The Study of Racialism

THE CIVIL RIGHTS OF MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY

The opposition to multiracial identity is an opposition to someone’s heritage. Not surprisingly, it entails the violation of civil rights that are universally acknowledged.

With regard to the Constitution of the United States, there is violation of as many as four Amendments--the First, Fourth and Fifth, and Fourteenth--and three classes of rights: freedom of conscience and expression, the right to privacy, and equal protection of the law.


(1) The one-drop rule

Freedom of conscience and expression

Opposition is carried out with a demonstrably nonfactual ideology--the one-drop-of-blood rule--and violates the First Amendment’s requirement that, as such, it cannot be compelled on anyone.


Right to privacy

Opposition, as carried out by means of involuntary and incongruent identities, is an unreasonable invasion and expropriation of one’s person, thereby denying the minimal autonomy granted by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.


Equal protection of the laws

Opposition demands that some, more than others, show a greater level of commitment to a legal cause (anti-discrimination). As noble as the cause is, this violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Opposition involves a punishment (having one’s heritage denied) for a crime (discrimination) that was not committed. As such, it violates the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

By assigning a mode of punishment that is not assigned to others for the same alleged crime, opposition violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

By falsifying biological inheritance, opposition creates unequal access to medical information and ultimately to medical treatment, thereby denying the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.


(2) The check-all-that-apply census policy

While the one-drop-of-blood rule had preserved a single ancestry, separate and unequal, census policy now preserves all ancestries, still separate but equal. On the other hand, a multiracial identity is an integration of ancestries within individuals because it removes the separateness of the various ancestries and merges them under a common identity.

It is incumbent on the government to reverse prejudice both in fact and symbol. But current census policy does not show the integration of ancestries within individuals. Instead, as the only formal characterization of multiracials, it becomes a symbolic representation of the historic prejudice against them, which said that their ancestries were not compatible. Current census policy is no different from displaying the Confederate flag on a government building. Both are reminders to many of an era when their humanity was denied.

By refusing to acknowledge the integration of ancestries within individuals, census policy declares a limit to the integration of ancestries between individuals that is the law, and in so doing persists in the prejudice at the heart of segregation.

In defining individuals by a prejudice that is rejected by law, census policy violates their freedom of conscience and expression, violates their person, and violates their equal protection in the law.


(3) Multiracial identity

Because in opposing a multiracial identity one denies these three classes of rights, it follows that a multiracial identity embodies these rights, grows out of them, and depends on them.

The denial of these rights has meant that multiracial identified individuals are judged (and condemned) simply for holding a multiracial identity, rather than on their conduct and character. Such judgment--really prejudgment--is prejudicial, and imparts all of the negative effects of prejudice.

The desire to be treated equally, to not be accused, tried and punished without due process of law, to have one’s conscience and expression reflect one’s reality, to preserve one’s person in public interactions, is common to all, and is integral to any definition of a common humanity.

A multiracial identity is not directly a request for a census category, but a request for basic civil rights. However, for a group whose rights are denied necessarily by virtue of classification--unlike with other groups--it is imperative that redress be sought through the most legitimate means of classifying the population--census policy.

Liam Martin

But isn't a "multiracial identity" nebulous in that it doesn't allow one to specify her heritage?

Isn't being Chinese, Indian, and African-American different from being Indigenous Australian, Indigenous Peruvian, and white German?

If someone prefers to check all that apply, isn't that more inclusive?