Mixed Race Studies

Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860

Minnesota Law Review
Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007)
pages 592-656

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

“It ain’t no lie, it’s a natural fact, / You could have been colored without being so black…”
—Sung by deck hands, Auburn, Alabama, 1915–161

“They are our enemies; we marry them.”
—African Proverb

In 1819 a Scotsman named James Flint crossed the Atlantic Ocean, made his way from New York to Pittsburgh, sailed down the Ohio, and settled for eighteen months in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just opposite Louisville, Kentucky. His letters home described everything from native trees and shrubs to the “taciturnity” of American speech, “adapted to business more than to intellectual enjoyment.” Soon after arriving in Jeffersonville, Flint recounted the time when a “negro man and a white woman came before the squire of a neighbouring township, for the purpose of being married.” The official refused, citing a prohibition on “all sexual intercourse between white and coloured people, under a penalty for each offence.” Then he thought the better of it. He “suggested, that if the woman could be qualified to swear that there was black blood in her, the law would not apply. The hint was taken,” Flint wrote, “and the lancet was immediately applied to the Negro’s arm. The loving bride drank the blood, made the necessary oath, and his honour joined their hands, to the great satisfaction of all parties.”…

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 “passing”; whites knew that certain people were different and let them cross the color line anyway. These communities were not islands of racial tolerance. They could be as committed to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy as anywhere else, and so could their newest members—it was one of the things that made them white. The history of the color line is one in which people have lived quite comfortably with contradiction.

This continual process of “racial migration” upends some of the most basic assumptions about race in the United States. When Southern colonies, and later states, restricted the civil rights and livelihoods of African Americans, such measures did not simply widen the gap between white and black. Rather, these obstacles to life and liberty pushed people across the color line into whiteness. At the same time, courts and communities made it increasingly difficult to reclassify people as black after they had been living as white. With an exponentially increasing number of people who were vulnerable to reclassification, the stability of Southern communities depended on what was in essence a massive grandfathering of white people with African ancestry. This racial amnesty was accomplished through court decisions that discouraged overzealous policing of the color line; through scientific theories and popular beliefs that African ancestry would always be visible on people’s bodies; and most importantly, through small-town Southern traditions of acceptance, secrecy, and denial.

This Article reconstructs the meaning and purpose of the one-drop rule, setting it within a larger history of racial migration. Most legal scholars casually describe the rule as the American regime of race without considering its history. Other scholars have attempted to trace the rule’s origin to the emergence of the cotton economy in the 1830s, the sectional crisis of the 1850s, or Reconstruction. Still others emphasize that most Southern state legislatures did not formally adopt one-drop racial definitions until the 1910s and 1920s.  Like an aging movie star, the rule depends on soft focus to maintain its allure. Amid the vagaries of origin, few suggest anything but that people followed the one-drop rule, as they would any other bright-line rule. But the reality of racial migration reveals that the one-drop rule did not keep whites racially pure; rather, it enabled them to believe that they were.

The Article proceeds in two parts. Part I examines the one drop rule in colonial North America and the early American republic.  Theories of innate racial difference transmitted through “blood” existed well before Jamestown, leading influential scholars to interpret almost reflexively early laws defining race and slave status to be synonymous with the one-drop rule. But the rhetoric of purity was always undermined by the realities of European, African, and Native American mixture and of a permeable color line. To the extent that legislators and judges showed confidence in the salience of race, the assumption of an impassable racial divide actually made it easier for some people of African descent to become white.

Southern courts and communities did not strictly define the color line because there was little reason to go beyond slavery’s proxy of racial boundaries, and an inflexible racial regime only threatened to interfere with the smooth functioning of a slave society. The one-drop rule’s transformation from ideological current to legal bright line and presumed social reality is in essence a story of freedom. Part II examines the thirty years preceding the Civil War. The prospect of freedom for people of African descent hastened the one-drop rule’s rise as whites attempted to preserve social hierarchies and property relations in the absence of slavery. While legal scholars identify this period as a time when tightening definitions fixed the status of mixedrace people as black, I contend that rather than establish or enforce a one-drop rule, efforts to tighten the color line pushed many mixed-race people into whiteness, sometimes with the full knowledge of their communities and often in spite of court rulings or publicity. Even as this racial migration continued, however, the rule’s growing ideological prevalence in the free North would presage its eventual codification in the South after slavery’s demise. During this period of ascendancy, the rule’s ostensible opponents played an important part in propagating it. Abolitionists seldom questioned white racial purity, instead relying on the one-drop rule as a symbol of Southern cruelty and of the threats that slavery posed to Northern whites. One might argue that today’s legal scholars depend on the rule in much the same way….

The practical consequences of this history lie in the fact that every area of the law that engages with race has a foundation in the one-drop rule. The rule acts as a metric for defining group membership, allocating race-based entitlements, awarding child custody, determining the existence of discrimination and monitoring the progress of remedial measures, and theorizing racial and other group identities. If the one-drop rule functioned differently from what its unambiguous terms suggest—if, as I argue, it expressed only a superficial commitment to racial purity, all the while fostering racial migration—then we have to rethink what race means. The magnitude of racial migration is beginning to emerge through the field of population genetics, with scientists estimating that millions of Americans who identify as white have African ancestors within recent historic memory. As people identifying as white begin to claim minority status in college admissions and employment settings, African “blood” is losing its ability to define race, determine civil rights violations, and fashion remedies. The already formidable tasks of measuring disparate racial impact or minority vote dilution risk becoming impossible when group boundaries blur.

Although the history of racial migration and the one-drop rule appears to threaten civil rights policies, ultimately it may strengthen them by forcing definitions of minority status to shift from blood to a shared history of discrimination. “African blood” is not unique to blacks. Centuries of racial migration reveal that more than anything, what fixed African Americans as a discrete group was the fact that they were discriminated against. In 1940 W. E.  B. Du Bois wrote, “I recognize [black] quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” Many people of African descent could and did avoid racial oppression by becoming white. When we regard the legal category of “African American” through the lens of a shared history of discrimination, the tidy parallel that “color-blind constitutionalism” draws between race-based discrimination and remediation falters. While discrimination against African Americans was premised on innate blood-borne inferiority and the preservation of racial purity, measures designed to benefit them are much more inherently remedial than many, including the Supreme Court, have been willing to suppose. Remedial measures acknowledge a specific history, not blood.

Today we inhabit a legal regime that is the accretion of centuries of myth and amnesia. Unexamined and unchallenged, the one-drop rule remains a fixture of the civil rights landscape. The rule’s stark language carries the appearance of unassailable authority. Its sheer inhumanity has made it an easy foil for people committed to uprooting racism, so there has been little reason to examine its history. But assuming the rule’s efficacy has only continued to spread the idea of white racial purity without undermining it. Just beyond the one-drop rule’s rhetoric is a reality of mixture and migration. It is hidden in plain sight…

Read the entire article here.

How Mixed-Race Politics Entered the United States: Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Appeal’

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 56, Number 1, 2010 (Nos. 218 O.S.)
pages 71-104
DOI: 10.1353/esq.0.0043

Robert Fanuzzi, Assistant Chair and Associate Professor of English
St. Johns University, Queens, New York

For scholars of the colonial and early national United States, it is difficult if not impossible to retell the story of social egalitarianism and political liberty without recounting the social, political, and legal codes governing the practice of miscegenation. Under both the colonial British regime and the post-Revolutionary political order of the United States, these laws and customs operated hand in hand with the equally determinate laws of slavery and citizenship, helping to decide who was a democratic subject and who was not.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, prohibitions against mixed-race marriages and extramarital unions along with their mixed-race offspring helped to create a new, putatively classless caste system, which equated the dignity of free labor and property holding with a pure British ancestry and the indignity of coercive labor with an African ancestry. In doing so, these laws paved the way for a historic argument for civic equality that rendered the American colonist the genetic bearer of English liberty.  In the new American republic, miscegenation laws functioned even more transparently as citizenship decrees, stipulating the whiteness of politically enfranchised subjects and, often capriciously, the blackness of the enslaved or disenfranchised. The logical outcome of these laws, the “one drop of blood” provision, was a testament to the determination of the privileged caste to maintain an artificially scarce supply of citizens by keeping their legal, economic, and political assets from their mixed-race descendants.

Miscegenation laws and regulations played an equally formative role in the civic culture of the antebellum era, when social prejudice against race mixing helped to police civil relations and to foreclose the scope of civic activism…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife” Interrogating Race and Self-Identity in Loving v. Virginia

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 8, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 67-80
DOI: 10.1080/10999940500516983

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

The article reexamines the Loving V. Virginia case by focusing on their tri-racial community of Central Point, Virginia and Mildred Loving‘s self identity as an Indian woman. Loving’s self identity was informed by the twentieth-century politics of racial purity, which resulted in a community-wide denial of African ancestry. I argue that Mildred Loving’s marriage to a white man was not an affirmation of Black/white intermarriage, but rather adhered to the code of racial purity as defined by the state of Virginia, a legacy which continues in the post-Civil Rights era.

The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, has garnered far less scholarly attention than its 1954 predecessor. Brown v. the Board of Education, which overturned legalized segregation. What little appeared in the way of scholarship has focused on analysis the history the history of anti-miscegenation legislation, the events which led up to the case presentation before the nine justices, the legal precedents regarding the arguments presented before the court, and the unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Until recently with the exception of an article which appeared in Ebony magazine several months after the Supreme Court decision, writers have given little attention to the personal lives of the actual plaintiffs now enshrined in American history, as “the couple that rocked the courts.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Ambiguity and the Ethics of Reading Race and Lynching in James W. Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1912)

Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS)
Volume 10 (2009)
ISSN: 1861-6127

Carmen Dexl
University of Erlangen

James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) discusses the causes, conditions, and implications of passing in a segregated society. The essay argues that the novel’s aesthetics of ambiguity conveys and reflects an ambivalence towards the concept of race. Using theories of Geoffrey Galt Harpham and John Guillory, it elaborates an ethics of reading race and lynching in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

…Being of mixed-race heritage and blurring the black/white binary, the Ex-Colored Man as a passing figure personifies this “category crisis.” As the living proof of the instability—and hence unreliability—of the category race, the Ex-Colored Man is necessarily ambivalent towards the ontology of racial categories. Apart from his intention to remain anonymous, his and all the other characters’ namelessness throughout the novel further denote a “sense of rootlessness” (Andrews xix) in a constantly changing modern society that is paradoxically firmly rooted in exactly these unreliable conceptions of race. His moral dilemma and contradictory attitudes towards himself and society result from being at once an insider and beneficiary as well as an outsider and critical observer of that very social system…

Read the entire article here.

Understanding Race: The Evolution of the Meaning of Race in American Law and the Impact of DNA Technology on its Meaning in the Future

Albany Law Review
Volume 72, Issue 4 (2009)
Pages 1113-1143

William Q. Lowe
Albany Law School

Race has played a decisive role in nearly all aspects of American society, yet its meaning in various contexts remains unclear.  Throughout history, individuals have struggled to define “race” as it pertains to science, society, and the law in particular. Although race became a part of the English language in the mid-sixteenth century, it did not take on its modern definition until the early nineteenth century. Scientific, social, and political interpretations of race have gone through an evolutionary process as well. After over two-hundred years of trying to understand its meaning, “[t]he word ‘race’ defies precise definition in American law.” Countless competing theories exist as to the definition and meaning of race, and the inability for one to earn universal support poses a significant problem to the American legal system. Despite the fact that numerous statutes have been enacted to prohibit racial discrimination throughout all aspects of American society, “the law has provided no consistent definition of race and no logical way to distinguish members of different races from one another.”

It has been argued that “race” was first used as a tool to classify individuals during the age of colonial exploration; however, this use was maintained for centuries. Today, classifications based on race are still present in America, and have been found to be permissible in some instances, such as when used to remedy instances of past discrimination. With the predominant role race continues to play in American society, to ensure that all are treated fairly under the law, it is imperative that a single definition of race is applied universally to all Americans. It is foreseeable that advances in science, particularly in DNA testing, will allow for a uniform method of determining one’s race.

This note will discuss the current lack of a settled definition of race in American Law, and the potential role DNA technology can play in remedying the problems associated with it. Part II of this Note will explore the concept of race by examining various definitions of race and how they have evolved into the modern definition. This section will additionally look at the historical understanding of the meaning of race, and the recent divergence from traditional thought. Part III of this Note will analyze the role of race throughout American legal history. This portion of the Note will address historical notions of race in America, the origin of the need to define race, and the treatment of race by the legislature and the courts. Part IV of this Note will discuss current DNA technology and the potential impact it may have of on modern concepts of race, particularly with regard to the law. It is foreseeable that advances in DNA technology will allow scientists to identify and classify individuals through an analysis of their genetic information.

The first legislative attempt at defining race took place in Virginia, nearly one-hundred years before America gained its independence from England, and it was enacted in response to the “uncertain status” of children born with parents of mixed race. The statute was concerned only with the status of mulatto children who were born to a black woman, and stated that the race of the mother would be used to determine the race of the child. This policy reflected the biological definition of race, as the skin color of the individual in question was determinative. This statute was in contrast to that of English law, where inheritance followed the paternal line. Ultimately, under the Virginia statute, children born of a free white man and his slave could potentially be considered to be slaves themselves.

The presence of many free blacks residing in Virginia quickly made this statute unworkable, because it was not easy to determine if a child’s black ancestry came from his or her mother’s side or his or her father’s side. The possibility that a white woman could have a child with a black man, whether he was a slave or a free man, resulted in mulatto children being exiled from Virginia, and ultimately led to the creation of “one-drop rules.” Such rules held that an individual would be classified as black, despite the fact that his or her genetic makeup was primarily white…

Subsequently, Virginia, as well as other states, passed similar laws aimed at the prevention of interracial marriages. Pursuant to such laws, any white person who married a non-white would be exiled from Virginia. The language used in the statute is striking, as interracial marriage is referred to as “that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion.” This serves as yet another example of the hierarchical system of classification based on race at this time in American history.

Later statutes based on the “one-drop rule” departed from the 1662 Virginia statute in the sense that they did not take a “physical appearance approach.” Such “[f]ormula-based definitions of race” became increasingly popular in the South, and Booker T. Washington provided an accurate description of what they entailed: “[I]f a person is known to have one percent of African blood in his veins, he ceases to be a white man. The ninety-nine percent of Caucasian blood does not weigh by the side of the one-percent of African blood. . . . The person is a Negro every time.” In practice, most states with race-based statutes formed under the “one-drop rule” held that individuals who had at least one black grandparent were legally black. It should be noted, however, that “as the likelihood that more biracial people could be classified as white… the laws became more restrictive… finally culminating in the one-drop rule…

Read the entire article here.

Identity problems in biracial youth

The Leader
University of Minnesota College of Education & Human Development
Fall 2004

Charlote M. Nitardy, Early Childhood Assessment Program Coordinator
Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota

While there is little data on the number of biracial children in the US, there is a consensus among demographers that we are experiencing a “biracial baby boom.” According to the 1990 U.S. Census, there were approximately 800,000 interracial families with about one million biracial children in the country (Herring, 1995). Biracial youth have a very unique problem that most of their peers never experience: racial identity. These biracial youth have difficulties identifying who they are in our society.

Historically, children of mixed parentage were identified with the parent of color; if one parent was black, then the child was considered black. While such simplification may have been adequate in the past, studies are showing that more and more biracial children in today’s society are experiencing identity problems…

Read the entire article here.

What Does “Black” And “White” Look Like Anyway?

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2008-10-24

Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Occidental College

Gwen Sharp, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Nevada State College

These two photos—one of Barack Obama as an adult and one of a young Obama and his Grandfather, Stanley Dunham—are a great opportunity to think a little bit about the social construction of race.  Comments from both me and Gwen after the pics.

Lisa:  Obama, to my eye, is the spitting image of his grandfather. Yet, we see Obama and Dunham as separate races, members of two categories we see as diametrically opposed, even biologically distinct.

Gwen: I tried a little experiment in class. I put up a photo of adult Obama and I had my students make a list of what characteristics made him identifiably Black, in their view. Every one of them put on their list his nose, lips, and hair, and several made comments about his ears or just that “the combination of all his facial features” was “clearly” Black…

Photo from Mangas Verdes

Read the entire article here.

The Census and the Social Construction of Race

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2010-03-29

Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Occidental College

Social and biological scientists agree that race and ethicity are social constructions, not biological categories.  The U.S. government, nonetheless, has an official position on what categories are “real.”  You can find them on the U.S. Census…

…Alvaro V. asked us to talk a little bit about the Census.  So, here are some highlights from the hour-long lecture I give in my Race and Ethnicity course…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Chicks Chat Interview with Steve Riley, Creator of Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #147 – Steven F. Riley
When: Wednesday, 2010-04-07 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Steven F. Riley

Mike Peden (aka The Sports Brain, or ‘TSB’) is a journalist whose film “What Are You? A Dialogue on Mixed Race” screened at the 2nd Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. He will be interviewing Steven F. Riley (aka SilverSpringSteve) whose blog www.MixedRaceStudies.org has over 1,000 posts on the study of multiracialism.

Listen to the episode here or download it to your computer here.

‘Passing’ Across The Color Line In The Jazz Age

National Public Radio
All Things Considered: You Must Read This
2010-04-07

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. Her debut novel is “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky.”

There are novels that are enjoyable to read and others that say something about the world.  And sometimes there are novels that are both.  Passing by Nella Larsen is one of those books…

Read the entire essay here.
Listen to the essay here.