{"id":11206,"date":"2011-01-02T20:02:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-02T20:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11206"},"modified":"2014-10-05T20:55:21","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T20:55:21","slug":"the-%e2%80%9cone-drop-rule%e2%80%9d-revisited-mary-ann-mcqueen-of-montgomery-county-north-carolina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11206","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cOne Drop Rule\u201d revisited: Mary Ann McQueen of Montgomery County, North Carolina"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cOne Drop Rule\u201d revisited: Mary Ann McQueen of Montgomery County, North Carolina<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
\n2010-12-21<\/p>\n

Victoria E. Bynum<\/a><\/strong>, Emeritus Professor of History
\nTexas State University, San Marcos<\/em><\/p>\n

Many people, perhaps most, think of \u201crace\u201d as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the term \u201cpassing<\/a>.\u201d Most of us immediately picture a light-skinned person who is \u201chiding\u201d their African ancestry. Many would go further and accuse that person of denying their \u201creal\u201d racial identity. Yet few people would accuse a dark-skinned person who has an Anglo ancestor of trying to pass for \u201cblack,\u201d and thereby denying their \u201ctrue\u201d Anglo roots!<\/p>\n

So why is a white person with an African ancestor presumed to be \u201creally\u201d black? In fact, in this day of DNA testing<\/a>, it\u2019s become increasingly clear that many more white-identified people have a \u201cdrop\u201d or two of African ancestry than most ever imagined. Are lots of white folks (or are they black?) \u201cpassing,\u201d then, without even knowing it?<\/p>\n

Having said all that, I\u2019d like to provide some historical examples of the shifting and arbitrary nature of racial categorization. Those familiar with Newt Knight<\/a> already know about the 1948 miscegenation trial of his great-grandson, Davis Knight<\/a>. According to the \u201cone drop rule<\/a>\u201d of race, Davis was a black man by virtue of having a multiracial great-grandmother (Rachel Knight). Yet, social custom and the law differed. One was legally \u201cwhite\u201d in Mississippi<\/a> if one had one-eighth or less African ancestry, and Davis eventually went free on that legal ground…<\/p>\n

…In 1884, Mary Ann McQueen, a young white woman about 33 years old, was suspected of having \u201cblack\u201d blood. So strong were these suspicions that her mother, who had always been accepted as white, swore out a deed in the Montgomery County<\/a> Court that \u201csolemnly\u201d proclaimed her daughter to be \u201cpurely white and clear of an African blood whatsoever.\u201d But why did suspicions about the \u201cpurity\u201d of Mary Ann McQueen\u2019s \u201cblood\u201d arise in the first place?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cOne Drop Rule\u201d revisited: Mary Ann McQueen of Montgomery County, North Carolina Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners 2010-12-21 Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History Texas State University, San Marcos Many people, perhaps most, think of \u201crace\u201d as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,1459,6462,20],"tags":[4518,20762,1457,1456,879,3884,1453,1454],"class_list":["post-11206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mississippi","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-davis-knight","tag-mississippi","tag-newt-knight","tag-newton-knight","tag-north-carolina","tag-piney-woods","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}