Chapter 8: Framing an Emancipatory Future for Multiracial People: Intergenerational Strategies for Revolutionary Practice

This chapter draws on multiracial scholarship and our experiences as diverse multiracial scholars and practitioners to blur existing boundaries, and to rattle, contest, and recreate the orientation of campus diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) efforts related to multiracial students, staff, and faculty. Our analysis echoes the position offered by Reginald Daniel (2021), our friend, colleague, and multiracial pioneer who passed while we were finishing this chapter. He noted that multiracial experiences and knowledge “can be a template of engaging in a social praxis that critiques racial essentialism and racial hierarchy as the basis for aspiring toward more inclusive collective subjectivities across the racial spectrum” (p. ix). Often framed within familiar goals of increasing equity and inclusion, we believe that many change efforts focus on increasing awareness and the capacity of individuals to understand multiracial experiences. While laudable, these strategies lack a critical understanding of systemic marginalization of multiracial people embedded in entrenched policies, practices, and cultures of our institutions. To understand the levels and depth of this marginalization requires using concepts drawn from multiracial experiences. For example, Johnston-Guerrero and Renn (2016) defined monoracialism as the predisposition or preference for discrete and rigid racial categories. Monoracialism is operationalized through monoracism, defined as the system of power “where individuals who do not fit monoracial categories may be oppressed on systemic and interpersonal levels because of underlying assumptions and beliefs in singular, discrete racial categories (Johnston & Nadal, 2010, p. 125). Without attending to how “monoracism is enacted on institutional, cultural, and intrapersonal or internalized levels of analysis (Hamako, 2014, p. 82), efforts to promote “Multiracial inclusion” may overtly or covertly exclude multiracial people because they are planned and executed within systems that overlook, minimize, or discount the experiences of multiracial people due to monoracism.