grounded ways to weaken how we think racially about ourselves and others? These questions suggest that we know in our hearts that we wrongly divide ourselves with race-thinking, and that we unnecessarily injure ourselves with racial violence, regardless of what form such violence takes.107 As such, we can change how we think about race, and in this way, we can also change how we think about ourselves. Keep in mind that whites cannot act racially “superior” unless blacks accept consciously or otherwise that they are racially “inferior.”108 If true, race and racism amount to a game of thinking, talking, and using.109 In short, it is a race con-
[*PG259]sciousness matrix game.110
With the advent of the Multiracial Category Movement, we have also implicitly announced that we wish to change our race-consciousness matrix. It appears that we have frustrated ourselves with limited, unitary race-thinking.111 If true, then are we prepared to shift our consciousness from the old matrix to a new one?112 Yes, absolutely! For too long, we have practiced the old race paradigm. By thinking of ourselves through newly “discovered” racial categories, we shift our race-thinking (matrix or paradigm),113 and we thereby create crises not only for the old logic but also for new racial practices.114 [*PG260]Nevertheless, the new racial practices herald a new logic, proverbial biblical end times for race and perhaps racism. With this new logic, we will experience some political and social difficulties,115 and we must acknowledge that new racial categories may not only liberate but also entrap us.116 To avoid this iron cage, we must constantly and mercilessly kill new race categories just like old ones; we, like water, must learn naturally to spill over artificially confining banks. In the meantime, I and other spiritual beings can choose to live beyond the limits of the old race-consciousness matrix. We can embrace new experiences, which were not embraced under the old matrix. As spiritual beings, I, and perhaps others, can acknowledge that God is the “color of water,”117 and the MCM proffers a chance to reclaim not our normal, raced selves but our natural spiritual beingness.118 In this way, the MCM shifts us from the old race-consciousness matrix to a new, potentially liberating one.
However, this MCM will co-exist with the old race-consciousness matrix. That is, people who cannot think beyond a unitary racial category need their race lenses.119 With them, people have certainty in a powerful social mythology.120 Without them, people would feel lost, afraid. Without this mythology, blacks and whites will suffer an [*PG261]identity crises. As such, “blackness” and “whiteness” ground a person to a limited social and spiritual identity, and to this extent, race has three dimensions like “five red apples.”121 Who determines what “blackness”—or “whiteness”—means?122
If “blackness” means “Nigger,” and if “Nigger” denotes a person unworthy of living, do I have a right to murder that person physically, emotionally, or spiritually?123 Although whites will still think and speak of blacks as “Niggers,” I would prefer to ignore such tripe, but if such old logic practices become intrusive, if not injurious, then those to whom such intended insults are directed ought to have social and legal remedies.
Regardless of such intended insults, I would rather define myself, and I would have the State (e.g., the Census Bureau) issue new racial categories so that my self identity can have public, if not legal, expression. Thus, while competing matrices will operate within the same space, I choose to focus not on a constrained idea of a person but on a much more liberating one. To be sure, I am not suggesting that the MCM permits its supporters to bury their heads in the social and political sandbox. What I am saying is that while we admit that whites have, can, and will hurt blacks physically, emotionally, and spiritually by using actual and symbolic violence to deny them human dignity, [*PG262]and while we acknowledge that blacks will deeply resist new racial identities that dilute their African heritage, we must focus our minds, nay, our consciousness, on a practical spiritual ethic of freedom. How we focus our minds determines what we see. If I believe in an idea, I see the idea at work all around me. I know that the MCM does not vanquish racists and white supremacists. I also know that if we—blacks, whites, and others—intend to alter our race-consciousness matrix, we must intend to broaden our views of ourselves and others. It takes courage. Although this society reinforces a limiting idea of human beings (e.g., race) through our thoughts, words, and deeds, we also must embrace new, expansive ideas.124 We must let these ideas into our individual and collective consciousness.125 And while for a time the old will co-exist with a new race-consciousness matrix, the MCM’s dialectics move us not only toward “racial” justice but also toward spiritual awareness.126
[*PG263] In this critical reply to Professor Tanya Hernández, I argue that the MCM shifts our race-consciousness matrix, and it is this paradigm shift that could eventually undermine our collective race consciousness which makes racial dualism possible and which thus provides the seed for racism and racial injustice. With legally recognized bi-racial and multiracial identities,127 we can create a vital opportunity to heal the pain that perforce follows when so-called blacks and other minority groups not only allow whites to define their life chances but also participate in their own marginalization, oppression, and silence by subscribing to terms that delimit their spiritual, social, and political road to Absolute Liberty.128 By honestly acknowledging our genetic [*PG264]heritage,129 we can stop hating that part of ourselves that is black, white, or other,130 and we can stop separating ourselves emotionally, psychologically, and physically from others because they appear to fall within a particular racialized space.
In The “Multiracial” Discourse,131 Hernández advances a race-consciousness approach as an alternative to the MCM, and in so doing she argues two vital points. First, she critiques how this MCM negatively impacts federal civil rights laws. For Hernández, if Congress adopts multiracial categories, whites will perniciously use these categories to destroy nondiscrimination principles. According to Hernández, these whites will also become ever more emboldened in their push for color-blind laws so that they effectively promote a white supremacy agenda. Thus, for Hernández, we could blame the MCM for providing whites, who are consciously or unconsciously racist, with a “counter-egalitarian” tool to oppress minorities. Why blame the MCM? It destroyed the “socio-political meaning of race.” Hernández argues that without this meaning, we cannot use race-conscious tools [*PG265]to end discrimination.132 Second, she questions whether the MCM’s goals will eliminate racial categories and promote racial justice.133
In advancing her thesis and in raising this question, Hernández proceeds in five steps. First, she critically analyzes what forces motivate this MCM, and she concludes that white mothers of biracial children propose multiracial categories not only because they fear languishing in genetic obscurity but also because they believe that without these categories their black children will not enjoy the privileges of their white heritage.134 Second, she asserts that society has always valued whiteness, and if the MCM succeeds, people who self identify as multiracial will be viewed as “white” by society. She argues that the privileged role of whiteness basically explains why this MCM has vitality.135 Third, she links the MCM to the Supreme Court’s color-blind jurisprudence because under a multiracial social order, “whiteness” still wins especially where the state and its courts apply race-neutral tests to social disputes.136 Fourth, she supports a race-conscious approach to end race discrimination because this approach does not permit society to ignore race and to forget that a race-neutral social order leaves in place and unchecked the historical privileges which whites have always enjoyed.137 Lastly, Hernández proposes two approaches. First, we ought to adopt a race-conscious census classification because it acknowledges the political meaning of race (e.g., the one-drop rule), and second, the government should modify its data collection forms by removing biologically determined race categories. Instead, data collection should use a race-conscious approach that would be sensitive to the political meanings society imposes on race categories. Ultimately, Hernández concludes that the MCM fails to achieve racial equality precisely because it does not adopt a race-conscious approach, and that her approach succeeds because it “forthright[ly] ... [deals with] this [racial] complexity and [it] encourages society . . . to . . . grappl[e] with the discomfort of acknowledging racial prejudice and disadvantage.”138
[*PG266] It is my view, however, that we cannot end a race-consciousness matrix through laws that have racial constructs as their central feature. If whites commit themselves immorally to racist practices and if blacks internalize these practices and refuse to imagine themselves beyond their race, we cannot legislate morality.139 And especially when society deeply connects itself to a racist Manifest Destiny, “moral” laws do not change our immoral hearts, and morality has nothing to do with whiteness, blackness, and otherness.140 Rather, we must “raise” or alter our consciousness, and as Professor Ronald Dworkin argues, we must develop an integrated community141 in which citizens express publicly an inner faith in an ethical life. Without this ethical life, whites who consciously and unconsciously view their world in racial terms can use rights-based claims—radical egalitarianism—to challenge affirmative action programs.142 Since the Civil War Amendments, the federal government has used a race-conscious approach,143 and this approach has not ended race, racism, and white supremacy. As such, Justice Brown in Plessy v. Ferguson aptly noted that racial supe[*PG267]riority and inferiority turns on how we think (e.g., our consciousness).144 For example, our most progressive statutes, often born out of necessity,145 like the Civil Rights Act of 1991,146 have not ended racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.147 Before that 1991 Act, Congress touted the Fair Housing Act148 as the statutory juggernaut that would end racial segregation,149 and today we are not just racially segregated in our residential housing patterns150 but [*PG268]clearly unable to force different racial groups to live in harmony.151 And while society may impose a cost for racially discriminatory acts,152 the law has not ended racial violence and oppression.153 Violence and oppression end when we have had enough, when we stop enacting law out of fear, and when we cannot stomach one more death. In this way, we deposit in the law our spirit for peace and love,154 and thus we make laws work. We create the mythology that makes effective, enforceable law. This depositing reflects our consciousness, and if we shift our race-consciousness matrix from race as person to person as person, then we cannot truly hold to the idea that blacks and whites differ fundamentally.155 Why? If we think of race as person, then we serve society to the point of racial tyranny. But if we think of people as (spiritual) persons, then we can create a new social mythology that [*PG269]destroys a race consciousness matrix and that builds a new human family.156 By thinking of ourselves as a human family, we can attain that which we so desperately seek— human harmony.157 At base, then, we must begin to shift how we think. A shift in this race matrix creates a window for change, for peace, for love. True peace and unconditional love will not embrace major social ills like racism. Therefore, not by relying on human laws but by shifting our race-consciousness matrix, we can gradually end race-thinking and racism. In short, a race-conscious approach fails to achieve Hernández’s mandate.
Rather than focus only on the failed race-conscious approach that Hernández exclusively proposes,158 I suggest that we alter how we think, and in so doing, focus on an unimagined social reality, one in which race has all value as currency in the social marketplace. Basically, then, this unimagined social reality is a new race-consciousness matrix or, at the least, its advent. How we think forms a matrix, a framework that reinforces a socially constructed “reality.” Accordingly, we must ask: does a race consciousness cure what ails me? I answer emphatically, no! I will argue that only by shifting how we think, our matrix, can we effectively weaken and then, after several generations, end race categories. Without race, we cannot have racism. For sure, I am not suggesting that without racism, we will not impose new socially constructed realities on ourselves, such as gender and class oppression.159 What I am arguing is that if we shift our race-consciousness [*PG270]matrix, we will end what Du Bois acknowledged would be the problem of the twentieth century: the color-line. With the new millennium upon us, should we not begin to destroy one piece of false thinking that has prevented us from having truly authentic relationships with each other that we consciously and unconsciously desire?160
Unlike a race-conscious approach, the MCM explicitly answers the question I posed earlier: why race-thinking? It answers by declaring that race-thinking limits us. That is, even if we concede that society socially constructed race, we cannot step politically and safely outside of our race paradigm.161 In this way, black is black, white is white. How limiting!162 Race-thinking locks us into a cube as if race were truly biologically determined.163 We ought to know better. We know [*PG271]from grown folks’ kitchen talk that blacks have passed for white164 because they have white mothers or fathers.165 It is the fixed lore of our communities. If we privately acknowledge that black-white folks exist, then we cannot publicly deny that unitary race-thinking is purely political and ideological. It is about “keeping it real.” It is about joining people with what Du Bois called a “common history.”166 Or the belief in some black communities that whites are biologically, if not culturally, different from blacks. Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah rejects a “common history” model for race because it operates on false biological notions.167 Appiah argues:
To put it more simply: sharing a common group history cannot be a criterion for being members of the same group, for we would have to be able to identify the group in order to identify its history. Someone in the fourteenth century could share a common history with me through our membership in a historically extended race only if something accounts for their membership in the race in the fourteenth century and mine in the twentieth. That something cannot, on pain of circularity, be the history of the race.
. . .
[*PG272]Whatever holds Du Bois’s races conceptually together, then, it cannot be common history.168
It would appear that any answer to “why race-thinking?” cannot stand on historical and biological grounds. Rather, blacks like whites embrace unitary race-thinking because they cannot imagine themselves outside of traditional categories and because they cannot envision a politically safe vehicle for reimagining their future. This limitation clearly affects why Hernández consciously chose a race-conscious approach. As such, unitary race-thinking operates within a race-consciousness matrix, and the matrix questions the MCM because different thinking about race is too disruptive.
The MCM asks us to shift our race-consciousness matrix,169 and in so doing we can create space for human equality. This shift evidences itself because open-minded people, perhaps people who have talked about why “Auntie Ethel” has fair or brown skin, support the MCM. Within the MCM, blacks, whites, Latinos and others wish to destroy all racial classes,170 and what remains will perhaps be a variety of ethnicity or culture which, if we accept Appiah’s argument, any person can practice.171 Although I argue for ethnicity over race as we move toward a non-racial identity, I am aware that “ethnicity” as a socially constructed category must be thoroughly interrogated by critical theorists, so that we can publicly note how dominant social institutions have used “ethnicity” to shield darker Europeans from the stigma of “blackness.”172 By labeling darker Europeans as “white,” dominant social institutions prevented similarly situated citizens from recognizing common interests, thus undermining coalition politics or class solidarity.173 Although ethnicity has a checkered history and dubious origins, I think that, unlike race, ethnicity can be successfully coopted, [*PG273]principally because many different kinds of people with different racial heritage have already been included within its cultural boundaries.174 Regardless of its political origins, I think (perhaps wrongly) that ethnicity centers itself on cultural practices, especially because culture excuses phenotypical differences and racial pedigrees. It would appear that ethnicity then does not depend on apparent (racial) distinctions. Rather, ethnicity proffers the promised inclusion that we all ultimately seek.
Unlike broadly inclusive non-racial cultural practices, unitary race-thinking and racial classes wound a person’s spirit and humanity.175 Racial classes reduce a person simply to a racial caste,176 and they lock her in. How can we break this racial caste, a prison that prevents free, unbordered thinking about ourselves and others?177 First, we ought to recognize publicly that blacks and other so-called racial groups, such as Native Americans and Chicanos, have different “racial” heritages, and second, if we have biracial parents, we—offspring of the love—acknowledge both parents, not because we approve the racial group to which they claim membership, but because love truly [*PG274]knows no such limitation, viz., race. As such, Hernández’s use of “symmetrical racial identity” is not a problematic “reality” of the MCM but rather a first crucial and critical step. If I can acknowledge my heritage on a census report, then the society learns how widespread biracial and multiracial identities are. This acknowledgment gradually undermines unitary racial thinking, and it weakens, and eventually ends, our historical and political commitment to a race-consciousness matrix. With the end of racial, and ultimately ethnic, categories, the MCM represents that “instrumental step toward the ‘dream of racial harmony,’ as opposed to the creation of ‘one more divisive category.’”178
If the MCM constitutes a radical shift in our racial consciousness, does it quite frankly matter that white mothers for example are key proponents of the MCM? Does it also matter that these white mothers might be motivated by a desire to be validated in their children’s identity? Does it matter to the MCM that these white mothers find traditional racial categories too constraining, too marginalizing? Basically, does it matter that the white mothers are narrowly driven by selfish motives?179 Hernández answers in the affirmative. For her, such motives more than suggest that the MCM uses new racial rhetoric to advance an old racist consciousness. I disagree, and I will present my counter argument shortly.
Specifically, Hernández asserts that the legal recognition of multiracial categories resonates with a color-blind society and its Supreme Court jurisprudence, and this approach prefers whites over blacks. Hernández thus suggests that white parents in their blind, narrowly rational, self-interested approach to self validation advocate for symmetrical identity. As such, biracial children will not have to choose one parent over another. However, Hernández argues quite rightly that historical whiteness has always been the preferred racial category.180 Thus, if symmetrical racial identity means that white and black [*PG275]genotypes attain legal recognition, then the white identity prevails over the black identity. Explicitly, then, symmetrical racial identity cannot succeed because such symmetry belies the realpolitik of racism and white supremacy. Hernández further suggests that the white mothers either know of this nation’s preference for whiteness or prefer ignorance, and in this way, they simply achieve through the MCM what the hypodescent rule prohibits.181 That is, under the one-drop rule, which is for practical purposes still viable today, our society constructs a person as “black” if either parent passes a certain percentage of “black” blood to the child. Equally important, if the child looks black, society forces her into the “Nigger” category, and most importantly, if the child does not look black but in fact has received “black” blood, then society has an especially keen interest in determining that child’s race, so that she does not blur the all-important racial divide and so that she does not attain social benefits to which whites are deemed specific heirs. In short, these white mothers are using the MCM not only to vitiate niggerization of their biracial children but also to confer upon them their birthright—the invisibility of white social privileges.182
Let’s assume that Hernández correctly captures the core factor behind the white mothers’ impassioned pleas for a multiracial category. How does this assumption undermine the powerful shift in the race-consciousness matrix that we have used to create and maintain space between people of apparently different racial groups? For me, this assumption is not fatal to my argument.183 What Hernández has [*PG276]missed in her argument is the historical irony that now plagues these white mothers who have not recognized the inherent injustice of the hyperdescent rule—the one-drop rule. Historically, during the Antebellum era, the child inherited the mother’s legal status. It mattered not if she were light, bright, and damn near white; if she had the proverbial one-drop of black blood, the child was socially doomed and spiritually pilloried. This rule served several purposes. First, the rule insured the relative stability of the racial color line. Second, this rule ensured that black slave females would not use their sexual appetites to corrupt free born, white Christian males into siring black babies in the far flung hope that the mulatto child would be birthed into a free legal status.184 And equally important, if a child were enslaved illegally, she could point to the free mother, and on that basis she could attain her freedom. This cause was more likely advanced by black men and women who sought their freedom in a legal venue. Yet, in any venue, racial pedigree stood centerstage. Unless one is totally blind, the MCM is irony writ large.
Because I disagree with Hernández, I must ask: what if white mothers wish in reality to confer a social largess on biracial or multiracial children?185 This effort too bespeaks irony. How do we as a society confer a property interest on a biracial or multiracial person’s whiteness without simultaneously benefiting her blackness?186 Is this question especially relevant if she has Negroid phenotypes? Rather than carving out a race-free space into which biracial and multiracial [*PG277]children will now step, are we not equally exposing the folly that is the social construction of racial categories? And if it is possible to confer a benefit on a biracial or multiracial person’s whiteness without equally privileging her blackness, is Hernández prepared to argue that race is a unitary trait that survives its social construction? Basically, then, I do not think Hernández wishes to grant credence where it has never really existed. Ultimately, I think that Hernández, like others who reject multiracial categories, cannot imagine a social reality in which we bear a variety of hues and in which we no longer view these skin colors through the lenses of American Negro slavery, Jim Crow, and racial discrimination. To imagine this future reality, we must be prepared first to break free of our old race-consciousness matrix. For legal scholars like Hernández, they simply cannot imagine the unimaginable. In the end, the old race-consciousness matrix remains the house in which we live and call home and about which we complain.
Today, multiracial categories compete with unitary racial categories. Each category is a paradigm. Multiracialism argues for honest racial or ethnic hereditary, a temporary weigh station that ushers in the death of the race-thinking of the past 300 years. Uniracialism, or thinking in black and white terms, stands for ignorance, arrogance, oppression, violence, and murder, and it reinforces the narrow race-thinking of an increasingly bygone era. Basically, the MCM urges us to expand our consciousness; a race-consciousness matrix keeps us huddled en masse in a mental prison in which we experience strange comfort, in which we feel unnaturally confined, from which we hope to escape, and by which we fear a life without racial shackles. Together, the MCM and uniracialism constitute poignant dialectical moments. A race-consciousness matrix has revealed its limits, and out of its fissures, the MCM dialectically and rhetorically emerges not as a wholly new concept, but as a secret custom for which we now have a name—multiracialism. As such, in almost vulgar Marxist language, the proverbial seed that destroys the old paradigm of a race-consciousness matrix has always existed. In this way, the MCM and uniracialism—or a race-consciousness matrix—constitute paradigms, and they both can and must co-exist in the same social space because, except when we fail cataclysmically, a new paradigm always arises before its predecessor has been completely entombed. For example, Brown co-existed with Plessy’s final days. Given this maxim, I think that [*PG278]we can recognize multiracial identities and adopt Hernández’s proposed race-conscious approach. Overlapping paradigms gradually permit us to shift our race-consciousness matrix, and they recognize that whites will resist this new shift in the race-consciousness matrix by discriminating against blacks and others.187
In critiquing the MCM, Hernández concedes no viable place for a multiracial paradigm. Her reasons are three-fold. First, the MCM paradigm represents a poor mechanism for assessing and eradicating racial discrimination.188 As I understand the MCM, the short-run goal is not eradicating racial discrimination but accounting accurately for one’s “racial” and ethnic identity.189 Second, the MCM gives cultural bullets to political conservatives who hate social programs like affirmative action. Those conservatives stand for color-blind social policies, an approach that discounts racial factors in political, social, and economic practices.190 Third, blacks will use this multiracial paradigm to deny their “blackness” or to purify themselves so that they do not have to suffer the lot in life doled out to the poor, unfortunate darkies.191 If our essential being is God or a spirited, race-less Self, why [*PG279]should blacks not have the luxury that whites enjoy—not thinking of themselves in racial terms?192 How has thinking of ourselves strictly in racial terms made blacks healthier human beings? And why is self-conscious race-thinking a normal cognitive activity? In answering these questions, we can still pursue racial justice. For Hernández, however, by not taking into account how pigmentocracy will create new problems on America’s racial frontier, the MCM simply allows biracial and multiracial children a chance to “flee repression.”193 In short, Hernández rejects a multiracial paradigm because it vouchsafes racist policies, promotes pigmentocracy, and ignores “the political meaning of race.”
Although I argue that these paradigms must coexist if we are to struggle directly or indirectly for justice in a non-racial world, Hernández rejects the MCM paradigm because she believes that its success requires a color-blind platform. I disagree. How does mocking unitary racial categories through biracial and multiracial identities perforce lead to a color-blind world? I am not saying that political conservatives will not attempt to coopt the MCM. They have successfully used race-based social programs to create wedges between blacks and whites.194 To this extent, any good idea can come to a bad end. Rather, I am asking: does the MCM paradigm perforce lead to color-blind politics in and of itself? I think not.
Hernández resists this implication by arguing that white mothers simply wish to “extend the supremacist system privilege to those who are viewed as ‘practically-all-White’ without actually dismantling the racial hierarchy itself.”195 While Hernández has ample historical evidence for her position, I do not think she accounts for the impact of [*PG280]multiracial categories on children, on parents, and on society. Thus, I do not believe that the MCM paradigm must stand principally for “dismantling racial hierarchy itself” because its agenda, if successful, achieves that goal indirectly. While the MCM paradigm can be viewed by skeptics like Hernández with deep suspicion, I posit that the MCM paradigm challenges the old race-consciousness matrix not by directly confronting it but by gradually dismantling its features.
Hernández asserts that the MCM paradigm serves a color-blind agenda.196 Hernández presents this argument syllogistically: the MCM wishes to have white parents genotypically recognized, and this recognition, especially in light of this nation’s commitment to white supremacy, must privilege whiteness over blackness. This privileging avoids public scrutiny and outrage through a color-blind agenda, little different from the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence which Justice O’Connor first advanced in City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company197 on the premise set forth in Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.198 With a color-blind agenda, the MCM basically provides the legal and intellectual groundwork that renders anti-discrimination legislation a virtual nullity.199
While this syllogism might prove persuasive to many, I take a different position. Any idea can be wrenched into an evil by people with dishonest designs. However, I think Hernández has conflated the MCM’s agenda with color-blind jurisprudence, perhaps because civil rights statutes as they currently exist might be further undermined by insincere politicians, policymakers, and others who have always sought to roll back constitutional protections for minorities.200 While I ap[*PG281]preciate this concern, and I accept that this potential reality exists, I am not prepared to argue, or to accept, that the MCM does not proffer great potential for radically shifting how we race-think. While we must concern ourselves with increasing the life chances of any group of people who have been historically denied access to the privileges that society has accorded to whites, I do not think that her attack encourages many of us to take responsibility for how we reinscribe ourselves as either “superior” or “inferior” racial groups. In short, I do not think a syllogism, even one that is as well argued as it is here by Hernández, truly responds to the potentially radical shift in our race-consciousness matrix that makes us all equal culprits in today’s existing paradigm of race, racism, and white supremacy.201
Because blacks have uncritically committed themselves to a race-consciousness matrix, I think that the greatest resistance to the MCM paradigm will come from traditional civil rights groups.202 As John Sullivan states:
The only organized opposition to the multiracial option comes from black groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP knows that estimates of the percentage of blacks with mixed racial heritage range as high as 70 percent or more. It worries that many blacks will identify themselves as multiracial. If so, the decrease in the black group’s population could reduce its share of a wide range of benefits based on numbers, such as political districting under the Voting Rights Act.203
[*PG282]Basically, then, the civil rights groups resist what the multiracial paradigm broadly implies because their proverbial “Ox” may get gored, and thus they reject any coexistence between a race-consciousness matrix and the MCM. By preferring the status quo racial paradigm, the groups argue that they prefer a paradigm where five racial categories are better than, say, twenty.204 It does not appear to matter that under the present paradigm, blacks and other marginalized racial groups still suffer in the labor market, in the workplace, in the mortgage lending market, and in public cultural consumption. At present, the census bureau catalogues us, all of us, into racial splits that benefit whites and blacks who profit from the insanity of racism and from a race-consciousness matrix in which we agree voluntarily to make ourselves prisoners of our own thinking. By resisting the MCM, these civil rights groups and scholars like Hernández are not prepared to free themselves, and for that matter the rest of us, so that each of us can individually experience the shift in race consciousness and so that we can liberate ourselves too.205 At base, I do not think that the MCM stands for the principle that any racial category is better than “blackness,”206 but I do think that civil rights groups would prefer that we [*PG283]remain “black” even if such a false unitary racial category midgets us mentally, enslaves us intellectually, and bankrupts us spiritually.207
Although color-blind advocates and those seeking to exit the “black” category will certainly seize upon the MCM, Hernández denies that biracial child her role as a “subject/agent.”208 Regardless of [*PG284]our racist history and a white supremacist paradigm, we must freely choose our identities, and self-autonomy requires no less. Under a subject/agency principle, a child must freely decide to honor his black mother and white father. Yet, the current paradigm denies her role as a subject/agent. Rather, she must choose white over black, or typically, given the one-drop rule, black over white. Should white mothers not resent a paradigm that denies their children this fundamental and personal agency? For Hernández, it is not about agency but race privileging. First, white mothers of biracial children seek multiracial categories because they have “the innate parental concern in having themselves publicly reflected in their children.”209 Second, these mothers wish to pass their inherited racial privilege on to the biracial child. Basically, these mothers would like their biracial child to live without self-consciously thinking that society has raced them.210 If we analyze these mothers uncharitably, then we can simply conclude that they are narrow-minded racists. Or, in a much more charitable light, we can conclude that they see hope for an America where biracial children can live without a racial identity, and they believe that they must start by weakening a racial paradigm that privileges white over black for goods and services and that pushes black under white for second-class citizenship.
I would not stretch credulity too much if I were to argue that interracial couples not only married for love, but also for conscious or unconscious political reasons. Are white and black mothers similar? Would a black mother work to ensure that society never forces her child to think of herself in negative racial terms? How does such work differ from a white mother who wishes that her biracial child consciously choose to acknowledge her black-white genetic—and cultural—heritage?211 They do not differ at all. If white mothers recognize that the one-drop rule erases them biologically and socially, and if biracial children self-consciously acknowledge both parents on a census form, then we have already witnessed a shift not only in how we racially define families and ourselves but also in how we race-think. [*PG285]This shift becomes the new paradigm that destroys rigid racial classifications and that potentially leads to racial healing.212
Unfortunately, when Hernández applies her argument against multiracial categories to interracial families, she does so with heavy cynicism. In so doing, she denies biracial children their subject/agency that undergirds how she politically analyzes why we should continue to mark the five racial categories proffered by the Census Bureau. Even if we use race-conscious policies like affirmative action, and even if we mark traditional racial categories, we cannot ensure that we prevent racial discrimination, and we cannot end pigmentocracy. Hernández’s proposal promises us liberal remedies while it robs us of rational subject/agency, a subject who wishes to break the race paradigm without creating a new one.213 I thus concede that this subject/agent would rely on multiracial categories that could undermine the justice she seeks in vitiating uniracial categories. Without this subject/agent, we remain fixed in an old race-consciousness matrix, principally because we fear the thorny discomfort and the existential crisis that will attend an end to race and race consciousness.
In ending race consciousness through a shift in the old paradigm, we experience what I call “living deconstruction.” Deconstruction represents a form of reading that never ends. The reader constantly interrogates the text, an inquisition that involves both the reader and the language, a result that rewards and frustrates the reader. Basically, then, deconstruction rigorously acts as a “constant [*PG286]reminder of the ways in which language deflects or complicates the philosopher’s project. Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea . . . that reason can somehow dispense with language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method.”214 As an example, consider how deconstruction impacts a notion like justice, or a unitary notion of race, or a race-consciousness matrix. Jacques Derrida writes that:
justice . . . implied non-gathering, dissociation, heterogeneity, non-identity with itself, endless inadequation, infinite transcendence. That is why the call for justice is never, never fully answered. . . . A judge, if he wants to be just, cannot content himself with applying the law. He has to reinvent the law each time. If he wants to be responsible, to make a decision, he has not simply to apply the law, as a coded program, to a given case, but to reinvent in a singular situation a new just relationship.215
Deconstruction implies not only searching for meaning in metaphors, rhetoric and language, but also destroying a race paradigm each time one engages or encounters it.
In this way, “living deconstruction” connotes not just the critical reading (and re-reading) of text. How we experience another person’s raced personality depends on whether she layers herself like text. Living deconstruction becomes how we think, act, and live day-to-day, existing beyond a fixed moment, in which many of us experience an existential crisis, a moment in which a racist paradigm prevents us from loving the biracial child in front of us. In effect, then, white mothers of biracial children survive this moment not by questioning the fullness of the paradigm, simply because this approach might deepen their crisis, but by desiring to care for her biracial and multiracial children through learned empathy and unconditional love.216 To this extent, white mothers of biracial children are less po[*PG287]litical,217 although some certainly have engaged the census issue directly, and more devoted to struggling with themselves and their children’s experiences. While they cannot “know” how their biracial children immediately experience a racist world, they do sincerely commit themselves to successful parenting, itself a concept like justice that requires living beyond a priori concepts or mental calculations. With all of its marked failures, parenting sincerity stands behind multiracial categories, and this sincerity beckons the death of an old paradigm like unitary race-thinking. I suspect that many of these parents can ill afford moments to reflect on the grander movement of race history. They, like all parents, work in the moment, often while holding back their fears for their children’s future well-being. Living deconstruction, while an incomplete answer to Hernández’s cynicism and race-conscious proposal, might serve as a better basis for multiracial categories and a shift in our race-consciousness matrix.
In conclusion, I think that Hernández raises vitally important questions that bear directly on how this society ought to protect and advance a societal agenda that protects historically marginalized people. However, I think this vital point does not specifically challenge that broad and powerful shift in our race consciousness that the MCM offers. I think that the MCM presents itself as living deconstruction. It is deconstructive because biracial and multiracial children will admit openly and honestly to their genetic pedigree. Soon unitary racial categories will fade from our collective memories.218 We will wonder [*PG288]why we ever limited ourselves to such straitjacketed thinking. As such, people will appear different. Our children and our family will look differently not because they have radically altered their phenotypes, but because we have altered our beliefs in what these images must mean. Professor Alex Johnson aptly argues:
In order to deconstruct this harmful racial dichotomy that creates otherness and subordination, I contend that society should embrace, as a transitory vehicle, multiple racial categories and expressly recognize and acknowledge products of mixed-race unions as distinct from both blacks and whites. This, I argue, will create a type of “shade confusion” that will eventually—and it may be a long, arduous process—destroy the black-white dichotomy that currently exists, ultimately reducing race to a meaningless category, as it should be. I allege further that if racial categories are destabilized and destroyed, then ethnic categories, which should be viewed favorably when compared to racial categories because of their fluidity and positive attributes, will rush to fill the void created by the absence of racial categories.219
To this extent, then, the MCM shifts individually and collectively our paradigm of race consciousness. Since the 1600s, this consciousness has constituted a matrix that binds us historically, socially, politically, and spiritually to the mental engines that create and maintain race, racism, and white supremacy. We have used this mental engine to construct and to define ourselves within a race-conscious, social development. At the very least, the MCM dangles an opportunity in front of us like a red flag (without a sword) to a bewildered bull. Through our bewildering experiences of racism, experiences which we have quite frankly forced on ourselves, we can charge with some hesitation forward with the full hope of discovering why we fear the red flag of biracial and multiracial categories, especially if we—or Critical Race Theorists—truly believe that race has never existed. [*PG289]Now, it is not the case that like the bewildered bull in a bullring we will just die from the many swords plunged into our hearts. Unlike a bull fight, the matador, the bull, the red cape, and the audience really and simply represent us. We have constructed all of these forces to form a race-consciousness matrix out of which race, racism, and white supremacy have flowed in the first place.
In the end, we must step into the fear that the MCM creates not within our hearts (which can never truly know the evil of racism) but within our conscious minds where racism deliberately originates and our unconscious minds where racism often operates. (Did not ex-Governor George Wallace arrive at this very point in his life?) When so-called blacks and whites have found love between each other, they have married despite mounting pressure from some quarters to maintain the sanctity of the racial-color line. By stepping to the fear and thus passing through it, we—all of us—can learn to think without the iron cage of racial categories. Basically, then, the MCM offers us a chance to view ourselves, children, families, and communities differently. As Johnson argues: “The current racial typology, however, can and will be eliminated only if multiracial categories are recognized and allowed to flourish.”220 Johnson’s point suggests that we can move beyond our traditional understandings of racial meaning. Race and racism correlate with our mental processes. As such, race cannot exist independent from our matrix of race consciousness, and we cannot rightly look to race as the impenetrable barrier that hinders peace within our minds and among each other. Rather, I maintain that it is our consciousness that determines who we really are and who we always really wanted to be.221 Therefore, I will place my faith in the MCM’s promise that I have been and can be a Free Soul, a raceless Spiritual being.