One-Drop Rule

Mark Christian

Arguably, one of the most permanent racialized ideas in the history of the United States has been the insistence on human classification. Regardless of its biological and scientific invalidity, the notion of “race” is an endemic feature in social relations and continues to artificially separate individuals who have more in common, racially speaking, than they have differences. Personifying the illogical reality of a racialized social construct is a particular term— the one-drop rule —in which anyone known to have even “one drop” of African ancestry was deemed or classified as African American. The social engineering of this term is inextricably interwoven within ...

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