One-drop rule

To revisit the history and significance of the one-drop rule of hypodescent, the central point of contention for multiracial critics and the improper name of a principle of mobilization within the centuries-long black freedom struggle. 

In an earlier note, I remarked upon the reduction in multiracial discourse of hypodescent to the infamous one-drop rule. The point not to... 

The One Drop Rule, which declares everyone with any black blood to be a member of the black race, is a myth which could be equally misapplied in other racial directions. One Drop is false and devoid of merit. 

The most virulent opposition to the notion that people of mixed race can carve out an identity that is neither black nor white is now coming from Afro-Americans. Mixed-ethnicity children who do not have a black parent are not subject to the same One Drop rule, but for those with a black parent, there is often intense pressure to cleave to the black, and accusations of racial betrayal if the individual chooses not to choose to be only black. Surely it is a significant irony that, one century after Euro-Americans were trying to write mulattos out of existence, the repression is now coming from Afro-essentialists. It seems we are witnessing another instance of the construction of the racial out of the denial of the interracial. (33)... 

In place of an analysis that would not only account for the emergence of the one-drop rule in the consolidation of racial slavery but also address its complexity, its multivalent character, its various articulations and appropriations, what we find, more or less, is a loquacious moral denunciation sometimes clear and unequivocal ( the one-drop rule is simply stupid and anyone adhering to it is a racist ), sometimes oblique ( the one-drop rule, is archaic and its function in the present is merely the residuum... 

The Hawaiian Alternative to the One Drop Rule. In Naomi Zack... 

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