Posted: Tue 21 Oct 2008 17:26 Post subject: How far back does the one drop rule go?
I understand the basics of the one drop rule. "If you have one drop of black blood, you are black".
However there has to be a cut off point and that's what I'm asking about. When does the one drop rule stop? We know if you go back far enough we are all from Africa but if the ODR was applied to that everyone would be called black. So there must be an even more recent cut off point.
Say for instance someone has a black grandfather in the year 1450 AD and the rest of his ancestors were white. This person would certainly look white to everyone, does the ODR apply to this person? So where does it stop? 1/16? 1/32?
Posted: Tue 21 Oct 2008 20:27 Post subject: Re: How far back does the one drop rule go?
abu isabella wrote:
When does the one drop rule stop?
Until about 1910 it varied greatly among different regions of the nation. Most states used 1/8; if one great-grand parent was mixed and the other seven were White, then you were White. Several states used 1/4; if one grandparent was mixed and the other three were White then you were White. Two states used 1/2; if one parent was mixed and the other was White then you were White. One state had a law that if you were rich and owned slaves then you were White by definition, no matter who your parents were.
Then, in 1910, just about every state switched to a law that any drop of African ancestry, no matter how far back, made you Black. It sounds odd today because nowadays we know that our species evolved in Africa and left Africa to colonize the planet a mere 70 kya. But in 1910 most scientists sincerely believed that White folks evolved from White European apes, Black folks evolved from Black African apes, Chinese folks evolved from yellow Chinese apes, ... etc. And so, a "true White person" (in their eyes) had no African ancestry, ever.
Posted: Tue 21 Oct 2008 23:29 Post subject: Re: Thanks!
abu isabella wrote:
Thanks for the info.
You're welcome.
I should add that ever since the civil rights movement of 1955-65, state and federal legislatures gradually abandoned "racial" classification laws and left the problem to the courts.
Since about 1987, courts in the U.S. have rejected the one-drop rule of "racial" classification that became law around 1910. Nowadays they also reject the old fractional definitions that were popular in the 1800s.
Instead, they now are moving more and more towards a "community membership" view of "racial" classification. If you are accepted by local African-American political leadership, the courts will rule you Black, no matter what you look like, no matter where your ancestors came from. Conversely, if you are rejected by local African-American political leadership, the courts will rule you not-Black, no matter what you look like, no matter where your ancestors came from.
Posted: Wed 22 Oct 2008 22:08 Post subject: Re: How far back does the one drop rule go?
fwsweet wrote:
abu isabella wrote:
When does the one drop rule stop?
Until about 1910 it varied greatly among different regions of the nation. Most states used 1/8; if one great-grand parent was mixed and the other seven were White, then you were White. Several states used 1/4; if one grandparent was mixed and the other three were White then you were White. Two states used 1/2; if one parent was mixed and the other was White then you were White. One state had a law that if you were rich and owned slaves then you were White by definition, no matter who your parents were.
Then, in 1910, just about every state switched to a law that any drop of African ancestry, no matter how far back, made you Black. It sounds odd today because nowadays we know that our species evolved in Africa and left Africa to colonize the planet a mere 70 kya. But in 1910 most scientists sincerely believed that White folks evolved from White European apes, Black folks evolved from Black African apes, Chinese folks evolved from yellow Chinese apes, ... etc. And so, a "true White person" (in their eyes) had no African ancestry, ever.
This is interesting! That's why I like this forum. It's fortunate to have a historian who has knowledge about these topics and someone who always quotes their sources!
Does anyone think that U.S.A., as a melting-pot country, we will all be one blended race? (obviously not in our life time). If so, what do you predict the time frame to be?
Does anyone think that U.S.A., as a melting-pot country, we will all be one blended race? (obviously not in our life time). If so, what do you predict the time frame to be?
In order for most Americans to become one big blended single unique race most people in this country would have to breed interracially and no longer breed with people of their own race and I don't ever see a day where most people in this country are no longer physically attracted to members of their own race and decide to only date/marry outside of their racial group. I don't see same race couples ever becoming a minority in this country or the world for that matter.
Does anyone think that U.S.A., as a melting-pot country, we will all be one blended race? (obviously not in our life time). If so, what do you predict the time frame to be?
In order for most Americans to become one big blended single unique race most people in this country would have to breed interracially and no longer breed with people of their own race and I don't ever see a day where most people in this country are no longer physically attracted to members of their own race and decide to only date/marry outside of their racial group. I don't see same race couples ever becoming a minority in this country or the world for that matter.
True and as we become more diverse in the U.S., both ancestrally and culturally, interracial marriage will decline.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Tue 24 Feb 2009 21:27 Post subject:
G-Man wrote:
Ramzinski wrote:
Quote:
Does anyone think that U.S.A., as a melting-pot country, we will all be one blended race? (obviously not in our life time). If so, what do you predict the time frame to be?
In order for most Americans to become one big blended single unique race most people in this country would have to breed interracially and no longer breed with people of their own race and I don't ever see a day where most people in this country are no longer physically attracted to members of their own race and decide to only date/marry outside of their racial group. I don't see same race couples ever becoming a minority in this country or the world for that matter.
True and as we become more diverse in the U.S., both ancestrally and culturally, interracial marriage will decline.
This has happened in other nations in the past to the point where a new ethnicity was form (or a common one) but in my reading I have never seen this happen but by force or where one group of men nearly annihilated the other and just "took their women" as it were...then again in many of these examples the people shared a major overlap in phenotype (Various mixtures Germanics and Celts and Romans who formed modern England, France, Spain, etc) no one laments in their mirror they are not pure "Saxon" or pure "Visagoth". Maybe some wish they were pure Roman. I can site the same thing in China with the Han...in other nations, even Madagascar or India there has not been complete admixture yet...(meaning a so tight a range in phenotypical expression people can not infer ancestry (correctly or incorrectly)...there are very light Southeast Asian looking Malagasy...and very dark Bantu looking ones as well...
America would, in my estimation would need a halt in immigration and hundreds even well over a thousand years to merge into one "ethnicity"...my opinion.
I posted elsewhere on this site that about 25% of black males live with nonblack women (mostly white)...and I speculated that a good %, if not a majority have kids.
If this keeps up for 3 or 4 hundred years (as most biracials of this type tend to identify as black and marry blacks)...you could have an absorption of what we consider "African Americans" or the worst case a caste of people who don't look very phenotypically different from whites, but are somehow marked as a "lower caste"...not sure how that would work though and still identify culturally as "black" even after the phenotypical overlap is so great it is hard to tell who is who...in my opinion that would be horrid.
America would, in my estimation would need a halt in immigration and hundreds even well over a thousand years to merge into one "ethnicity"...my opinion.
I posted elsewhere on this site that about 25% of black males live with nonblack women (mostly white)...and I speculated that a good %, if not a majority have kids.
If this keeps up for 3 or 4 hundred years (as most biracials of this type tend to identify as black and marry blacks)...you could have an absorption of what we consider "African Americans" or the worst case a caste of people who don't look very phenotypically different from whites, but are somehow marked as a "lower caste"...not sure how that would work though and still identify culturally as "black" even after the phenotypical overlap is so great it is hard to tell who is who...in my opinion that would be horrid.
Think of all the times you've heard that we'd never have a Black president in this lifetime. :|If Obama doesn't do anything while he's in office, one thing he's taught us all is that anything is possible! And I second that this would be beyond horrible. It irks the living hell out of me now how much people love and copy AA culture yet try to make us look bad.
It irks the living hell out of me now how much people love and copy AA culture yet try to make us look bad.
1. Please do not use first person plural. See rule 2.4.
2. Please do not change the subject. Start a new thread (in one of the political advocacy forums) if you want to talk about Obama or what irks you. This thread is about the historical origins of the ODR.
3. This forum is for scholarly discussion of history please keep your personal feelings out of it. See rule 3.1.
Look, you have already been formally warned once today. You might want to take a break and cool down before posting again. Otherwise you are likely to get yourself suspended.
Dragon Horse wrote:
If this keeps up for 3 or 4 hundred years (as most biracials of this type tend to identify as black and marry blacks)...you could have an absorption of what we consider "African Americans" or the worst case a caste of people who don't look very phenotypically different from whites, but are somehow marked as a "lower caste"...not sure how that would work though and still identify culturally as "black" even after the phenotypical overlap is so great it is hard to tell who is who
The process of genetic assimilation that you describe has happened many times in history: 17th-century Iberia, 18th-century Mexico, 19th-century Argentina and Chile. Without exception, every time that it has happened so far, the descendants consider themselves White and there are no castes (def: endogamous group).
Dragon Horse wrote:
...in my opinion that would be horrid.
First warning. Please do not express value judgements in the Technical and Scholarly forums. It is a violation of rule 1.3. This forum is for scholarly discussion of history. To participate, you must keep your personal feelings out of it.
Last edited by fwsweet on Wed 25 Feb 2009 00:04; edited 4 times in total
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 25 Feb 2009 00:37 Post subject:
Dragon Horse wrote:
...in my opinion that would be horrid.
fwsweet wrote:
First warning. Please do not express value judgements in the Technical and Scholarly forums. It is a violation of rule 1.3. This forum is for scholarly discussion of history. To participate, you must keep your personal feelings out of it.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 25 Feb 2009 00:53 Post subject:
Dragon Horse wrote:
If this keeps up for 3 or 4 hundred years (as most biracials of this type tend to identify as black and marry blacks)...you could have an absorption of what we consider "African Americans" or the worst case a caste of people who don't look very phenotypically different from whites, but are somehow marked as a "lower caste"...not sure how that would work though and still identify culturally as "black" even after the phenotypical overlap is so great it is hard to tell who is who
fwsweet wrote:
The process of genetic assimilation that you describe has happened many times in history: 17th-century Iberia, 18th-century Mexico, 19th-century Argentina and Chile. Without exception, every time that it has happened so far, the descendants consider themselves White and there are no castes (def: endogamous group).
Iberia, yes.
Mexico? there are still Indio who are descendant from Mayan (and other)...who are not "assimilated" in that they are not considered "white"...but they are indigenous or were you talking about the former black slaves in Mexico? Actually I would argue that the differentiation between "white" and "other" that still exist in Mexico shows a lack of a complete assimilation into one ethnicity. Indio, at least according to the CIA Factbook (I know not exactly accurate) make up ~30% of the pop. That's pretty high.
What I was talking about was more to the point of assimilation where there are no known differences in nationality as far as "race or ethnic".
Iberia, yes I would agree. Mexico I would not.
When I made this statement I was thinking about a nation-state of people with little to no minorities, basically a state that is the same name as the ethnicity. England is predominately ethnic English. China is predominately ethnic Han.
An example would be the English in England (I am not going to talk about the Scots, Welsh, Irish that also make up the UK). English no longer distinguish between any sub-ethnic components that are known to contribute to the population.
Everyone who is English is just English. There might be some difference in Catholic and Protestant, but the English are an ethnicity. There are no sub-groupings like Celtic-English or Saxon-English, Jute-English, etc. There are no real visible divisions in the population either. Even redhair (at least in this country often associated with Irish and I was told by some Englishmen I knew that it is assumed a redhead is Irish in England even now) is not necessarily a marker of "non-English"...Queen Elizabeth I was a redhead.
In China there are minority groups (mostly on the peripheral), but the Han have absorbed and expanded out from the Hua-xia group that sprouted along the Yellow River some thousands of years ago and it is known clearly that Han males often intermarried with "barbarian females" in the South of the nation and even today there is a slight difference in phenotype as you move North to South but Chinese consider all Han to be Han, although there are regional cultural difference in my extensive reading about Chinese society there is no talk of "racial" or "inter-ethnic" differences among Han Chinese based on ancestry or appearance.
The vast majority of Japanese are now just Japanese. The reality is Japanese less than 2,000 years ago were made up of various tribes (some whose names have been forgotten in history) not all of who were related to each other...today but for the handful of Ainu on "reservations in the North" and the Koreans brought in before WWII most everyone else, about 98% of the population, (not counting U.S. military) is just "Japanese". My wife's clan name, Sakurai (Cherry Blossom Well), originated from a Chinese family that immigrated to Japan over a 1,000 years ago, but today no one thinks when they hear her name "Chinese". They are just Japanese. I talked to my father-in-law about this and he said "No...we are "pure Japanese"...not Chinese..." then he changed the subject. His mother told me it was a lie and they did not come from China at all...but had always been in Japan.
I imagine it would take America some extended isolation and many centuries before we become like the English, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
[I edited my post]
Last edited by Dragon Horse on Wed 25 Feb 2009 01:13; edited 1 time in total
Mexico? there are still Indio who are descendant from Mayan (and other)...who are not "assimilated in that they are considered "white"...but they are indigenous or were you talking the former black slaves in Mexico?
Sorry. I was talking only about the assimilation of African slaves. Of course, Native Americans are still an endogamous enclave in Mexico. Some Native Americans, as I discovered once on the road to Cuernavaca, do not even speak Spanish.
No, I was talking only about Africans. Even on the east coast, near Vera Cruz, where some people look quite dark (around 7-15 percent SSA), they still consider themselves (and are considered) as simply Mexicans.
Oddly, at the "Colorism Exposed" conference that Mary Lee and I attended in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, the presenter of a paper on that topic told us that the audiences who are most hostile to accepting Afro admixture in Mexicans are the Mexicans themselves. Far from maintaining a Black self-identity, they deny even trivial admixture (unlike, say, Brazilians or Puerto Ricans).
Last edited by fwsweet on Wed 25 Feb 2009 01:18; edited 4 times in total
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 25 Feb 2009 01:14 Post subject:
fwsweet wrote:
Dragon Horse wrote:
Mexico? there are still Indio who are descendant from Mayan (and other)...who are not "assimilated in that they are considered "white"...but they are indigenous or were you talking the former black slaves in Mexico?
Sorry. I was talking only about the assimilation of African slaves. Of course, Native Americans are still an endogamous enclave in Mexico. Some Native Americans, as I discovered once on the road to Cuernavaca, do not even speak Spanish.
No, I was talking only about Africans. Even on the east coast, near Vera Cruz, where many people look very dark indeed (around 7 percent SSA), they still consider themselves (and are considered) as simply Mexicans.
Yeah that is what I thought, good example though, especially in regard to this board.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 25 Feb 2009 15:39 Post subject:
Dragon Horse wrote:
G-Man wrote:
Ramzinski wrote:
Quote:
Does anyone think that U.S.A., as a melting-pot country, we will all be one blended race? (obviously not in our life time). If so, what do you predict the time frame to be?
In order for most Americans to become one big blended single unique race most people in this country would have to breed interracially and no longer breed with people of their own race and I don't ever see a day where most people in this country are no longer physically attracted to members of their own race and decide to only date/marry outside of their racial group. I don't see same race couples ever becoming a minority in this country or the world for that matter.
True and as we become more diverse in the U.S., both ancestrally and culturally, interracial marriage will decline.
This has happened in other nations in the past to the point where a new ethnicity was form (or a common one) but in my reading I have never seen this happen but by force or where one group of men nearly annihilated the other and just "took their women" as it were...then again in many of these examples the people shared a major overlap in phenotype (Various mixtures Germanics and Celts and Romans who formed modern England, France, Spain, etc) no one laments in their mirror they are not pure "Saxon" or pure "Visagoth". Maybe some wish they were pure Roman. I can site the same thing in China with the Han...in other nations, even Madagascar or India there has not been complete admixture yet...(meaning a so tight a range in phenotypical expression people can not infer ancestry (correctly or incorrectly)...there are very light Southeast Asian looking Malagasy...and very dark Bantu looking ones as well...
America would, in my estimation would need a halt in immigration and hundreds even well over a thousand years to merge into one "ethnicity"...my opinion.
I posted elsewhere on this site that about 25% of black males live with nonblack women (mostly white)...and I speculated that a good %, if not a majority have kids.
If this keeps up for 3 or 4 hundred years (as most biracials of this type tend to identify as black and marry blacks)...you could have an absorption of what we consider "African Americans" or the worst case a caste of people who don't look very phenotypically different from whites, but are somehow marked as a "lower caste"...not sure how that would work though and still identify culturally as "black" even after the phenotypical overlap is so great it is hard to tell who is who...in my opinion that would be horrid.
I need to correct this, as I misrepresented the stat.
About 25% of blacks cohabitation are with people of other races, about 85% of them being male, and about half of those interracial cohabitation are with whites.
Sorry, I just wanted to be accurate. I posted another study on this on this site, but here is another was that is slightly similar but I believe the numbers a little less than the first study.
This has happened in other nations in the past to the point where a new ethnicity was form (or a common one) but in my reading I have never seen this happen but by force or where one group of men nearly annihilated the other and just "took their women" as it were...then again in many of these examples the people shared a major overlap in phenotype (Various mixtures Germanics and Celts and Romans who formed modern England, France, Spain, etc) no one laments in their mirror they are not pure "Saxon" or pure "Visagoth". Maybe some wish they were pure Roman. I can site the same thing in China with the Han...in other nations, even Madagascar or India there has not been complete admixture yet...(meaning a so tight a range in phenotypical expression people can not infer ancestry (correctly or incorrectly)...there are very light Southeast Asian looking Malagasy...and very dark Bantu looking ones as well...
America would, in my estimation would need a halt in immigration and hundreds even well over a thousand years to merge into one "ethnicity"...my opinion.
[Old cartoon: The Irish resemble Negroes]
According to some articles on this forum there is no need to go very far back in time for these processes as there used to be Germanic Black Dutch and Black Irish in the US, once considered ‘not white.’ The Black Irish were judged as ‘Not Teutonic, not Alpine; but of another race’ and ‘resembling Negroes.’
How did they become white, phenotypically speaking?
This remark also sparked my interest because I wonder how the European aristocracy (1500-1789) which claimed blue (=black) blood became white, after 1789, while they first kept themselves black and coloured through intermarriage with colour.
The answer to me is the racist onslaught, the spreading of grotesque ideas that blacks are in fact ugly, evil, disease ridden, closer to apes, smelly and prone to sudden extinction because of all their horrible defects.
This might lead people to take a different view of their black ancestors, and repaint their portraits with beige paint or have a whitened copy made. And not to couple with dark skinned persons, but ‘breed’ themselves into whiteness.
But these things are in my view only of interest to a ruling elite-class. Because it’s the colour and ethnicity of its ruling class that decides if a nation is white or black.
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I can site the same thing in China with the Han...in other nations, even Madagascar or India there has not been complete admixture yet...(meaning a so tight a range in phenotypical expression people can not infer ancestry (correctly or incorrectly)...there are very light Southeast Asian looking Malagasy...and very dark Bantu looking ones as well...
