The devil and the one drop rule: racial categories, African Americans, and the U.S. census.

• Author: Hickman, Christine B.

Introduction

1. Treatment of Mixed-Race People: The Early Legal

   Record

   1. The First African Americans and the First

      Race Mixing

   2. Mulattoes: Black by Law

   3. A Study in Contrasts: Exclusion of Mulattoes

      from De Crevecoeur's "New Race of Men"

   4. The Census and the Mulatto Category, 1850-1910

2. Proposals for a Multiracial Category: Critiquing

   the Discourse

   1. The One Drop Rule: The Misapprehension of

      the Historical Context

      1. Misperceptions of the One Drop Rule:

         Gotanda's Theories of Racial Purity,

         Objectivity and Subordination in

         Recognition

      2. The One Drop Rule and "Buying into the

         System of Racial Domination"

      3. Lessons from the South African

         Experience

   2. Rebiologizing Race

      1. The Collapse of Biological Race

      2. Proposals for a Broad Genetically Based

         Multiracial Category

      3. The Proposal for a Majoritarian

         Classification System

      4. Biological Passing for Black

      5. The Harlem Renaissance and Cultural

      6. Race, Biology and the Law: The Racial Credential

         Cases

   3. The Dangers of Redefining Black: Distancing.

      1. Finding Solutions for the Lighter Part of the

         Race

      2. Sanitizing our Attacks on Racism

      3. Conclusion

3. From the One Drop Rule to the Discourse on

   Race

   1. There is Race

   2. Race as a Metaphor

   3. Essential vs. Cultural Concepts of Race

   4. Race as a Choice

   1. Appiah, Lee, and the Choice of Our Racial

      Identity

   2. Choice Today

   3. The Choice of Our Race by Daily

      Actions

4. A Proposal for the Census

   1. The Broad, Blood-based Multiracial

      Category

   2. Counting Loving's Children on the Race Line

      1. Multiracial Status as Race

      2. The False Choice Between Race and

         Multirace

      3. The Multiracial Category on the "Race"

         Line: Guaranteed Inaccuracy

   3. A Line of Their Own.

      Conclusion

      "My grandmother was her master's daughter; and my mother was her master's daughter; and I was my master's son; so you see I han't got but one-eighth of the blood. Now, admitting it's right to make a slave of a full black rigger, I want to ask gentlemen acquainted with business, whether because I owe a shilling, I ought to be made to pay a dollar?"

      -- Lewis Clarke, fugitive slave, 1842(1)

      "If the old saying `one drop of Black blood makes you Black' were reversed to say one drop of White blood makes you White, would the biracials still be seeking a separate classification?"

      -- Letter to the Editor, Ebony Magazine, November 1995(2)

      INTRODUCTION

      For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the "one drop rule," which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of "hypodescent"(3) and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race but a large part of the history of America.

      Now as the millennium approaches, social forces require some rethinking of this important, old rule. Plessy v. Ferguson,(4) which affirmed the right of states to mandate "equal but separate accommodations" for White and "colored" train passengers, is a century old. Brown v. Board of Education,(5) which effectively overruled Plessy and instituted the end of de jure discrimination, was decided over a generation ago. Nearly thirty years have passed since the Supreme Court, in Loving v. virginia,(6) invalidated any prohibition against interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Since the 1967 Loving decision, the number of interracial marriages has nearly quadrupled.(7) This trend has even extended to Black-White couples,(8) whose intermarriage rate has traditionally lagged behind that of other racial and ethnic groups.(9) For the first time, opinion polls indicate that more Americans approve of interracial marriage than disapprove.(10) The number of children born to parents of different races has increased dramatically,(11) and some of the offspring of these interracial marriages have assumed prominent roles in American popular culture.(12)

      Some of these children of interracial marriages are now arguing cogently for a reappraisal of hypodescent. Their movement(13) has sprung to public consciousness with the recent bid by multiracial organizations, over the objections of civil rights groups,(14) to put a "multiracial" category in the "race" section of the forms that will be used when the next decennial census is conducted in the year 2000. This proposal has immense practical importance because the census provides the nation with its main source of racial and ethnic data. For example, implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 all depend on racial and ethnic statistics culled from the census, and the addition of a new category could change the count of the existing racial groups and alter the way these laws are implemented.(15)

      One wing of this new multiracial movement argues that a new "multiracial box" should be made available for the growing number of children of interracial marriages. Another wing of this movement, in books and law review articles, suggests that the addition of this category should be part of a wholesale redefinition of the racial identities of most Americans. The thinking of both wings of the multiracial movement is informed by their rejection of hypodescent and the "one drop rule." To date, the participants in this discourse have emphasized the racist notions of White racial purity that gave rise to the one drop rule. They have concluded that the effects of this old rule are mainly evil and that the consequences of abandoning it will be mainly good. Based in part on such reasoning, the more activist wing of this movement has proposed several neat, symmetrical, and radical redefinitions of African-American racial identity. Under one such proposed definition, any Black person with White or Native American ancestry would become "multiracial."(16) Under another, any Black person with a "majority of [his] origins in the original peoples of Europe" would become European American.(17)

      My purpose in this article is to critique this discourse. I agree that the one drop rule had its origins in racist notions of White purity. However, many scholars have misunderstood the way that this rule has shaped the Black experience in America, and this misunderstanding has distorted their proposals for a new multiracial category on the census forms. As we examine the one drop rule and its importance in the current discourse, we should recall the famous exchange between Faust and Goethe's Devil:

      Faust: Say at least, who you are?

      Mephistopheles: I am part of that power which ever wills evil yet

      ever accomplishes good.(18)

      So it was with the one drop rule. The Devil fashioned it out of racism, malice, greed, lust, and ignorance, but in so doing he also accomplished good: His rule created the African-American race as we know it today, and while this race has its origins in the peoples of three continents and its members can look very different from one another, over the centuries the Devil's one drop rule united this race as a people in the fight against slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.

      However valid the multiracial viewpoint may be in some contexts, it has tended to overlook the good the Devil did in using the rule of hypodescent in order to forge a people. This paper therefore is intended to bring a more balanced view of the one drop rule to the discourse surrounding the proposed new multiracial category and to question the proposals to invent neat new racial classifications to replace the categories that the social history of the United States has created over the last four hundred years. This article concludes with a proposal for counting the new generations of biracial Americans' on the census in a way that will not ignore the social history of the African-American race.

      I noted above that the one drop rule has shaped countless lives, and as "place markers" in the discussion, here, I will use incidents from two such lives: those of my great uncles, one documented in the 1944 volume of the Pacific Reporter, the other chronicled in a 1956 issue of Time Magazine.

      My Uncle Clarence Jones was a Los Angeles lawyer who practiced law in the days when Black lawyers could not join county bar associations or be considered for government employment but were limited to providing probate, family law, and real estate services to an exclusively Black clientele. Reversing the norm, Uncle Clarence worked as Black but his rather fair complexion allowed him and his family to live in a neighborhood without reference to their race. Despite the ambiguity of their light-brown skin, the Jones family -- in the eyes of their White neighbors -- could not really have been Black: Uncle Clarence was a hardworking lawyer who had graduated from Ohio State Law School in the teens, his three daughters were all attending U.C.L.A., and his wife's skin was nearly white. So for years, he lived with his family in a home that he loved in a pretty neighborhood.

      The home, however, was subject to a restrictive covenant that prohibited occupancy by any "persons other than the Caucasian race."(19) Refusing to acknowledge the validity of this racist restriction, Uncle Clarence had ignored the covenant and moved his family in. Some years later, when his eldest daughter married, she decided on a home wedding. And as the various guests arrived, the neighbors were forced to see what their social training had not let them see before -- the Jones family was undeniably Black. A lawsuit was brought to enforce the restrictive covenant and to force the Jones family out of its home.

      When he received the summons, Uncle Clarence made two decisions. First, he would fight this eviction to the highest court in the state. Second, he would not deny his...