ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, “Interpreting (Multi)Racial Movements,” explores how multiracial discourses inform and undermine images of social progress in popular dance. In the US, the term “multiracial,” also known as “mixed-race,” typically refers to the individual identification with two or more racial groups that are frequently understood as distinct. This chapter extends this definition to consider the “multiracial” beyond an exclusive association with identity; instead, it theorizes “multiracialism” as a set of politicized discourses that claim to (A) disrupt racial stereotypes and (B) expand dominant racial hierarchies premised on discrete categorization. Although this understanding of multiracialism frequently evokes progressive racial politics, I further contend that the same multiracial ideals that promise to disrupt racial biases can also support essentialist understandings of race and promote superficial approaches to racial justice. In this chapter, I excavate key multiracial philosophies from two examples of popular dance: a commercial for the clothing company Old Navy (2021) and The Masked Dancer (2021), a reality television program airing on FOX. Although neither performance literally explores multiracial experiences or features explicitly self-identified mixed-race people, I argue that both dances express multiracial discourses that ultimately support hegemonic racial-social orders—even as they claim to disrupt them.
