Multiracials and Civil Rights Law

• In Event: 3556 - Multiracial Classification/Identity

Abstract

Commanding greater public attention is the idea that discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people is a distinctive challenge to the enforcement of civil rights law. This perspective is based upon the belief that multiracials experience racial discrimination in a unique manner that makes it necessary to reformulate traditional civil rights law. My research project "Multiracials and Civil Rights," based upon a close examination of many multiracial discrimination legal cases in a variety of equality law contexts, demonstrates the fallacy and danger of that conjecture. The manuscript elucidates the distinction between the presumed exceptional space that multiracial persons are rhetorically imagined to occupy in the public discourse, and the binary nonwhite versus white realities they actually experience when targeted for discrimination. Rather than point to a need for a shift away from the existing civil rights laws, the cases instead indicate the need for further support of the current structures. The manuscript concludes that multiracial discrimination cases are helpful in highlighting the continued need for attention to white supremacy and for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial privilege and the lingering legacy of bias against nonwhites.

Author

• Tanya K. Hernandez, Fordham University