Hyperdescent
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hyperdescent is the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his more socially dominant parent.
Hyperdescent is the opposite of hypodescent (the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed race ancestry by assigning the child the race of the more socially subordinate parent). Both hyperdescent and hypodescent vary from other methods of determining lineage such as patrilineality and matrilineality.
[edit] Examples of hyperdescent
- Brazil is an example of a country with a history of European slavery of black Africans somewhat analogous to that of the United States of America. However, while for black Americans, hypodescent became the dominant rule for determining lineage, in Brazil, the practice of hyperdescent was followed. Thomas e. Skidmore, in Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought explains that many of Brazilian elite encouraged a national process of "whitening" through miscegenation. Skidmore writes, "In fact, miscegenation did not arouse the instinctive opposition of the white elite in Brazil. On the contrary, it was a well—recognized (and tacitly condoned) process by which a few mixed bloods (almost invariably light mulattoes) had risen to the top of the social and political hierarchy.” p. 55*
- The Roman Empire could perhaps be credited with popularizing the concept of hyperdescent. In the Roman army, civil offices in outposts and in many other opportunities - almost exclusively outside of Rome proper of course - ethnicity and even "race" as we think of it today were of far less concern than loyalty to the Roman way of life and Rome itself. At the peak of Roman expansion, Roman military members were overwhelmingly non-Latins, as was the "Roman" population at large (as opposed to the population of the city of Rome). The empire simply could not operate without empowering local, native bureaucrats (and genuine civic and military leaders), becoming so increasingly multicultural that it not only spread an Arabic pastoral instrument, the bagpipe, all the way to Scotland, it eventually moved its administrative capital to the Near East, paving the way for the bifurcation of the empire into what later became the Greek-dominated Byzantine Empire and the Germanic-dominated Holy Roman Empire.
References
- Christine B. Hickman, "The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S. Census," Michigan Law Review, Vol: 95, March, 1997, 1175-1176.
- Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NY: New York University Press: 1996)
- Thomas e. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke University press, 1993
