Personal Identity Equality and Racial Misrecognition: Review Essay of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination

(Excerpt) There is a growing body of social science literature documenting multiracials as an “emergent minority group. . . who . . . have not always been recognized as either a separate racial group or as legitimate members of racial groups.” Tanya Hernández has been writing about aspects of American multiracialism for twenty years. Her 1998 article in the MARYLAND LAW JOURNAL focused on the multiracial discourse about racial categories on the 2000 U.S. census. In that article, she analyzes the multiracial identity movement’s effort to get a multiracial category on the U.S. census. Although that movement failed, the 2000 census did permit responders to mark more than one race.

Hernández’s new book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, explores another aspect of this movement: the growing scholarship of those she identifies as multiracial identity scholars (hereinafter identity scholars), a concept she first introduced in 2017. In her book, Hernández critiques these scholars’ claims that legal recognition of a separate “multiracial” category is needed to address the discrimination multiracial plaintiffs face.