Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism.(Book review)

AMALGAMATION SCHEMES: ANTIBLACKNESS AND THE CRITIQUE OF MULTIRACIALISM, by Jared Sexton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 345 pp, $22.50, paper/ $67.50, cloth).

Reviewed by LeiLani Nishime

JARED SEXTON'S Amalgamation Schemes is an original, theoretically sophisticated, powerful, and controversial intervention into the field of multiracial studies and multiracial politics. This book is meant to ruffle feathers and unreservedly condemns the ethically suspect claims of some multiracial activists and scholars. At the same time, in his zeal to reveal the uses of multiracial rhetoric to isolate and undermine blacks in the U.S. and globally, Sexton fails to define multiracial studies. The ensuing elision and dismissal of multiracial, Asian American and Chicano/ Latino Studies weakens an otherwise compelling argument (249).

Sexton's critique of the utopic and unrelentingly wholesome language of the conservative/neo-liberal base of the multiracial movement is both devastating and meticulously argued. His arguments are at their most incisive in chapters one, three, and four of this five-chapter book, which draws from public archival material including personal memoirs, public speeches, internet sites, and editorials..

In chapter one, Sexton demonstrates how the supposedly neutral language of the multiracial movement and multiracialist academics shields a consistently anti-black political agenda. Its celebration of "mixedness" casts blacks as anachronistically monoracial and as the primary source of the racial subjugation of multiracial people. Sexton states:

   ... it is suggested that the racism of blacks towards   self-identified multiracial people, and toward   nonblacks more generally, has become not simply   dominant but hegemonic--a structure of   unwarranted enmity and illegitimate political   power eclipsing the historic centrality of white   supremacy. (56)

Chapters three and four take up one of the most notable and least examined signatures of the multiracial movement and multiracial studies, the focus on children. In his psychologically complex and theoretically rich analysis, Sexton makes his most notable contribution to the study of multiracial identity politics. He argues that insistence on the normality of multiracial people "retroactively legitimizes the interracial sexual relationship from which they issue" (157). This allows the multiracial activists and academics to "rescue" interracial relationships from the taint of "perversion and pathology" (171) and reassert a heteronormative familial ideal. At the same time, it also enables multiracial activists to claim that interracial relationships are inherently revolutionary and threatening to white supremacy. To the contrary, Sexton makes the case for the centrality of the concept of miscegenation to the maintenance of racial differences:

   ... the projected and reified racial difference supposed   to be mortally threatened (for better or   worse) by the prospect of subsequent interracial   sex acts is itself produced, need we say performatively,   in and through the apprehension of miscegenation.   (218)

Thus, according to Sexton, crossing of the color line serves to delineate and reinforce that color line.

CHAPTER TWO is the longest and most vitriolic of the book, and it is not difficult to see why. Sexton reads three texts that make the astonishing argument that black female slave-white male slave owner sexual relationships were not only sometimes consensual, but also empowering for the female slave and "the path to social reform and reconstruction ..." (131). Yet, in choosing these three texts as the primary exemplars of the multiracial academic thought, Sexton emphasizes the way he has bracketed off the term multiracial studies. Although, multiracial studies is a new and amorphous field with no dedicated academic departments, no academic society, no peer-reviewed academic journal, Sexton assumes a coherent, although never defined, field of study. For Sexton, it does include the more intellectually weak liberal humanism of the anthological work of Maria Root and Naomi Zack, but it does not seem to include the more ambivalent, historically situated, and critical anthological work of Dave Parker and Miri Song or the multiracial anthologies on passing edited by Elaine Ginsberg or by Maria Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg. Sexton set up a tautology where multiracial studies is defined as anti-black and if it is not anti-black then it is not multiracial studies.

What is most surprising after 244 carefully argued pages is the fourteen-page section that concludes the book, in which Sexton takes up the "... structural antagonism between black studies and ethnic studies, or between black politics and the multiracial coalition ..." (247). He argues that multiracial studies and later comparative analyses ignore "this fundamental social truth: not simply that anti-blackness is longstanding and ongoing but also that it is unlike other forms of racial oppression in qualitative ways ..." (245). Yet he also argues that Asian American scholars and "other immigrants of color" (250) are incorrect in asserting a qualitatively different form of racism due to the construction of blacks as the foreigners within. How can these opposite arguments both be true? According to Sexton, anti-blackness is "historically and ontologically prior" to a range of racial inequalities, formations of globalizing capital, and "gender power and the regulations of sexuality" (245). So the black-white paradigm is not only unique it is also original, and all other inequalities can be understood through this single lens, which allows him to dismiss the limits of a black-white paradigm as a "fiction" (246).

This perspective represents a loss of scale that limits his ability to recognize the critical role that other racialized bodies play in the maintenance and perpetuation of global racial inequalities. To reference the global sex industry, as Sexton does on a number of occasions (171, 215, 232, 239), but to not take up the racialization of Asian female bodies seems a glaring absence. As an example, his exploration of the global fear of AIDS in the form of a demonized and violently sexualized black body is not set in relation to the counter image of a "clean," passive, child Asian sex worker, an image that prepares for her global exploitation.

In the best moments of the book, however, Sexton does manage to meld multiple modes of analysis, for example in his argument about the heteronormative underpinnings of the multiracial movement's focus on the psychological health of multiracial children. Ironically enough, Sexton's work is an important contribution to the shifting cannon of multiracial theory. This book can and should push multiracial academics to examine critically the anti-blackness that might be animating their own writing.