One-drop theory

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. It is an ethnocentric concept based on the idea of human hierarchy. 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."

In practice this meant, "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 this, the 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.

Despite cries to the contrary, the color line still exists in America, and indeed most countries. Classic examples of "modern day racism" are found on the evening news where news anchors and reporters are typically no darker than a "brown paper bag". The same "brown paper bag" identification system was used during slavery. Further, movies and music videos continue to be stereotype laden. Therefore, although the "one-drop theory" is firmly held by certain racists (the KKK, etc), for the majority of America, and the world, Blacks and African Americans are acceptable, as long as their complexion does not darken to shades beyond the yardstick, "brown paper bag". (Similar comparisons can be made to hair texture, and the fact that Afros and dreadlocks, while cool for certain music videos and TV sitcoms, are not acceptable in corporate America or in most executive media jobs or educational institutions.) Thus, many persons with dark skin and very curly hair, tend to use makeup, and hair treatments in order to fit into what is accepted as normal in American and other cultures. Obviously, this leads to self-hatred, and the descendants of these individuals have real psychological problems. So to the uninformed the "one drop" issue may seem trivial. Yet when we take into the account that many dark persons are left out of the hiring process due to racism/one drop, and when we evaluate the psychological, financial and political damage caused by "one drop rules", we cannot, in good conscience, ignore overt and covert racism.

History

The one-drop rule was unrelated to slavery.

Some people think that the one-drop rule dates from U.S. slavery and that it determined whether you were a slave. Reality was the exact opposite. The court cases Gobu v. Gobu, 1802 North Carolina, Hudgins v. Wrights, 1806 Virginia, and Adelle v. Beauregard, 1810 Louisiana established the U.S. law that if you 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 13th Amendment.

Plessy v. Ferguson did not consider the one-drop rule.

Some people think that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the one-drop rule in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In fact the Supreme Court wanted to rule on the issue of Plessy's "race" and suggested to his lawyers that that they should 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.

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 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,, Naomi Drake of Louisiana, 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.

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 North Africans are considered to be White.

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.

Genetic "averaging"

Some who subscribe to the one-drop school of thought consider Europeans to be intermediate in a racial continuum between Africans and North East Asians (see J. Philippe Rushton) and thus consider a person with an equal amount of descent from these two groups as Caucasian "on average". Some argue that the genetic research Rushton cites has shown no biological basis for race and that his identifications of genetic groups are arbitrary - specifically, the genetic diversity found between members of a group is higher than differences between groups.

Arthur Jensen argues that, "if the differences between the means of various populations were not larger than the mean difference between individuals within each population, it would be impossible to distinguish different populations statistically." Others assert that Jensen makes a logical error in believing that any observed genetic difference must be representative of all genetic differences - that is to say, it is possible to distinguish arbitrary groups which have minor differences between means, but more differences within those groups. For example, blue and green bags of coins may differ as groups, by 2 cents, but within groups larger amounts:

Color->	Blue	Green
	2	4
	4	6
	70	72
	72	74
Mean->	37	39

Type->	Low Amount	High Amount
	2	70
	4	72
	4	72
	6	74
Mean->	4	72

Some claim that the genetic linkage trees Cavalli-Sforza provides clearly show distinct branches for all the three main races Rushton describes. Others claim that when Cavalli-Sforza applied the wholly objective mathematical procedure of principal component analysis to his genetic data, the major racial groupings Rushton descibes formed very clear and unambiguous clusters. Rushton claims his focus on race is consistent with the work of forensic experts, research in bio-medicine, and biologists studying geographic variation in other species. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson told journalist Peter Knudson. "The basic reasoning by Rushton is solid evolutionary reasoning; that is it's logically sound. If he had seen some apparent geographic variation for a non-human species-a species of sparrow or sparrow hawk, for example-no one would have batted an eye."

These claims are highly contested by other scientists and researchers, including those whom Rushton cites. Rushton's research has also been criticised by those that consider his conclusions and methods as "sloppy" and "unscientific".

See also

• Multiracial
• Passing
• Pencil test
• Racial purity
• Hypodescent

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
• Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2002. ISBN 1566399092

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

See also

• Race
• Hypodescent