One-drop rule

From Metapedia

The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States of America that holds that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry (however small or invisible) cannot be considered white and so unless said person has an alternative non-white ancestry they can claim, such as Native American, Asian, Arab, Australian aboriginal, they must be considered black.

[edit] Use of the rule

The 1910–19 decade was the zenith of the Jim Crow era by most measures. Tennessee adopted a one-drop statute in 1910. It was followed by Louisiana 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 (one-sixteenth, one-thirtysecond) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto.^[1] 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,^[2] Naomi Drake of Louisiana,^[3] and similar people around the country, who insisted on labeling families of mixed ancestry as Black.

Before 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 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."^[4]

In the case of Native American admixture with 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, invalidated Plecker's Virginia Racial Integrity Act, along with its key component, the one-drop rule, as unconstitutional.

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ 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.
2. ^ For the Plecker story, see J. Douglas Smith, “The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: 'Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro',” Journal of Southern History 68, no. 1 (2002): 65-106
3. ^ For Drake, see Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University, 1986)
4. ^ Madison Grant, The Passing of The Great Race, 1916