The One-Drop Rule

Racial segregation was a major component of life in the southern United States. In the years prior to the civil war all the way to the middle of the 20^th century, African Americans have been severely segregated against. This was not just an underground movement created by ‘rebel’ groups, the government agencies and officials supported and often created racial divides. Some went as far as to make these discriminatory, racially motivated constructions a legally binding law; The One-Drop Rule is one such example. The One Drop rule is a “historically colloquial term in the United States that holds that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry, however small or invisible, cannot be considered White”¹. While horrific, this concept was an integral aspect of life in the South.

            In many of Mark Twain’s stories he discusses the major race issues in the South, Pudd’nhead Wilson speaks indirectly on The One-Drop Rule. The main female character Roxy, explains that while her heritage contains more white ancesters than African- American, she is considered ‘black’. “To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts of her that made her a negro” (Twain 64). Roxy’s son Chambers also falls within this category, even though his father is completely Caucasian and his mother only one sixteenth black, he is considered black. “Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too was a slave and, by a fiction of law and custom, a negro. He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrade…” (Twain 64). In the diagram below you can see a possible demonstration of Roxy and Chambers ancestry.

            In this diagram the pink demonstrates an individual that is fully ‘black’, the blue shows someone that is fully Caucasian and the purple is a mixed race individual. As a black man procreating with a white woman was punishable by death the most likely situation is that all the women in Roxy’s family had children with white men. So for this diagram the circles are female and squares male. This means the last person to be fully ‘Black’ in their lineage would be Roxy’s great-great-grandmother. Yet that one ancestor determines their entire race.

            Historically, many slave owners would rape their female slaves, sometimes their motives were to ‘create’ more workers and other times it was for sheer cruelty². Psychologically these ‘fathers’ had to consider their child ‘tainted’ in order to be able to emotionally distance themselves from them, thus allowing them to abuse and torture them with forced labor. This continuous ‘breeding’ of the slaves created a mixed culture where many individuals physically did not look to be black.   

             In the early 20th century many states passed legislation banning inter-racial marriage using The One-Drop Rule as it's foundation. These laws stated that is you had 'one drop' of blood in you that was not of white ancestry then you could not marry someone that was fully caucasian. Thankfully in 1967 the Supreme Court in the case Loving v. Virginia found any laws banning inter-racial marriage unconstitutional and prohibited the use of The One-Drop Rule.  

  

References

      1.     http://blackhistory.com/content/63228/one-drop-rule

      2.     https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/empire/1890s.html

     Image: http://artbybond.blogspot.com/2009/04/one-drop-rule.html

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