{"id":39073,"date":"2014-12-24T17:50:40","date_gmt":"2014-12-24T17:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39073"},"modified":"2014-12-24T17:50:40","modified_gmt":"2014-12-24T17:50:40","slug":"white-black-a-murky-distinction-grows-still-murkier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39073","title":{"rendered":"White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier"},"content":{"rendered":"

White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-12-24<\/p>\n

Carl Zimmer<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In 1924, the State of Virginia<\/a> attempted to define what it means to be white.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s Racial Integrity Act<\/a>, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people \u201cwhose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was just one problem<\/a>. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia\u2019s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.<\/p>\n

So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the \u201cPocahontas exception<\/a>.\u201d Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.<\/p>\n

People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.<\/p>\n

In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter. In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published<\/a> the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people…<\/p>\n

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

White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier The New York Times 2014-12-24 Carl Zimmer In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white. The state\u2019s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people \u201cwhose blood is entirely white, having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,2039,459,14646,1467,8,3015,6940,20],"tags":[18815,16695,1751,18810,7742,7743,3273,18812,18807,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-39073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-history","category-latino","category-law","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-23andme","tag-carl-zimmer","tag-claudio-saunt","tag-david-reich","tag-jeffrey-c-long","tag-jeffrey-long","tag-joanna-l-mountain","tag-joanna-mountain","tag-katarzyna-bryc","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39073","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=39073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}