Mixed Race Studies

Ideologies of racial purity and pollution are as old as America, and so is interracial mixing. Yet the one-drop rule did not, as many have suggested, make all mixed-race people black. From the beginning, African Americans assimilated into white communities across the South. Often, becoming white did not require the deception normally associated with racial […]

Race and the “One Drop Rule” in the Post-Reconstruction South Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners 2009-03-17 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 term “passing.” Most of […]

Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s 2015 Survey of Multiracial Adults, we find declining evidence of hypo- and hyperdescent at work in the United States today, some support for a dominance structure that upends conventional expectations about a Black one-drop rule, and a rising regime of co-descent. In addition, we explore how regimes of mixed-race classification vary by racial ancestry combination, gender, generation of multiraciality, and the time period in which multiracial respondents or their mixed-race ancestors were born.

America’s “one-drop rule” historically identified any individual with a single black ancestor as black, and therefore inferior. And while most of us these days know that “racial purity” is as grounded in reality as mermaids and unicorns, the “one-drop” idea continues. Harvard University psychologists found that mixed-race individuals are still perceived as belonging to the racial group of their “lower-status” parent. Imagine the world classifying Barack Obama as a white man as a result of his white heritage? It would never happen.

For most of the history of the United States, the racial categorization of mixed black/white persons was illogical and often contradictory (Sollors, “Introduction” 6). Generally speaking, people with any percentage of black ancestry were most commonly classified simply as black (according to the “one-drop rule” imposed by whites), and, at times, recognized as a separate subgroup within this category.

“(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race” sets out to explore the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference, particularly among those for whom the legacy of the one-drop rule perceptibly lingers. Featuring the perspectives of 60 contributors representing 25 countries and combining candid narratives with simple yet striking portraiture, this book provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness.

This study adds to the growing body of literature on multiracial identity by illustrating the importance of reflected appraisals in shaping racial identity. Importantly, these findings also show how reflected appraisals are fundamentally shaped by the one-drop rule (for black-white Americans in particular).

In “Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom,” A.B. Wilkinson adds to a growing field of scholarship questioning the genesis of ideas and production of race and social differences in the trans-Atlantic world. Wilkinson’s detailed examination looks at the ways mixed-heritage people—or individuals with at least two ancestors from predominantly African, European, and Indigenous backgrounds—shaped legal and cultural understandings of interracial mixture in British North America.

This article examines monoracialization through historical processes of Mexican–American identity formations. Over the twentieth century, this shifted from White to Brown, but without any acknowledgment of African ancestry.

This is the problem with using biracial identity as an excuse to be racially neutral. Doing so often results in ignoring both black suffering and the racist political, economic, and social structures which produce black suffering.