The One Drop Rule

Tamale Chica here on the One Drop Rule. I was having a discussion with a Caucasian friend of mine, who was curious as to whether most U.S. minorities really like to segregate them selves from the general population. This is an incredible question because it opens the door to looking at what it is that makes us a nation of hyphens, especially collective hypens in terms of race. For one thing, the racial grouping was done for US Census purposes. I'll cover some of that issue later on in another post. It was a governmental classification, and there have been plenty of issues in how those classifications were determined over time.

Perhaps more importantly, and at the crux of the matter, is that for most of our great country's history, we had many unbelievably racist laws, passed and put into place to keep "non whites" in their place, which was outside of the mainstream of society. It is a testament to our nation that today, I can write about these as "racist laws of the past." As I share these, you, dear reader, may find them incredulous. That, too, will be a good thing, because as a nation we have evolved.

Looking back, we had something here called the "One Drop Rule." The one drop rule, or hypodescent, is a US tradition that has distant roots in the anti Roman traditions of northwestern Europe. Most male colonists came to North America with their wives or found wives among their own segregated ethnic communities once they arrived in the English and Dutch colonies. This meant that there was little chance that significant numbers of persons of mixed race descent would even occur. Over time, other types of inter-ethnic liaisons increased among the European nationalities and with non Europeans.

During this time the identity American was used to refer to these multiethnic people and their communities, in contrast to what later developed to Anglo exclusiveness. Prejudice was somewhat less in regards to intermarriage between Europeans, but remained where non-Europeans were involved. During this time, the two numerically significant non-European groups were Native Americans and Africans. Because Native Americans were considered internal nations without the rights of citizenship, this discouraged intermarriage.

After the end of the Civil War, as the federal troops left the South and the Reconstruction ended, notorious Jim Crow laws appeared, including anti miscegenation laws. Anti-miscegenation laws were directed toward mixed bloods. By making interracial liaisons illegal, the offspring of these unions would be illegal, and therefore unable to inherit property, which is an important basis for capital accumulation and power. During this same time in history was the emergence of various racial theories that lent claim to Anglo or Nordic claims of superiority, including the idea that racial mixture resulted in debilitation and regression. This then lent itself to the notion that the races should remain segregated in the interest of racial purity.

The one-drop rule was used to prove that any nonwhite ancestry, no matter how small, was proof of nonwhite status. The one-drop rule originally designated any individual with any African lineage as black. This has served not only to expand the number of slaves born from conjugal relationships with white slave owners, but served to preserve what sociologists now look at as "white privilege." Any person of mixed European blood was then to be the race with lesser status and civil rights.

Ironically, the one drop rule was lawfully upheld in the legal context of a civil rights case. Homer Plessy was denied the right to sit in a "Whites Only" train section because he had one black great grandparent. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court rules that state imposed racial segregation of railroad cars is constitutional, this establishing a legal precedent that legitimized the One Drop Rule.

In modern times, the one-drop rule has been used as political aresenal. "Today, ironically, the one-drop rule has been embraced by Black folks because we want more Black folks. After all, greater numbers translate into greater political and social clout. So it's a big deal for racial and ethnic groups when the federal government decides which races are to be measured, which boxes are to be checked on the census form," said Clarence Page, a journalist from the Chicago Tribune during a prophetic 1997 interview with the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

After the release of Census 2000, newspaper headlines across the country announced that the number of Latinos had surpassed those of African Americans as the nations largest minority group. Using one-drop mathematics, and counting everyone who checked "Black" plus any number of other races, then these numbers may very well have been different.