Multiracial Movement Suicide? Part 3
“Conclusion:
The place you reach when you’re tired of
thinking.” –Martin Fischer
Now we can get to the convoluted conclusion the
“’Founding Mothers:’ White Mothers of Biracial Children in the Multiracial
Movement (1970-2000) by Alicia Doo Castagno. We would normally begin with the title, but I am
not going to bother with “CONCLUSION; THE THWARTED UTOPIAN POTENTIAL OF
MULTIRACIAL POLITICS” just because it’s so out in left field.
In her conclusion, Alicia pronounces that, “Unwittingly,
their [white mothers] white racial identity informed the ways in which they
chose to advocate for multiracial rights.” Elsewhere in her diatribe, Alicia
surmises that we white women really wanted our kids not to be black, so I’m
going to take a stab at what little Alicia means. Apparently, I really have to
go over this one more time: when I called the Census Bureau after receiving my
1990 Census form, I called and was told that “the children take the race of
their mother.” I’m white, so my children were white by Census Bureau
definition. If THAT was what I wanted, why have I worked for 23 years to get
the privilege for multiracial people to embrace their entire heritage on US
Census forms?! Do you get it now?
We white mothers were not advocating for passing, we were
hoping the federal government could include ALL the races of any person. Again,
we were not trying to make our kids only white, black, or any other color. We
hoped their various rainbow of colors would finally be validated and
recognized.
Alicia Doo Castagno goes on to say that “the Multiracial
Movement’s participants did not advocate for radical change outside of
expanding racial data tabulation. She is right—we had our hands full. She is also
wrong—tabulation is extremely important and is something the wannabe academics
have never understood. So be it—remain uninformed about the real specifics of
this issue and take those dollars doled out to finance your error ridden “thesis
papers,” if it makes you happy.
Then comes this: “Other academic criticism of interracial
family organizations similarly castigates the white women in leadership roles
for failing or refusing to engage with racial issues.” Huh? What do you think we were doing?!
We white mothers of the multiracial movement never
promised to make America a racial utopia, but we are constantly accused of not
succeeding with that small feat. This land is not just your land, but being
critical of us for not correcting hundreds of years of racial strife is just
plain ridiculous. We just set out to make things more accurate for our
multiracial children.
The really funny thing about this is that it was the
academics who warned me in 1990 that I would “never change the way the government counted race—never.” They didn’t think we should even
try. Then they blamed us when we did and it didn’t go the way they wanted.
Everyone who has read the thesis in question and my reply,
at my request, has also commented that staff at Wesleyan University should
never have let this piece of drivel through. Some of my readers are academics
themselves. So shame on Wesleyan.
Rocket scientist Alicia Doo Castagno, goes on to say the
following:
“Interracial
family groups’ white female leaders had already set the course for multiracial
advocacy by the time that mixed heritage adults took over leadership in
organizations founded by white women.”
The real story is the ship was sinking and the white
female leaders were the only ones willing to set any course. Carlos Fernandez was still scratching his head over how
to get non-profit status, and Ramona Douglass—R.I.P.—was mostly whining about
her roommate, or hoping to score points with the NAACP and go on to be a
national hero because that’s what they promised her in return for her vote in
making multiracial kids black.
The author of this thesis, in addition to not being able
to write a simple, declarative sentence, also says that “we” excluded non-white
multiracials. Perhaps Alicia needs a drug test. Funny, I don’t recall any of
her questions to me along those lines, but I can tell you with all certainty
that we would have been happy to offer membership to her own mother if she only
had asked.
The entire mess of a paper is concluded this way:
Based on my primary and secondary
research, however, the racial identity of these “founding mothers” did
influence the ways in which they chose to engage in multiracial politics.
Their inability to fully break
free of their white privilege ultimately grounded founding mothers’ multiracial
politics in privileged notions of racial safety, separate spheres ideology,
and— in Graham’s case in particular—racially unreflexive [sic] forms of
advocacy.
I’m still amazed that the word “paradigm” wasn’t anywhere
in that paragraph. Much of Castagno’s argument throughout referred to white
mothers and their white privilege. I call that the “typical academic fallback.”
They go there when their dreamed up lies and stories don’t work, which is
pretty much all of the time.
Being a white woman no more equals “white privilege” than
multiracial equals black. Think about it.
-Susan Graham, who
is very proud to be one of the founding mothers of Project RACE and the
multiracial movement.
