One-drop theory
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The one-drop theory (or one-drop rule) classes people with any non-white ancestry as being non-white. It is an ethnocentric and racist concept based on the idea of human hierarchy. The one-drop theory (or one-drop rule) is a historical colloquial term for the standard—found throughout the United States of America—that holds that a person with even a tiny portion of non-white ancestry ("one drop of non-white blood") should be classified as "colored", especially for the purposes of laws forbidding interracial marriage. This notion of invisible/intangible membership in a "racial" group has seldom been applied to people of American Indian ancestry (see Race in the United States for details). The notion has also been applied to the idea of solely black ancestry. E.g. Langston Hughes wrote, "You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word ‘Negro’ is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown."<ref>Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, an Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1940).</ref>
In practice this means, “Not one drop of non-white blood that we know about”. People will not always know if their great Grandmother, for example was slightly darker than white people usually are. If they know they may keep quiet because they do not think it matters. They may keep quiet because they do not want to attract Racial prejudice to themselves and their children. Many people in any case believe that racial prejudice is unjust. They may keep quiet because they do not want to discourage a potential sexual partner. Casual sex happens among white Americans as among all other people. In such cases parents may not know if the other parent of their child is completely white or not. There are also cases where a child appears to be legitimate but the person named as father on the Birth certificate is not the biological father or may not be the biological father. The rule is unenforceable.
Despite the above one-drop theory is still influential in the U.S.—by de facto American color standards, a multiracial person with visible black heritage is considered black unless they declare themselves otherwise, identifying instead as white, mixed-race, or American Indian, for example. (Different color standards can be seen in countries such as Brazil.) These standards are widely rejected by America's Latino community, the majority of whom are of mixed ancestry, but for whom their Latino cultural heritage is more important to their ethnic identities than skin color. Incidentally there is no scientific reason for assuming that race matters as much as the one-drop theory suggests. There is no scientific reason for assuming it matters if a person has one drop or more of Non-white blood.
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History
Misunderstanding No. 1 -- That the one-drop rule defined who was a slave.
Some people think that the one-drop rule dates from U.S. slavery and that it determined whether you were a slave. For example, a Wikipedia article erroneously claims, "The designation of anyone possessing any trace of African ancestry as "black", and, therefore, of subordinate status to whites, guaranteed a source of cheap labor during slavery and for decades afterward."<ref>African American#Who is African American?</ref> Reality was the exact opposite. The court cases Gobu v. Gobu, 1802 North Carolina,<ref>The Gobu v. Gobu court record is avaliable in any U.S. law library under the index "1 N.C. 188."</ref> Hudgins v. Wrights, 1806 Virginia,<ref> The Hudgins v. Wrights court record is avaliable in any U.S. law library under the index "11 Va. 134."</ref> and Adelle v. Beauregard, 1810 Louisiana<ref>The Adelle v. Beauregard court record is avaliable in any U.S. law library under the index "1 Mart o.s. 183."</ref> established the U.S. law that if your had any discernable European ancestry at all, then you were presumed to be free, and the burden was on the alleged slaveowner to prove that you were legally a slave through matrilineal descent. This law was then followed in hundreds of court cases without exception until U.S. slavery was ended by the Civil War.<ref>For a discussion of this, see Paul Finkelman, "The Color of Law," Northwestern University Law Review, 87 (no. 3, 1993), 937-91, 952-54; Daniel J. Sharfstein, "The Secret History of Race in the United States," Yale Law Journal, 112 (no. 6, 2003), 1473-509, 1478; Adrienne D. Davis, "Identity Notes Part One: Playing in the Light," American University Law Review, 45 (1996), 695-720, 702-17; Ariela J. Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South," Yale Law Journal, 108 (no. 1, 1998), 109-88, 129-30; Ian F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, 1996), 1-5; and Leon A. Higginbotham, Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff, "Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia," Georgetown Law Journal, 77 (no. 6, August 1989), 1967-2029, 1985-87.</ref>
Misunderstanding No. 2 -- That the one-drop rule was upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson.
Some people think that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the one-drop rule in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). For example, a Wikipedia article erroneously claims, "The United States Supreme Court formalized the legal status of this rule in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the Court affirmed the legality of racial segregation and upheld the State of Louisiana's ruling that, despite being 7/8 white, Homer Plessy's one black great-grandparent rendered him legally non-white and, therefore, subject to being barred from whites-only railway carriages." In fact the Supreme Court wanted to rule on the issue of Plessy's "race" and explicitly suggested to his lawyers that that they make the argument. They all knew that, since Plessy looked completely White, he could easily have been accepted as White. But, like famed NAACP secretary Walter White a generation later, and like Gregory Howard Williams today, Plessy wanted to use his African heritage coupled with his European appearance in order to highlight the injustice of "racial" discrimination.<ref>For an outstanding discussion of this very misunderstood point, see Walter Wadlington, “The Loving Case: Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Historical Perspective,” Virginia Law Review, 52 (no. 7, November 1966), 1189-223, 1196.</ref>
The One-Drop Rule was First Legislated in 1910.
The 1910-19 decade was the nadir of the Jim Crow era by most measures, and this was the decade when the one-drop rule was first adopted as written law. Tennessee led the parade by adopting a one-drop statute in 1910. It was followed by Louisiana in the same year, Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923, Virginia in 1924, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Oklahoma in 1931. During this same period, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their old blood fraction statutes de juris but amended these fractions (1/16, 1/32) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto <ref> Pauli Murray, ed. States’ Laws on Race and Color (Athens, 1997), 428, 173, 443, 37, 237, 330, 463, 22, 39, 358, 77, 150, 164, 207, 254, 263, 459.</ref> By 1925, almost every state had a one-drop law on the books, or something equivalent. These were the laws that gave power to bureaucrats like Walter Plecker of Virginia,<ref>For the Plecker story, see J. Douglas Smith, “The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism inVirginia, 1922-1930: 'Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro',” Journal of Southern History 68, no. 1 (2002): 65-106</ref>, Naomi Drake of Louisiana,<ref>For Drake, see Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University, 1986)</ref> and similar people around the country--people whose mission was to hunt down any families of mixed ancestry and shove them to the Black side of the color line.
Prior to 1930, individuals of mixed European and African ancestry had usually been classed as mulattoes, sometimes as black and sometimes as white. The main purpose of the one-drop-rule was to prevent interracial relationships and thus keep Whites "pure". In 1924 Plecker wrote unscientifically "Two races as materially divergent as the white and negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher,". In line with this concept was also the assumption that Blacks would somehow be "improved" through white intermixture.
Walter Plecker had been preceded by Madison Grant who had written in his book The Passing of the Great Race: The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew. (Grant, The Great Race, 1916)
In the case of American Indian admixture in whites the one-drop-rule was extended only as far as those with one-quarter Indian blood due to what was known as the "Pocahontas exception." The "Pocahontas exception" existed because many influential Virginia families claimed descendence from Pocahontas. To avoid classifying them as non-white the Virginia General Assembly declared that a person could be considered white long as they had no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.
In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court, in its ruling on the case of Loving v. Virginia, conclusively invalidated Plecker's Virginia Racial Integrity Act Plecker, along with its key component, the one-drop rule, as unconstitutional. Despite this holding, the one-drop theory is still influential in U.S. society. Multiracial individuals with visible mixed European and African and/or Native American ancestry are often still considered black unless they explicitly declare themselves otherwise, identifying instead as white, mixed-race, mulatto or American Indian, for example. By contrast these standards are widely rejected by America's Latino community, the majority of whom are of mixed ancestry, but for whom their Latino cultural heritage is more important to their ethnic identities than race. The one-drop rule is not applied to Latinos of mixed origin or to Arab-Americans.
Future
There are different ways of trying to assess the future of the one-drop rule in the United States: Some of them include how interracial parents label their children on the decennial U.S. census, scholarly opinions and trends in affirmative action court cases.<ref>For detailed sources and citations for this paragraph and the three following paragraphs, see "Chapter 14. Features of Today's One-Drop Rule" of the book, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is also available online at Features of Today’s One-Drop Rule.</ref>
From Reconstruction until about 1930, the children of Black/White interracial parents and of Mulatto parents were usually identified as Mulatto. That 87% of mixed U.S. children were still identified as Black in the 2000 census does not necessarily demonstrate that the one-drop rule is still accepted the way it used to be. More and more people identify themselves as Multi-racial, Mulatto or Mixed rather than as Black or White. That the fraction of mixed children census-labeled as solely Black dropped abruptly from 62 percent in 1990 to 31 percent in 2000 (when multiple "races" were first allowed) suggests that the One-Drop-Theory and denying one's European ancestry is no longer accepted the way it used to be.
However despite the One-Drop-Rule being illegal ever since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 overturned the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, as recently as 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ODR by refusing to hear a case against Louisiana’s “racial” classification criteria as applied to Susie Phipps (479 U.S. 1002). In addition several authors and journalists have found it very profitable to "out" as Black famous historical Mulattoes and multiracial Whites, who were regarded as White in their society and self-identified as such and who were culturally European-American, merely because they acknowledged having (often slight) African ancestry (Anatole Boyard, Patrick Francis Healy, Michael Morris Healy, Jr., Calvin Clark Davis, John James Audubon, Mother Henriette Delille—a Louisiana Creole).
Many scholars publishing on this topic today (including: Naomi Zack, Neil Gotanda, Michael L. Blakey, Julie C. Lythcott-Haims, Christine Hickman, David A. Hollinger, Thomas E. Skidmore, G. Reginald Daniel, F. James Davis, Joe R. Feagin, Ian F. Haney-Lopez, Barbara Fields, Dinesh D'Souza, Joel Williamson, Mary C. Waters, Debra J. Dickerson) affirm that the one-drop rule is still strong in American popular culture. Affirmative action court cases on the other hand (where an apparently White person claims invisible Black ancestry and claims federal entitlements and/or EEOC enforcement) are mixed. In some cases, such as 1985 Boston firefighters Philip and Paul Malone, courts have held that such claimants are guilty of "racial fraud" despite their claim of a Black grandparent. In other instances, such as the 1988 Denver case of schoolteacher Mary Walker – a person of fair complexion, green eyes, light brown hair, and no documented Black ancestry – courts have ordered employers to accept claimants as Black for EEOC purposes. And still other claimants, such as 1997 Detroit businessman Mostafa Hefny, a Black-looking immigrant actually from Africa (Egypt), are denied benefits because Africans from Africa are not "ethnically" African-American.
If affirmative action is maintained in the future it is unclear how court support of (or opposition to) the one-drop rule will unfold.
Alternatives
As an alternative to this theory, various terms were and are used to denote persons with varying degrees of African and European ancestry. These terms include mulatto for 1/2 black and 1/2 white, quadroon for 1/4 black, octoroon for 1/8 black, sambo or griffe for 1/4 white. With the exception of mulatto and eventually quadroon these terms are rarely used today. In addition Mulatto is also used as a generic term which includes different mixtures of both substantial European and substantial African ancestry.
Footnotes
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See also
Further reading
- Davies, James F., Who is Black?: One Nation's Definition. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0271021721
- Guterl, Matthew Press, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0674010124
- Moran, Rachel F., Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race & Romance, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN 0226536637
- Romano, Renee Christine, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post-War America. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0674010337
- Yancey, George, Just Don't Marry One: Interracial Dating, Marriage & Parenting. Judson Press, 2003. ISBN 081701439X
External links
- New Life for the "One Drop" Rule
- PBS - Multiracial America - Who is black? One nation's definition
- Battles in Red, Black, and White: Virginia's Racial Integrity Law of 1924
- Harvard Political Review: Painting by Number
- "One Drop of Blood" by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, July 24, 1994
- AsianWeek.com: One Drop Rule: Tiger as Asian Pacific American
- Features of Today’s One-Drop Rule