Purity, racial 251 white

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... 

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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