{"id":15455,"date":"2013-02-13T03:46:24","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T03:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15455"},"modified":"2013-02-13T04:37:44","modified_gmt":"2013-02-13T04:37:44","slug":"racial-identity-and-the-law-miscegenation-and-the-%e2%80%9cone-drop-rule%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15455","title":{"rendered":"Racial identity and the law: miscegenation and the \u201cone drop rule\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/renegadesouth.wordpress.com\/2011\/08\/05\/racial-identity-and-the-law-miscegenation-and-the-one-drop-rule\/\" target=\"_blank\">Racial identity and the law: miscegenation and the \u201cone drop rule\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/renegadesouth.wordpress.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners<\/a><br \/>\n2011-08-05<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.txstate.edu\/history\/people\/faculty\/bynum.html\" target=\"_blank\">Victoria E. Bynum<\/a><\/strong>, Emeritus Professor of History (author of <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5463\" target=\"_blank\">The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies<\/a><\/em>)<br \/>\n<em>Texas State University, San Marcos<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=3208\" target=\"_blank\">one drop rule<\/a>\u201d of race refers to the belief that a mere drop of African ancestry makes one \u201cblack\u201d\u2014no matter how \u201cwhite\u201d one\u2019s appearance. This pseudoscientific concept, still commonly believed throughout the United States and among people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, reinforces the idea that a white person who has even one African ancestor somehow is \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passing<\/a>\u201d for white. However, legal cases that involved race during an era in which being classified as a \u201cNegro\u201d severely circumscribed one\u2019s civil rights reveal that questions about racial identity were anything but black and white.<\/p>\n<p>Historically, one of the many paradoxes of Southern race-based society was the co-existence of the \u201cone drop rule\u201d alongside contradictory legal definitions of whiteness. In <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mississippi\" target=\"_blank\">Mississippi<\/a> and<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/North_Carolina\" target=\"_blank\"> North Carolina<\/a>, for example, a person with less than one-eighth African ancestry was legally defined as white. The legal criteria for determining one\u2019s race sometimes\u2014but certainly not always\u2014prevailed over the one drop rule in cases involving the marital rights of mixed-race people&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/renegadesouth.wordpress.com\/2011\/08\/05\/racial-identity-and-the-law-miscegenation-and-the-one-drop-rule\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Racial identity and the law: miscegenation and the \u201cone drop rule\u201d Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners 2011-08-05 Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History (author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies) Texas State University, San Marcos The \u201cone drop rule\u201d of race refers to the belief that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,125,8,20],"tags":[2317,1453,1454],"class_list":["post-15455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-renegade-south-histories-of-unconventional-southerners","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15455","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=15455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}