Introduction

When Americans discuss and debate the government's role in promoting racial equality and justice, the conversation on race commonly spirals into a debate over affirmative action. The debates continue to rage on and continue to center on the black–white divide, even as the racial paradigms and demographics have become more complicated in the face of multicultural and multiracial movements. Until recently, multiracial identity has been largely overlooked by practitioners, political entrepreneurs, and scholars of affirmative action (Leong, 2006: 1). To the extent that scholars have turned their focus to multiracial identity and race policy, it has tended to center on the Census.

When affirmative action is scrutinized not only on the basis of whether its methods are narrowly tailored and whether its rationales are compelling, but also on the basis of whether the choice of beneficiaries accords with these rationales and whether the policy methods are capable of selecting among the appropriate beneficiaries, the project of affirmative action becomes even more vulnerable to criticism. Adding multiracial Americans to the discussion raises just these sorts of questions and concerns. Critiques come from sympathetic audiences as well as staunch opponents of race-based programs. Some progressives are critical of affirmative action law and policy for preserving rigid racial categories that “often fail to comport with the complexities of race and the racial mixture in the modern United States” (Johnson, 2003: 2). On the other hand, many African-American civil rights activists and leaders feel threatened by the rise of multiracial identities because they fear the legal acknowledgment of the fluidity of racial boundaries will endanger the civil rights project of affirmative action, school integration, and other racial inclusion policies (Daniel, 2002).

What is surprising is not that critics of affirmative action have in recent years begun to capitalize on problematizing the social and legal construction of racial categories, but rather that they took so long to do so.