>i think this is dangerous.
>the racial composition of this country is shifting quickly with more and
>more people of mixed ethnic heritage. racialization will need to
>reconfigure itself under those circumstances
Twenty five years ago Norman Podhoretz suggested that the final solution to the Negro problem was to miscegenate it out of existence. As if the physical nature of blacks itself provoked racism, requiring that blacks change their physical nature Michael Jackson style! With friends like that...
At any rate, not your typical fascistic genocidal solution to the race problem. However, the valorization of the mixed (ethnic) type can consolidate an antipathy or be reason for consolidating antipathy towards those who are perceived to be purely of the disturbing (race) type. That is, a tolerance and valorization of those perceived to be mixed in ethnicity can go hand in hand with antipathy towards those perceived (falsely of course) to be pure in race. The black vindicationist St Clair Drake calls that the Brazilian (non-)solution to the race problem.
In short, a multicultural tolerance of the hybrid (the great buzzword in post colonial studies today) is not ipso facto a dissolution of anti black racism.
Kelley, I also think it is dangerous to refer to such pseudo realities as the changing racial composition of the country--I am a bit stunned to see you invoke its existence. This is an eugenicist, typological discourse which attempts to break down a seemingly homogeneous populations into two or more forms (or races) each with its own Gaussian distribution in relevant characteristics; that is the first step to enlisting methods of artificial selection to ensure that the more viable of the forms (or races) grows at the expense of the other even if the latter is more fecund. It is out of eugenicist discourse that concepts such as the "racial composition" of the population have arisen; eugenicists understand selection not working so much on the mean and the dispersion of a homogeneous population but through the growth of one race or type or form over another. Of course this suggests the anti darwinian nature of eugenicist discourse.
yours, rakesh
see Jean Gayon, Darwinism's Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection. Cambridge. 1998.