Mixed Race Studies

‘One-drop rule’ persists: Biracials viewed as members of their lower-status parent group Harvard Gazette Harvard Science: Science and Engineering at Harvard University 2010-12-09 Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer Arnold K. Ho (right), a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard, and James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard, researched […]

Appropriating the One-Drop Rule: Family Guy on Reparations Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture Volume 7: Open Issue (2010) Jason Jones University of Washington The one-drop rule, or the notion that one drop of African blood renders a person black, once played a vital role in the expansion of the nineteenth-century American slave […]

Navigating Racial Boundaries: The One-Drop Rule and Mixed-Race Jamaicans in South Florida Florida International University 2010 343 pages Sharon E. Placide A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparitive Sociology Like many West Indians, mixed-race Jamaican immigrants enter the United States with fluid notions about […]

Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule Backintyme Publishing 2005 542 pages Paperback ISBN: 9780939479238 Frank W. Sweet Every Year, 35,000 Black-Born Youngsters Redefine Themselves as White About 1/3 of “White” Americans have detectable African DNA Genealogists were the first to learn that America’s color line leaks. Black […]

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 […]

The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages Sociological Forum Volume 20, Number 1 (March, 2005) pages 35-67 Print ISSN: 0884-8971, Online ISSN: 1573-7861 DOI: 10.1007/s11206-005-1897-0 Wendy D. Roth, Assistant Professor of Sociology University of British Columbia, Canada The identity choices of multiracial individuals with Black heritage have traditionally been […]

The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term for a belief among some people in the United States that a person with any trace of African ancestry is black. See also: hypodescent. Wikipedia For more information, see Winthrop D. Jordan’s (Paul Spickard, ed.) “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States,” in […]

The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France Law and History Review Volume 27, Number 3 Fall 2009 University of Illinois Jennifer Heuer, Associate Professor Department of History University of Massachusetts at Amherst In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story.  Charles […]

Winthrop Jordan, one of the most honored of US historians, wrote about racial mixing a generation before there was a field of mixed race studies. At the time of his death, he left an unfinished manuscript: “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States.” For this inaugural issue of the JCMRS, Jordan’s former student Paul Spickard, himself a foundational scholar of multiracial studies from the first wave of scholarship in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has edited Jordan’s final article.

12 Beautiful Portraits Of Black Identity Challenging the “One-Drop” Rule PolicyMic New York, New York 2014-02-06 Amirah Mercer What are you?” they’d ask, head tilted and eyes squinted. “Black,” I’d reply. “No … but like, what else are you? I know it’s not all black.” So went a typical interrogation by my peers as a […]