Mixed Race Studies

The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans and the U.S. Census

Michigan Law Review
Volume 95, Number 5 (March 1997)
pages 1161-1265

Christine B. Hickman, Associate Professor of Law
California Western School of Law

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. Treatment of Mixed-Race People: The Early Legal Record
  • A. The First African Americans and the First Race Mixing
  • B. Mulattoes: Black by Law
  • C. A Study in Contrasts: Exclusion of Mulattoes from De Crèvecoeur’s “New Race of Men”
  • D. The Census and the Mulatto Category, 1850-1910
• II. Proposals for a Multiracial Category: Critiquing the Discourse
  • A. The One Drop Rule: The Misapprehension of the Historical Context
    1. Misperceptions of the One Drop Rule: Gotanda’s Theories of Racial Purity, Objectivity and Subordination in Recognition
    2. The One Drop Rule and “Buying into the System of Racial Domination”
    3. Lessons from the South African Experience
  • B. Rebiologizing Race
    1. The Collapse of Biological Race
    2. Proposals for a Broad Genetically Based Multiracial Category
    3. The Proposal for a Majoritarian Classification System
    4. Biological Passing for Black
    5. The Harlem Renaissance and Cultural
    6. Race, Biology and the Law: The Racial Credential Cases
  • C. The Dangers of Redefining Black: Distancing.
    1. Finding Solutions for the Lighter Part of the Race
    2. Sanitizing our Attacks on Racism
    3. Conclusion
• III. From the One Drop Rule to the Discourse on Race
  • A. There is Race
  • B. Race as a Metaphor
  • C. Essential vs. Cultural Concepts of Race
  • D. Race as a Choice
    1. Appiah, Lee, and the Choice of Our Racial Identity
    2. Choice Today
    3. The Choice of Our Race by Daily Actions
• IV. A Proposal for the Census
  • A. The Broad, Blood-based Multiracial Category
  • B. Counting Loving’s Children on the Race Line
    1. Multiracial Status as Race
    2. The False Choice Between Race and Multirace
    3. The Multiracial Category on the “Race” Line: Guaranteed Inaccuracy
  • C. A Line of Their Own.
• Conclusion

For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the “one drop rule,” which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of “hypodescent” and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race but a large part of the history of America.

Now as the millennium approaches, social forces require some rethinking of this important, old rule. Plessy v. Ferguson, which affirmed the right of states to mandate “equal but separate accommodations” for White and “colored” train passengers, is a century old. Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively overruled Plessy and instituted the end of de jure discrimination, was decided over a generation ago. Nearly thirty years have passed since the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, invalidated any prohibition against interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Since the 1967 Loving decision, the number of interracial marriages has nearly quadrupled. This trend has even extended to Black-White couples, whose intermarriage rate has traditionally lagged behind that of other racial and ethnic groups. For the first time, opinion polls indicate that more Americans approve of interracial marriage than disapprove. The number of children born to parents of different races has increased dramatically, and some of the offspring of these interracial marriages have assumed prominent roles in American popular culture.

Some of these children of interracial marriages are now arguing cogently for a reappraisal of hypodescent. Their movement has sprung to public consciousness with the recent bid by multiracial organizations, over the objections of civil rights groups, to put a “multiracial” category in the “race” section of the forms that will be used when the next decennial census is conducted in the year 2000. This proposal has immense practical importance because the census provides the nation with its main source of racial and ethnic data. For example, implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 all depend on racial and ethnic statistics culled from the census, and the addition of a new category could change the count of the existing racial groups and alter the way these laws are implemented.

One wing of this new multiracial movement argues that a new “multiracial box” should be made available for the growing number of children of interracial marriages. Another wing of this movement, in books and law review articles, suggests that the addition of this category should be part of a wholesale redefinition of the racial identities of most Americans. The thinking of both wings of the multiracial movement is informed by their rejection of hypodescent and the “one drop rule.” To date, the participants in this discourse have emphasized the racist notions of White racial purity that gave rise to the one drop rule. They have concluded that the effects of this old rule are mainly evil and that the consequences of abandoning it will be mainly good. Based in part on such reasoning, the more activist wing of this movement has proposed several neat, symmetrical, and radical redefinitions of African-American racial identity. Under one such proposed definition, any Black person with White or Native American ancestry would become “multiracial.” Under another, any Black person with a “majority of [his] origins in the original peoples of Europe” would become European American.

My purpose in this article is to critique this discourse. I agree that the one drop rule had its origins in racist notions of White purity. However, many scholars have misunderstood the way that this rule has shaped the Black experience in America, and this misunderstanding has distorted their proposals for a new multiracial category on the census forms. As we examine the one drop rule and its importance in the current discourse, we should recall the famous exchange between Faust and Goethe’s Devil:

Faust: Say at least, who you are?

Mephistopheles: I am part of that power which ever wills evil yet ever accomplishes good.

So it was with the one drop rule. The Devil fashioned it out of racism, malice, greed, lust, and ignorance, but in so doing he also accomplished good: His rule created the African-American race as we know it today, and while this race has its origins in the peoples of three continents and its members can look very different from one another, over the centuries the Devil’s one drop rule united this race as a people in the fight against slavery, segregation, and racial injustice…

Read the entire article here.

PSU MFA Monday Lecture Series: Laylah Ali

Portland State University Campus (at the corner of SW Broadway & Hall)
Shattuck Hall Annex
1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198
Portland, Oregon
2011-01-31, 19:30-20:30 PST (Local Time)

Laylah Ali, Associate Professor of Art
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Free to the public

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and a MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Laylah Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

PSUs Art Dept. offers free public Art lectures almost every Monday night of the school year. Local, National and International, interdisciplinary artists visit Portland to speak about their work.

The PMMNLS is supported in part by: PICA, Portland Center for Public Humanities, Wealth Underground Farm, Bear Deluxe Magazine, Northwest Film Center. If you or your organization is interested in becoming supporters of the PMMNLS please contact the art department.

For a complete list of MFA Monday Night Lectures please click here.

Kelly Jackson: Faculty spotlight

Arizona State University
College of Public Programs
2011-01-14

Dr. Kelly Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Social Work in the College of Public Programs.

Before coming to the College four years ago, she earned her Masters in Social Work from the University at Albany, and her PhD in Social Welfare from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Kelly’s research focuses on the cultural identity development of persons of mixed racial and ethnic heritage. She is also interested in developing and evaluating strength-based interventions for at-risk multiracial and multicultural youth.

She says her work is very personal to her.  “As a social worker and a person of mixed race heritage, I am committed to expanding the current knowledge base of multiracial identity development by conducting and disseminating empirical research that utilizes ecological and strength-based conceptualizations of the multiracial experience.”…

Read the entire article here.

Admixture in a biologically African caste of Black Americans

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 74, Issue 2 (October 1987)
pages 265–273
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330740213

Curtis W. Wienker, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
University of South Florida

Social and historical factors account for much of the variation in European ancestry among different Black American populations, including that of McNary, Arizona. The Black population of McNary is socioculturally and geographically isolated. Admixture estimates based upon reflectometry and serological data suggest that this population has less than 5% European ancestry. Anthropometric and hemoglobin data also suggest that this population is more African in ancestry than other Black American populations. Admixture estimates for the population are complicated by several factors. Genetic drift has probably affected Black McNary; estimated effective population size (N_e) is 52.11 and the coefficient of breeding isolation is less than 50. Frequencies of the alleles B, O, and r support this hypothesis; they are quite atypical for a Black American group. Selective migration and occupational selection may also have influenced the current genetic composition of Black McNary. Over 80% of the Black residents of McNary were born in backwoods lumbering towns in the American South. Most Black families in McNary trace their economic reliance on lumbering back several generations. Historical sources and demographic data from Black McNary suggest that Southern Black millworking families formed an endogamous unit that produced this caste, which has a relatively small amount of European ancestry.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

Peter Lang
1998
142 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8204-4265-5

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

How and when does literature most effectively uncover race to be a metaphor? The passing figure, a light-skinned African-American capable and willing to pass for white, provides the thematic focus to this provocative study. In exploring the social and cultural history of this distinctly American phenomenon, Bennett moves freely between literature, film, and music, arguing that the passing figure is crucial to our understanding of past and present conceptions of race.

Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes

Biography
Volume 23, Number 4 (Fall 2000)
pages 670-693
E-ISSN: 1529-1456 Print ISSN: 0162-4962
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0043

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

Langston Hughes, “Desire”

At the very beginning of his career and throughout most of his forty years of writing, Langston Hughes repeatedly returned to the theme of racial passing, exploring the subject in two autobiographies, several poems and short stories, a brief scene in his first novel, and at least one play. More than those writers who could easily pass for white—Jean Toomer and Walter White—and more than those writers who have become central to the growing study of passing literature—Nella Larsen and William Faulkner—Langston Hughes examines this figure through all the major genres, and more importantly, with an incredible range and inventiveness. In surveying the work, however, it becomes apparent that Hughes began to abandon the theme of racial passing just as he was beginning to explore the interrelated themes of homosexuality and homophobia. As Hughes moves to this “new” material, he can be found structuring it, perhaps as many authors do, upon his early work, with the more familiar drama of racial passing informing his approach to homosexuality. Perhaps less obvious are the ways that the early representations of racial passing, including…

Read or purchase the article here.

A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 124, Number 491 (Winter 2011)
pages 120-121
E-ISSN: 1535-1882 Print ISSN: 0021-8715

Sharon Downey Varner
Department of English
University of South Alabama

Hodes, Martha. A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007.

This meticulously researched historical narrative is reconstructed from letters written by the subject and her family members. In A Sea Captain’s Wife, historian Martha Hodes brings to life the story of an obscure New England woman who marries a black man after the Civil War and takes up residence in the Cayman Islands. Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South.

Eunice Richardson, the subject of this book, was born a white, working-class woman in New England in 1831. She was first married to William Stone, a fellow New Englander, with whom she moved to Mobile, Alabama, for a period of time. Hodes speculates that it was in Mobile that Eunice first became acquainted with Smiley Connolly, an African American who would become her second husband.

Hodes leaves no stone unturned and no document undogged. Her storyteller’s bent, her understanding of the complex racial climate of the late 1800s, and her extensive historical knowledge combine to produce an engaging historical document that reads like a novel…

Read or purchase the article here.

Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 37-63
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-063

Chris Andersen, Associate Professor of Native Studies
University of Alberta

Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.

Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties

Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice
Los Angeles, California
2010-11-18

Manny Otiko, Our Weekly Contributor

November is Native Heritage month

There is an old joke in the Black community about women attributing long hair to having “Indian blood” in their family. But like all jokes, there is an element of truth in this statement. There are deep ties between Native Americans, America’s first residents, and Black Americans, America’s first sizable minority group.

Los Angeles resident Phil Wilkes Fixico claims both Native American and African American roots on both sides of his family. Fixico, a performance artist and activist for Black Indian culture, says that he first started exploring his genealogy, when he got into his 50s.

Fixico said he has been on an 11-year journey to identify with his Native American roots. This has included reaching out to relatives in Oklahoma, producing a DVD about the Black-Indian experience and doing presentations about Native American culture around Los Angeles…

…Fixico said that he grew up a troubled youth, who was in an out of the juvenile system. After a stint in a correctional institution, he finally turned his life around. He received help from people of all races to do this.

Fixico attributes much of his problems to an identity crisis caused by lack of knowledge about his history. At 52, he decided to start investigating his background. He knew his mother, who raised him alone, was of Creek, White and African descent, but he later learned that his biological father was also part Seminole.

Fixico discovered that his ancestors were Seminole Maroons, slaves who opted to escape captivity and form alliances with the Seminole Indians in Florida…

Read the entire article here.

Phil Wilkes Fixico — a True Native Son

L. A. Watts Times
2010-03-11

Darlene Donloe, Contributing Writer

Phil Wilkes Fixico’s life is more dramatic than virtually any soap opera.

It took him about 52 years to find out who he was after growing up in what he calls a “web of lies.”

His intriguing story is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” a book and exhibit that will tour the country for five years and make its Los Angeles debut at the California African American Museum, tentatively in March 2011. The book speaks to the challenges and triumphs of dual African American and Native American heritage.

A “home-grown” kid who grew up in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, Fixico, 62, came up hard. His mother not only hid the identity of his biological father, but as a kid he was in and out of four juvenile institutions, experienced rejection, used drugs, committed crimes and witnessed domestic violence, said Fixico, who lives in Inglewood.

Fixico, a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry, and the “Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” said he “grew up as a troubled youth because I kept bumping into the truth and half-truth.

“I knew there was more than what I was being told, but I didn’t know what it was. I certainly didn’t know it was this.”

What he discovered 10 years ago rocked his core: He is a “Seminole–Maroon descendant.” He now describes it as an “identity crisis.”

By appearance, Fixico looks like a black man to some, but he doesn’t think of himself that way; instead, he describes himself as a “Seminole-Maroon descendant.”…

…To understand why he calls himself a Seminole-Maroon descendant is a long story that he pieced together through research.

“I don’t call myself black,” said Fixico, who is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-fourth Cherokee Freedman, one-fourth Seminole Freedman, one-fourth mulatto and one-eighth Creek Freedman, according to a Smithsonian researcher. “The reason I don’t say black is because that doesn’t really describe the nuances of who I am. I’m a shade of black, a flavor of black.

“When someone asks, ‘Are you black?’ it gives me pause. I can’t take the same credit as someone coming out of Africa who is pure. I can’t take their same degree of blackness.”

To be clear, Fixico doesn’t have a problem with being called black or with black people.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be black,” said Fixico, who explained his mother was African and Cherokee and his father African and Seminole. “I’ve been the product of a mixture. The one-drop rule says I’m black as anybody.

“Under America’s concept of black, I’m black. But when I look at it as my own sense of self, I’m a flavor of black.”…

Read the entire article here.