Jewishness after mount sinai: Jews, blacks and the (multi)racial category

The absence of attention to Black‐Jewish identities in the discourse of multiracialism results from exaggerated attention to Black‐Jewish relations, as well as a conceptual slippage between Jewishness and whiteness. This essay proposes that identities in the public arena are always political, and that racial binaries continue in spite of the authorization of multiple‐box checking in the U.S. Census. When Jewish parents in the U.S. identify themselves as white, they reproduce race thinking in their children, which, in turn, reinforces, rather than undermines racial hierarchies. This surfaces with particular saliency in the proposal for a multiracial category.

Key words:

• Racial Classifications
• Census Categories
• Identities
• Jews
• Power