Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Abstract

This article, which utilizes personal experience as well as other perspectives and theories on race and mixed race, suggests that multiracial identity is a manifestation of recent date that differs from traditional conceptions and descriptions of mixed race that conform to the dichotomous and hierarchical logic of the binary racial system. As delineated in this article, the emergence of multiracial identity is properly understood in the context of the post-civil rights era and has been coextensive with multiculturalism, the proliferation of information technologies, and with the emergence of the multiracial political movement in the 1990s. Further, this article suggests that multiracial identity is also in part a by-product of multicultural American universities of the 1980s and 1990s. That is, multiracial identity has to a certain extent taken shape in reaction to the rigid ethnoracial boundaries and discourses that are imposed on mixed race students in the multicultural academy.