The rise of a multiracial identity dovetails with an utopian ideal of a pan-ethnic, post-racial America—one where everyone is a little something. But that post-racial space doesn’t yet exist, with one of the effects being that multiracial people are often pulled between identities. Whether someone identifies more with one race or the other is strongly attributable to their upbringing, their family history, their surroundings, and their physical appearance, making no two multiracial experiences totally alike. [...] That hard work and a high salary helped turn Asians into a model minority clues us into how whiteness works. Being “white” doesn’t just refer to skin tone. It means you’re industrious and rich, that you believe in meritocracy and respect the status quo. Be respectable and diligent like a white person, and you’ll succeed. Whiteness, at its most pernicious, is an unquestioned belief in the American dream without acknowledging that America has historically denied the rewards of meritocracy to hard workers who didn’t look the right way. And if playing by the rules means you’re still on the outside, what minority would see assimilation as a worthwhile goal in 2015? [...] If Republicans can get away with only a cursory examination of modern racial relations—to say nothing of the frequency with which they appeal to outmoded stereotypes—then what does it say about our progress toward that supposedly glorious post-racial future? This is the dark side of the post-racial, which was supposed to be within sight after Obama’s election. To presume that race is over without resolving any of its conflicts is obviously no solution at all—a limited view of the post-racial that David Theo Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, defined to me as “whiteness in fear of its loss of its own power and its own status, and its own standing. It reaches for the post-racial as a way of entrenching the given racial distributions as they stand.”

It’s fairly easy, and indeed tempting, to write M.I.A. off as a faux-radical who relies on the borrowed aesthetics of revolution to sell records. But that superficial reading belies her truest political work: her commitment to self and the exploration of identity in a world and industry that is more comfortable with easily digestible predetermined narratives, particularly when it comes to racialized people.

Kenan Malik writes that the attempt to preserve "cultural identity and authenticity" is largely an inauthentic act, one steeped in relativism and traditionalism, and more concerned with how individuals "should" act than how they actually do. Thanks to @kemp for the link.