ABSTRACT
Over the past fifteen years in the United States, there has emerged a concerted push to reclassify people with one Black and one white parent as biracial.1
Advocates of this biracial project seek to have people of mixed parentage (PMP) recognized as a distinct, biracial race.2 They maintain that a biracial identity is more mentally healthy than a Black one and challenges popular notions of race in the United States, therefore making it the basis for “ultimately disabus[ing] Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race” (Zack 2001:34). This will lead society away from racial classifications, hasten racism’s demise, and bring about a color-blind society (Gilanshah 1993; Spickard 2001; Zack 2001). Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real.
