I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. Here's one for Jared Sexton's Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism:
In the closing chapter of Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes, he cites a thought expressed by lawyer and scholar Mari Matsuda, aired at a conference on critical race theory, held back in 1997. I reproduce it here: “When we say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what a whole lot of people say or feel or think: ‘Thank goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those Black people made me feel so uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really don’t know anything about Asians, and while we’re deconstructing that Black–white paradigm, we also need to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and thank god I don’t have to take those angry black people seriously anymore.’” This is a book about that.
Or, more accurately, this is a book which uses and examines the then(?) emergent field of ‘multiracialism’ - advocating for the recognition of ‘multiracial’ peoples, half-black, half-asian, say - in order to see how the drive to get ‘beyond race’ very often ends up reproducing and even reinforcing racial categories, in sometimes insidious, sometimes naive ways. Written largely with the North American context in mind, Sexton shows - trenchantly and cuttingly - how time and time again, the invocation of the imminent arrival of a multiracial society brings with it it’s own racial baggage, most often in the form of a surprising - at least for me - antiblackness. The logic runs something like this: insofar as the promise of a multiracial future is equally the promise of the overcoming of race altogether, those who currently advocate on behalf of, say, racial redress, are the ones in fact standing in the way of this promised post-racial utopia.
As it happens, all across the multiracial literature, those ’standing in the way’ turn out to be none other than blacks. Hence the otherwise puzzling charges of ‘reverse racism’ littered all across the multiracial literature: “the repression is now coming from Afro-essentialists”, as one cited multiracial advocate puts it here. With an eye to the coming post-racial future, not white supremacy, but black separatism is the real problem now. Just how this twisted turn of intellectual affairs has come about - twisted quite in denial of reality, both historical and contemporary, as Sexton shows - is the object of this book. With its heady mix of philosophy, racial politics, history, close reading, and even psychoanalysis, Amalgamation Schemes is not for the light of head: the challenge here is as much one of argumentative density as it is of conceptual destabilization.
For, despite the seemingly niche subject that is multiracial politics (admission: not being American myself, I thought, coming into this book, that ‘multiracialism’ was some provincial American term for ‘multiculturalism’… oops), thrown into question here are any and all dreams for the seamless phasing out of engagements with race - the nicely-nicely liberal future (or present) in which ‘race doesn’t (or won’t) matter’. As among the ur-texts of what today goes by the ‘afro-pessimist’ line of thought, at stake here is the singularity of black experience and black life, one that cannot (ever? easily?) be, well, amalgamated into post-racial schemas of a world of undifferentiated difference. For those committed to race as belonging to a bygone era, or at least, an era now fast on the wane, this is a book of unsettling reading indeed.
Nonetheless, it's from just this vantage point that Sexton tears into the multiracial literature and finds it wanting in ways undeniable. Assessing, for example, the 'new multiracial histories' of the antebellum South, which sing the sometimes 'romance' between slave-owners and their slaves as aspirational models of a multiracial future, does Sexton go downright medieval on them for their pussyfooting about the violent and coercive social relations which marked such romances with inescapable barbarism. It's in just these kinds of moments, which make up the bulk of Amalgamation Schemes' argumentative movements, that one can really feel the power of inhabiting the perspective that Sexton advances. To not be done with race - and to not be done with black racial politics in particular - this may well be more libratory than the flat and sometimes even disturbing charms of the multiracial promise.
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