Mixed Race Studies

Is It Time to Do Away With The ‘One-Drop’ Rule? Clutch 2013-07-10 Britni Danielle Los Angeles Conversations about race in America can lead to never-ending discussions, hurt feelings, and sometimes even breakthroughs. Blame it on our complicated past of slavery, racism, and legalized prejudice, but even approaching a frank discussion about race in this country […]

Dr. Yaba Blay Explores ‘One-Drop’ Rule [VIDEO] NewsOne: For Black America 2012-12-14 Jeff Mays Remember when President Barack Obama won in 2008 and pundits started asking if the United States was post-racial because we had a Black man in the White House?   Well, people like Dr. Yaba Blay (pictured) knew better.   Blay, an […]

Infant Perceptions of Mixed-Race Faces: An Exploration of the Hypodescent Rule in 8.5 Month-Old Infants Pitzer College, Claremont, California Senior Theses Spring 2013 42 pages Sophie Beiers Studies have shown that adults often categorize mixed-race individuals of White and non-White descent as members of the non-White racial group, an effect said to be reminiscent of […]

“One-Drop: Fact, Fiction, or Fate?” by Dr. Yaba Blay, April 13th at 7pm in Stirn Auditorium Amherst College Stirn Auditorium, Mead Art Museum Amherst, Massachusetts Saturday, 2013-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time) What exactly is Blackness and what does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who determines who is […]

Racial identity and the law: miscegenation and the “one drop rule” 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 “one drop rule” of race refers to the belief that […]

The One Drop Rule: How Black Are You? Crème Magazine 2012-02-29 Jessica Thorpe “Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud!”  The James Brown classic shed light on the revolution of how descendants of the African Diaspora would begin to self-identify.  Replacing racial identification terms such as “negro” and “colored,” the use of the word […]

Don Lemon: Legacy of ‘one drop’ rule inspires search for family history Cable News Network (CNN) In America: You define America. What defines you? 2012-01-29 Don Lemon, Anchor CNN Newsroom This is  final installment of  a three-part series about the (1)ne Drop Project. Read Don Lemon’s column, “It only takes one drop,” and Yaba Blay’s […]

The one-drop aesthetic: How literary formalism reinvented race in the United States Harvard University 2009 233 pages Publication Number: AAT 3365201 ISBN: 9781109254617 Kevin Brian Birmingham A dissertation presented by Kevin Brian Birmingham to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of […]

The One Drop Rule: How Black Is “Black?” Psychology Today Blogs: In the Eye of the Beholder: The science of social perception 2011-04-07 Jason Plaks, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology University of Toronto The perception of race is subjective. Many biracial people publicly identify themselves with only one race (for example, either black or white, […]

The “One Drop Rule” 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 “race” as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the […]