The Cognitive Life of Things

tiracial types perceived equally, or are certain mixes and base races discriminated against more than others? Will Hispanics, with sharpened demographic growth and their enduring racial malleability, succeed where the multiracial movement has failed, and could they ultimately undermine the “Anglo” racial system? The film highlights sociological studies that indicate generational change in racial self-identity. For example, firstgeneration Hispanics often have difficulty identifying with the country’s “racial pentagon,” but by the third generation are more likely to identify as white. If so, are Hispanics becoming the country’s largest minority, or are (some of them) in the process of transitioning to “whiteness”? These and other questions posed in the film speak to the growing fluidity and destabilization of the racial classification system in the United States. Multiracial Identity presents an air of inevitability regarding the unfolding future of a multiracial America. The film cites a Bureau of the Census prediction that by 2050, one in five Americans will identify as multiracial. Interracial relationships are on the rise, already constituting one-eighth of households in California, for instance, and multiracial celebrities and public figures increasingly populate the American cultural and media landscape. Of those that chose multiple racial categories in the 2000 census, 42% were under the age of 18, signaling a youthful charge against the country’s monoracial fixity. Public or institutional acceptance of these changes will not happen automatically, however. As the narrator concludes, “Too much of our everyday life in America is invested in racial differences to accept the overlapping multiracial existence.” Multiracial Identity is well suited for university undergraduate instruction. The film could be effectively paired both with conventional scholarly treatments of race in the United States and with anthropological or comparative studies of race in other countries and regions. As the film explores advocacy largely oriented around the positive valorization of racial identity, it not only complements more common treatments of race’s discriminatory dimensions, but it could also be used in dialogue with scholarship on ethnicity. The latter would be particularly useful given the overlap between public debates and political reaction surrounding both the “browning” and the so-called “hyphenization” of America. All told, Multiracial Identity offers an insightful and accessible contribution to the urgent and ever-shifting debates on race and identity, in America and beyond.