{"id":778,"date":"2009-09-20T02:00:27","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T02:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=778"},"modified":"2012-03-13T19:38:48","modified_gmt":"2012-03-13T19:38:48","slug":"the-one-drop-rule-the-one-hate-rule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=778","title":{"rendered":"The one drop rule & the one hate rule"},"content":{"rendered":"

The one drop rule & the one hate rule<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

D\u00e6dalus, Winter 2005<\/p>\n

David A. Hollinger<\/a><\/strong>, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
\nUniversity of California at Berkeley<\/em><\/p>\n

Two portentous practices within the public discussion of \u2018race\u2019 in the United States since the late 1960s are rarely analyzed together. One is the method by which we decide which individuals are \u2018black.\u2019 The other is our habit of conflating the mistreatment of blacks with that of nonblack minorities. Both practices compress a great range of phenomena into ostensibly manageable containers.\u00a0 Both function to keep the concept of race current amid mounting pressures that threaten to render it anachronistic.\u00a0 Both invite reassessment at the start of the twenty first century.\u00a0 The prevailing criterion for deciding who is black is of course the principle of hypodescent. This \u2018one drop rule\u2019 has meant that anyone with a visually discernable trace of African, or what used to be called \u2018Negro,\u2019 ancestry is, simply, black. \u00a0Comparativists have long noted the peculiar ordinance this mixture denying principle has exercised over the history of the United States.<\/strong> Although it no longer has the legal status it held in many states during the Jim Crow era, this principle was reinforced in the civil rights era as a basis for antidiscrimination remedies.<\/p>\n

Today it remains in place as a formidable convention in many settings and dominates debates about the categories appropriate for the federal census. The movement for recognition of \u2018mixed race\u2019 identity has made some headway, including for people with a fraction of African ancestry, but most governments, private agencies, educational institutions, and advocacy organizations that classify and count people by ethnoracial categories at all continue to perpetuate hypodescent racialization when they talk about African Americans.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This practice makes the most sense when antidiscrimination remedies are in view. If discrimination has proceeded on the basis of the one drop rule, so too should antidiscrimination remedies. But even when antidiscrimination remedies are not at issue, most Americans of all colors think about African American identity in either\/or terms: you are black, or you are not. It is common for people to say, \u201cI\u2019m half Irish and half Jewish\u201d without one\u2019s listener translating the declaration into terms other than the speaker\u2019s. One can even boast, \u201cI\u2019m one-eighth Cherokee\u201d without causing the listener to quarrel with that fraction or to doubt that the speaker is basically a white person. But those who say things like \u201cI\u2019m half Irish and half black\u201d are generally understood really to be black, and \u201cI\u2019m one-eighth African American\u201d is not part of the genealogical boasting that infuses American popular culture.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second portentous practice is the treating of all victims of white racism alike, regardless of how differently this racism has affected African Americans, Latinos, Indians, and Asian Americans, to say nothing of the subdivisions within each of these communities of descent.\u00a0 When federal agencies developed affirmative action programs in the late 1960s, they identified Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Indians along with African Americans as eligible groups. \u00a0As John Skrentny has shown, entitlements for nonblack groups were predicated on the assumption that such groups were like blacks in their social experience.\u00a0 Other disadvantaged groups, including women, impoverished Anglo whites, impoverished European ethnics, and gays and lesbians, were less successful in gaining entitlements during the socalled minority rights revolution because they were not perceived as victims of white racism. Yet the officials who designed entitlement programs for the purposes of remedying white racism often homogenized those descent groups colloquially coded as black, brown, red, and yellow. There was a good reason for this. White racism was real, had expressed itself against every one of these color-coded groups, and was a problem in American life that demanded correction…<\/p>\n

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

The one drop rule & the one hate rule D\u00e6dalus, Winter 2005 David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History University of California at Berkeley Two portentous practices within the public discussion of \u2018race\u2019 in the United States since the late 1960s are rarely analyzed together. One is the method by which we decide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,20],"tags":[112,166,56,82],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-david-a-hollinger","tag-david-hollinger","tag-hypodescent","tag-one-drop-rule"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","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=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}