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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 racial profiling and laws forbidding interracial marriage. The one-drop theory arises curious cases. For instance, all the British Royal Family might be of African ancestry, because of descent from Margarita de Castro e Souza, a Portuguese of possibly mixed origins, who was known at her time for having a "Moorish" appearance. This notion of invisible/intangible membership in a "racial" group has seldom been applied to people of Native American ancestry (see Race in the United States for details). The notion has also been applied to the idea of solely black ancestry. 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."
Beginnings In the slaveholding U.S. South, racial membership was essentially the reverse of the twentieth-century one-drop rule. If you had any visible European ancestry you were presumed to be free. The court cases Gobu v. Gobu, 1802 North Carolina, Hudgins v. Wrights, 1806 Virginia, and Adelle v. Beauregard, 1810 Louisiana established the U.S. caselaw that if a person had any discernable European ancestry at all, that person was presumed to be free, and the burden was on the alleged slaveowner to prove that he or she was 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. Legislation The 1910-19 decade was the nadir of the Jim Crow era by most measures, and also 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 jure 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, "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. ) In the case of Native American 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 descent 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, 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 non-white unless they explicitly declare themselves white or Anglo, and are typically identified instead as mixed-race, mulatto or mestizo, or Black 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 generally 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. It is becoming increasingly common for people to 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 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 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 In Ibero-America the situation was the reverse. European (Spanish, Portuguese) ancestry was so valued that an elaborate caste system was developed with terms that kept track of remote white, Amerindian and Negro ancestors. These terms were adapted also in the American South, especially Louisiana They include mulatto (Spanish and Portuguese mulato) 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 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. After the abolition of slavery in the Americas, the detailed categories have collapsed and people may be classed as white, mulatto or black depending on looks and economic status. Some Results of One Drop Rule Mainly because of the one drop rule there are many pale skinned people that are considered black. In many of these instances the person can actually be more white, than black, but be considered black. There are examples of how this could happen through the generations. In slavery there is a mulatto person who because of the one drop rule is considered black. They then have a child with a white person. Because of the one drop rule the child is 1/4 black, but considered black. There are plenty of people through American history that have been more Caucasian than Sub Saharian(Black) , but have been generally, or often considered black. Examples of this would include Sally Hemings, G.K. Butterfield,and Mariah Carey. Footnotes See also Further reading | ||||||||
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