Making Multiracials: State, Family, And Market In The Redrawing Of The Color Line

"Making Multiracials is an absorbing book, replete with intriguing insights and engaging accounts. Addressing a topic of profound social, political, and cultural importance, Kimberly DaCosta skillfully brings into focus the world of multiracial activists and the challenges and anxieties that surface in multiracial families."--William Julius Wilson,
Harvard University
"Kimberly DaCosta's brilliant analysis of the multiracial movement should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature of race in 21st century America. DaCosta is an expert guide to the frontiers of American identity and to the increasingly complex and evolving American racial order. A groundbreaking book."
--Mary C. Waters, author of Black Identities and Ethnic Options


When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods described his racial identity on "Oprah" as "cablinasian," it struck many as idiosyncratic. But by 2003, a "New York Times" article declared the arrival of "Generation E.A."--the ethnically ambiguous. Multiracial had become a recognizable social category for a large group of Americans.
"Making Multiracials" tells the story of the social movement that emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s. Organizations for interracial families and mixed race people--groups once loosely organized and only partially aware of each other--proliferated. What was once ignored, treated as taboo, or just thought not to exist quickly became part of the cultural mainstream.
How did this category of people come together? Why did the movement develop when it did? What is it about "being mixed" that constitutes a compelling basis for activism? Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the author answers these questions to show how multiracials have been "made" through state policy, family organizations, and market forces.