Comment #1

LiLSpeedy — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 08:01:43 GMT

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Original Blog Entry: Who Is Black?

LiLSpeedy — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 08:22:39 GMT

There are those among us that like to categorize blacks using the obscene one-drop rule. In their mind one is not considered Black if they are of mixed races. But in reality no race in America is 100%. Where did this one-drop rule originate?

One-drop rule

Since the late nineteenth century, the South used a colloquial term, the one-drop rule, to classify as black a person of any known African ancestry. This practice of hypodescent was not put into law until the early twentieth century. Legally the definition varied from state to state. Racial definition was more flexible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before the American Civil War. For instance, President Thomas Jefferson held persons who were legally white (less than 25% black) according to Virginia law at the time, but, because they were born to slave mothers, they were born into slavery, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662.

Outside of the US, some other countries have adopted the one-drop rule, but the definition of who is black and the extent to which the one-drop rule applies varies greatly from country to country.

The one-drop rule may have originated as a means of increasing the number of black slaves and was maintained as an attempt to keep the white race pure. One of the results of the one-drop rule was the uniting of the African-American community. Some of the most prominent abolitionists and civil-rights activists of the nineteenth century were multiracial, such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Purvis, and James Mercer Langston. They advocated equality for all.

Genetics is what determines race. Virtually everyone has a pigment called melanin that determines skin color. However, it is a person's genes that determine how much melanin is actually presented in skin cells. Those with a lot of melanin in their cells will have very dark skin and those with little will have light colored skin. It is the genetic code in human DNA that also determines their facial features, hair color, etc. It is asinine to try and categorize a person using percentages. To do so would demonstrate a lack of intelligence as well as a very limited science background.

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