Race policies are a vital part of efforts to promote racial justice. At the most basic level, race policies that require keeping race-based data are invaluable resources in the fight for racial justice. Without such policies, we would not be able to prove or, in some cases, even notice patterns of racial discrimination. If we are not aware of such patterns, we cannot address them.

Without data to prove a pattern, it is common for the American public to ignore or brush off experiences of racial discrimination as isolated or unusual cases. In contrast, social protests sparked by the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in the summer of 2014 helped bring the killings of unarmed Black men by police officers to the consciousness of the US public. However, it would be impossible to make the case that they are examples of a social pattern of racial discrimination without race policies that require tracking the treatment of different racial groups by the police. With the evidence provided by such tracking, we can show that these episodes are part of a pattern of racial discrimination in the US criminal justice system that must be addressed (Alexander, 2010; The Sentencing Project, 2014).

Why must race policy include multiracial Americans? As the chapters in this book demonstrate, more Americans than ever before now identify with more than one race, and their numbers will continue to grow rapidly. We need race policies that will help us better understand the various multiracial populations and measure and address the racial discrimination they face. The very existence of growing numbers of people who identify as multiracial indicates that racial lines are not as stark as they once were. However, they do not imply the end of racial disparities and racism. We may have a Black President (of multiracial descent), but we do not live in a color-blind and postracial society. When unarmed Black men can be killed by police officers without penalty and the unemployment rate for Black people remains persistently double that of White people, race still matters (Somashekhar et al, 2015; Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, 2015).