Hypodescent is the practice of determining the classification of a child of mixed-race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent. Because Caucasians were historically socially dominant in the Western world, mixed-race children in slave societies were most frequently assigned the status of their non-Caucasian parent. This was also to keep them classified as property, which slaves were. In some colonial societies, however, especially the Catholic Portuguese, Spanish and French, a third class of “people of color” developed.
Mixed Race Studies
Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
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- You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness.
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