Deutschland Musings.

In this precise respect, multiracialism solicits alliances with other political and intellectual efforts to go "beyond the black-white binary" - whether in the current campaigns for immigrant rights or the research agendas of comparative ethnic studies - efforts which, in many cases, have been shot through with an air of antiblackness (Matsuda 2002). In the register of contemporary racial politics, black identity appears as an antiquated state of confinement from which the "multiracial imagined community" (Stephens 1999) must be delivered; the negative ideal against which "the browning of America" (Root 1992a) measures its tenuous success. One discovers in this new-fangled admonition of runaway blackness traces of the criminalization and repression of Black Power that subtends the birth of Reganism (Churchill and Vanderwall 2002). In the longer view, the "communal tyranny" (Kennedy 2003) imputed to the collective black personality in this context appears as a refraction of the pronounced fear of "black domination" that underwrites the history of white supremacist discourse: whether postbellum alibis for institutionalized lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement (Hunter 1997) or the propaganda of "reverse discrimination" fashionable today - from "welfare queens" (Roberts 1998) to "coddled criminal" (Mauer 1999) to "affirmative action baby" (Post and Rogan 1998). Ultimately, it is consternation about being eclipsed by blackness that articulates multiracialism with the array of campaigns consolidated under the heading of the New Immigration (Jaynes 2000) and links them collectively, and perhaps unconsciously, to political projects they might otherwise oppose.