In An Election Defined By Race, How Do We Define Race?

In An Election Defined By Race, How Do We Define Race?

FiveThirtyEight
2016-11-06

Farai Chideya, Senior Writer

When I was younger, I had an idea for a satire in which a group of rogue genealogists would get blood samples from racially incendiary white politicians. They’d run DNA tests on them to see if they were part black, then publish the information on those who were.

This was way back before you could order DNA tests online and watch television shows about celebrities seeing their results. I don’t write satire, and wisely abandoned the idea. But the broader concept of bloodlines and our construction of political identity popped into my head during a recent discussion about the election.

Donald Trump’s supporters, 90 percent of whom are white, have measurably less positive feelings about African-Americans and several other groups than other Republicans or the public at large. But how many of his voters are “black,” not by our current categorization but under the “one-drop rule” saying that no matter how white they looked, anyone with a drop of black blood was categorized as such? Variations of the one-drop rule persisted in law until 1983 in Louisiana, after a mixed-race woman unsuccessfully sued to become legally white, and legislators overturned the law in response to the fractious case. Some argue that the one-drop rule had already been eroded by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case on interracial marriage, now the subject of a new movie

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