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Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism
Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiculturalism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality.
In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.
An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.
Jared Sexton is assistant professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.
In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.
An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.
Jared Sexton is assistant professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.
328 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 29, 2012
amazing read please pass to your progressive multicultural mixed race friends.
August 17, 2009
A brilliant and provocative book that dares to tear into the blase arguments of the "multiracial movement", a movement based on the spurious claim that certain racialized products of certain racialized sex encounters pose a threatening challenge to the racialized world. Sexton not only challenges them at the level of their words, texts, and deeds but also at a deeper structural level where he explores presences and absences. He uncovers a tortured and desperately anti-black world of meaning and behavior, a reading that should leave leaders of this seemingly "well-meaning" movement speechless and gasping for air --- if they would even dare to engage his thinking at all.
From Fanon to Lacan, Derrida to Spillers, Sexton displays incredible dexterity in unearthing the multiracial movement's -- and indeed the world's -- antiblack agenda. He further endeavours to explore it's telos in the globalizing/global world of late capitalism (perhaps a world where "black vs. beige" becomes the new dichotomy),and in his final strokes lays forth a radical response -- one that I can only hope will be further explored in future works.
Though I have to admit that it gets a bit chunky at times, Amalgamation Schemes is undoubtedly the first major work from a fresh and dynamic radical thinker.
From Fanon to Lacan, Derrida to Spillers, Sexton displays incredible dexterity in unearthing the multiracial movement's -- and indeed the world's -- antiblack agenda. He further endeavours to explore it's telos in the globalizing/global world of late capitalism (perhaps a world where "black vs. beige" becomes the new dichotomy),and in his final strokes lays forth a radical response -- one that I can only hope will be further explored in future works.
Though I have to admit that it gets a bit chunky at times, Amalgamation Schemes is undoubtedly the first major work from a fresh and dynamic radical thinker.
August 9, 2023
In the closing chapter of Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes, he cites a thought expressed by lawyer and scholar Mari Matsuda, aired at a conference on critical race theory, held back in 1997. I reproduce it here: “When we say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what a whole lot of people say or feel or think: ‘Thank goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those Black people made me feel so uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really don’t know anything about Asians, and while we’re deconstructing that Black–white paradigm, we also need to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and thank god I don’t have to take those angry black people seriously anymore.’” This is a book about that.
Or, more accurately, this is a book which uses and examines the then(?) emergent field of ‘multiracialism’ - advocating for the recognition of ‘multiracial’ peoples, half-black, half-asian, say - in order to see how the drive to get ‘beyond race’ very often ends up reproducing and even reinforcing racial categories, in sometimes insidious, sometimes naive ways. Written largely with the North American context in mind, Sexton shows - trenchantly and cuttingly - how time and time again, the invocation of the imminent arrival of a multiracial society brings with it it’s own racial baggage, most often in the form of a surprising - at least for me - antiblackness. The logic runs something like this: insofar as the promise of a multiracial future is equally the promise of the overcoming of race altogether, those who currently advocate on behalf of, say, racial redress, are the ones in fact standing in the way of this promised post-racial utopia.
As it happens, all across the multiracial literature, those ’standing in the way’ turn out to be none other than blacks. Hence the otherwise puzzling charges of ‘reverse racism’ littered all across the multiracial literature: “the repression is now coming from Afro-essentialists”, as one cited multiracial advocate puts it here. With an eye to the coming post-racial future, not white supremacy, but black separatism is the real problem now. Just how this twisted turn of intellectual affairs has come about - twisted quite in denial of reality, both historical and contemporary, as Sexton shows - is the object of this book. With its heady mix of philosophy, racial politics, history, close reading, and even psychoanalysis, Amalgamation Schemes is not for the light of head: the challenge here is as much one of argumentative density as it is of conceptual destabilization.
For, despite the seemingly niche subject that is multiracial politics (admission: not being American myself, I thought, coming into this book, that ‘multiracialism’ was some provincial American term for ‘multiculturalism’… oops), thrown into question here are any and all dreams for the seamless phasing out of engagements with race - the nicely-nicely liberal future (or present) in which ‘race doesn’t (or won’t) matter’. As among the ur-texts of what today goes by the ‘afro-pessimist’ line of thought, at stake here is the singularity of black experience and black life, one that cannot (ever? easily?) be, well, amalgamated into post-racial schemas of a world of undifferentiated difference. For those committed to race as belonging to a bygone era, or at least, an era now fast on the wane, this is a book of unsettling reading indeed.
Nonetheless, it's from just this vantage point that Sexton tears into the multiracial literature and finds it wanting in ways undeniable. Assessing, for example, the 'new multiracial histories' of the antebellum South, which sing the sometimes 'romance' between slave-owners and their slaves as aspirational models of a multiracial future, does Sexton go downright medieval on them for their pussyfooting about the violent and coercive social relations which marked such romances with inescapable barbarism. It's in just these kinds of moments, which make up the bulk of Amalgamation Schemes' argumentative movements, that one can really feel the power of inhabiting the perspective that Sexton advances. To not be done with race - and to not be done with black racial politics in particular - this may well be more libratory than the flat and even disturbing charms of the multiracial promise.
Or, more accurately, this is a book which uses and examines the then(?) emergent field of ‘multiracialism’ - advocating for the recognition of ‘multiracial’ peoples, half-black, half-asian, say - in order to see how the drive to get ‘beyond race’ very often ends up reproducing and even reinforcing racial categories, in sometimes insidious, sometimes naive ways. Written largely with the North American context in mind, Sexton shows - trenchantly and cuttingly - how time and time again, the invocation of the imminent arrival of a multiracial society brings with it it’s own racial baggage, most often in the form of a surprising - at least for me - antiblackness. The logic runs something like this: insofar as the promise of a multiracial future is equally the promise of the overcoming of race altogether, those who currently advocate on behalf of, say, racial redress, are the ones in fact standing in the way of this promised post-racial utopia.
As it happens, all across the multiracial literature, those ’standing in the way’ turn out to be none other than blacks. Hence the otherwise puzzling charges of ‘reverse racism’ littered all across the multiracial literature: “the repression is now coming from Afro-essentialists”, as one cited multiracial advocate puts it here. With an eye to the coming post-racial future, not white supremacy, but black separatism is the real problem now. Just how this twisted turn of intellectual affairs has come about - twisted quite in denial of reality, both historical and contemporary, as Sexton shows - is the object of this book. With its heady mix of philosophy, racial politics, history, close reading, and even psychoanalysis, Amalgamation Schemes is not for the light of head: the challenge here is as much one of argumentative density as it is of conceptual destabilization.
For, despite the seemingly niche subject that is multiracial politics (admission: not being American myself, I thought, coming into this book, that ‘multiracialism’ was some provincial American term for ‘multiculturalism’… oops), thrown into question here are any and all dreams for the seamless phasing out of engagements with race - the nicely-nicely liberal future (or present) in which ‘race doesn’t (or won’t) matter’. As among the ur-texts of what today goes by the ‘afro-pessimist’ line of thought, at stake here is the singularity of black experience and black life, one that cannot (ever? easily?) be, well, amalgamated into post-racial schemas of a world of undifferentiated difference. For those committed to race as belonging to a bygone era, or at least, an era now fast on the wane, this is a book of unsettling reading indeed.
Nonetheless, it's from just this vantage point that Sexton tears into the multiracial literature and finds it wanting in ways undeniable. Assessing, for example, the 'new multiracial histories' of the antebellum South, which sing the sometimes 'romance' between slave-owners and their slaves as aspirational models of a multiracial future, does Sexton go downright medieval on them for their pussyfooting about the violent and coercive social relations which marked such romances with inescapable barbarism. It's in just these kinds of moments, which make up the bulk of Amalgamation Schemes' argumentative movements, that one can really feel the power of inhabiting the perspective that Sexton advances. To not be done with race - and to not be done with black racial politics in particular - this may well be more libratory than the flat and even disturbing charms of the multiracial promise.
January 8, 2022
analyses of derrida and zizek could have been more lucid, but very compelling analysis of how multiculturalism shores up anti-Blackness.
January 25, 2021
What may appear at first to be a minor cross-disciplinary dustup ends up revealing profound and fundamental problems with a popular discourse about race/racism. Sexton's critique is precise, incisive, and its implications reach far beyond the misguided work of multiracialist scholars. This book demonstrates the singularity of antiblackness and argues for the necessity of a robust structural critique in any discussion of race.
July 22, 2020
will need to reread at some point
December 5, 2021
The analysis offered in this book is truly prophetic.
March 16, 2025
Fantastic read.
Sexton’s critique of multiculturalism, while occasionally a bit verbose, does a fantastic job of outlining the immense flaws project.
Sexton’s critique of multiculturalism, while occasionally a bit verbose, does a fantastic job of outlining the immense flaws project.
November 4, 2025
Honestly this was so tea coming from a lightskin man but he didn’t stutter
November 24, 2023
I had to read so many chapters multiple times. Sexton is an undeniable genius. 1 point off because he’s white though. Why are you as a white man burdening yourself with thoughts of racism and miscegenation. Go listen to Taylor Swift or The Beatles
October 15, 2011
Sexton posits that multiracialism is not--as it likes to promote itself--a progressive boundary-busting movement, but rather is precisely what maintains white supremacy, heternormative sexuality, and antiblackness. He is part of the "Afro-Pessimist" movement, which critiques the utility of comparative ethnic studies and strives to reframe blackness as an unresolvable social and political antagonism within the US and indeed around the world. At points here Sexton is utterly persuasive, especially when he points out the problem with multiracialist scholars' suggestions that there might have been "free" interracial love during slavery (obviously, obviously that is not possible). However the tone of this book is scathing, and the logic and syntax are often thick and difficult to follow, which makes it hard to jump on board entirely with Sexton's project. His overall critiques, though, are well taken.
Want to read
August 16, 2008Yay Jared!
January 30, 2013
To sum it all up, multiracialism/post-Blackness becomes antiblackness when Blackness identifies and defines itself and petitions for a list a of grievances within, or because of, multiracialism.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews