One-drop rule

The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood")[1][2] is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.[3]

This concept became codified into the law of some U.S. states in the early 20th century.[4] It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness"[5] that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which had included the hardening of slavery as a racial caste system and later segregation. Before the rule was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision of 1967, it was used to prevent interracial marriages and in general to deny rights and equal opportunities and uphold white supremacy.

  1. ^ Davis, F. James. Frontline."Who's black. One nation's definition". Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  2. ^ Dworkin, Shari L. The Society Pages. "Race, Sexuality, and the 'One Drop Rule': More Thoughts about Interracial Couples and Marriage". Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  3. ^ Conrad P. Kottak, "What is hypodescent?" Archived 14 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine, Human Diversity and "Race", Cultural Anthropology, Online Learning, McGraw Hill. Retrieved 21 April 2010.
  4. ^ Sharfstein, Daniel (2007). "Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860". Minnesota Law Review.
  5. ^ Cooper, Erica Faye (2008). One 'speck' of imperfection—Invisible blackness and the one -drop rule: An interdisciplinary approach to examining Plessy v. Ferguson and Jane Doe v. State of Louisiana (Thesis). ProQuest 193505748.

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