Purity, racial

Others, hearing that the First Matter is concentrated in the blood have followed more vile routes in their questing. These foolish and often cruel methods have included class and caste systems, eugenics and blood sacrifice. Subsequent beliefs in the so-called purity of blood (in either a particular family or racial grouping) have culminated in beliefs in superior master races, leading to the evils of tyranny and genocide. 

Multiracialism suffers from this conundrum wanting to condemn identification with racial blackness as the source of social crisis, seeking to locate a politicized blackness as the barrier to a postracial future, while affirming mixed-ness in ways that reinforce and expand notions of racial purity and the concomitant hierarchies of value that underwrite white supremacy and antiblackness. This is why the reclamation of whiteness, or more precisely, nonblackness, is elevated to the status of a virtue, a sign not only of mental and emotional well-being (openness to diversity, within and without) but also of moral rectitude (tolerance for difference and commitment to reconciliation) (Daniel 2002). It is more than contradictory that this... 

By these means, Stephens s work contemplates an evasion of the ethical implications of this historical legacy. This evasion or extrication takes cover under the terms of contested cultural property and the racial designation of bodies in dispute. However, the pressure of the political dilemma underpinning the discussion about essentialism, authenticity, territoriality, purity, and so forth—from race to culture and back again—is never lost. The instant legitimation that Stephens spitefully ascribes to those who declare for the permanence of (white) racism —and the foolishness of those who agree with them—redounds with this historic pressure, a force that is not felt simply because it can be assumed or asserted but because it... 

There is no interracial sexual relationship the political inflection and social valorization of intimate interracial relationships and the related publicizing of multiracial identities reifies schemes of racial categorization, reimposing notions of racial purity to substantiate claims of sexual transgression and racial mixture. 

Monoracial is a term used widely in the essays collected by Root (1992a, 1996b). Like Spencer (1999), I take it as a terminological indicator of the disavowed reassertion of racial purity that characterizes the academic literature on people of mixed race to date. 

See, for example, the definition in Gaskins (1999) Monoracial A so-called racially pure person someone who identifies himself or herself as white, black, or Asian/Pacific Islander, for example (12). The notion of racial purity, while admitted here to be conventional, constructed, and so-called, is nonetheless absolutely necessary to the possibility of conceptualizing a mixed-race project. 

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