Abstract
This article, “Post What? The Liminality of Multi-Racial Identity,” argues that the successes and failures of 21st-century satire reveal the myth of post-raciality while simultaneously dismissing racial essentialism. I focus on three critical moments: the commercial success of Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, a text and forthcoming television show that examines the shifting self-identities of mixed-race individuals; the inability of a potential love interest on the television series, Louie, to accept a black woman as the ex-wife of the titular protagonist’s phenotypically white daughters; and Barack Obama’s self-designation as “black” on the census shortly after his election. I argue that the widespread reach of these instances, coupled with audience engagement and response, underscores the ways that the public realm frames a contemporary understanding of race as both meaningful and absurd.
Highlights
The Personal is Public?“The people whose appearance matches the identity they project, they have a place in society that they fit into with minimal cramping.But here, standing next to us, is everyone else
Biracial, even multiracial? Or is the point to ‘forget” or disregard that feature of identity insofar as a just society is possible only when we move beyond race consciousness, as many proponents of postracialism suggest?”
What is interesting here is not that Johnson so rightly identifies the national hypocrisy of our insistent articulation of the post-racial as a goal of enlightenment, but that he places it in the context of multi-racial self-identification in the twenty-first century and very real concerns surrounding an affinity toward blackness, or its rejection
Summary
The Personal is Public?“The people whose appearance matches the identity they project, they have a place in society that they fit into with minimal cramping.But here, standing next to us, is everyone else. The existence of mixed-race people, those who seem racially ambiguous or those who identify as other than their phenotypic portrayal, distorts an understanding of identity as simplistic and, even more importantly, obvious, that is, part of the national consciousness.
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