Hypodescent
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Hypodescent was the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed-race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent. Because Caucasians were dominant in the Western world, mixed-race children in slave societies were most commonly assigned to their non-Caucasian parent. In some colonial societies, however, a third class of people of color developed, especially in French and Spanish colonies. People of color were often educated, and went on to own property, including, in some instances, slaves.[citation needed]
But when two non-Caucasian parents have a child, the child is typically not assigned to either race.[citation needed] For instance, although mulattos and Blasians are both half Black, only the former are generally perceived as Black, while Blasians such as Tiger Woods are not forced to self-identify as Black. The opposite of hypodescent is hyperdescent.
The United States practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began its development in the colonies, but developed more during the late 18th and 19th century with first, the hardening of slavery as a racial caste, and second, the growth of numbers of slaves in the South. By the 18th century, in Virginia, travelers already noted the high rate of mixed-race people, and many shades of color found among slaves, especially in families such as Thomas Jefferson's, where both he and his father-in-law had fathered numerous children by slave women.
The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie of the Civil War-era about the hypocrisy of everyone's recognizing white men's children among the slaves in every household but her own. Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of the South as well, including the way white men used slave women and left their children enslaved.
In the US, when slavery became a legal lifelong condition, children took on the status of the mother. In that context, many mixed-race slave children had white fathers who were planters or their sons, or overseers, and mothers who were enslaved. Men took advantage of the power relationship. Sometimes the fathers freed the children and/or their mothers, or provided education or apprenticeship, or even settled property on them, but many were left enslaved. See Hickman, 1175-1176.
Research by historians and genealogists has shown that most African Americans free in Virginia and nearby states in the colonial period were from relationships between white women, indentured servant or free, and African or African-American men, indentured servant, free or slave. This reflected the fluid nature of relationships among the working classes before slave rules were made so strict. Because the mothers were white, the children were free born. Many free African Americans migrated to frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and then further west. Such families sometimes settled in insular groups and were the origin of some isolated settlements that have long claimed Indian or Portuguese ancestry.[1]
In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent was used for the "one drop rule," meaning that if a person had one drop of black blood, he was considered to be black. See one-drop theory. New laws arose long after the end of slavery, such as the Virginia’s 1924 Act for the "Preservation of Racial Integrity,", which defined as white a person with "no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian." This may have been in reaction to general social tensions of the post-WWI years, and to increasing agitation by African Americans to regain civil rights.
In the summer of 1919, racial riots erupted in numerous northern and midwestern industrial cities, where black populations had increased markedly in the first decade of the Great Migration out of the South for better opportunities. In addition, by 1924 there would have been many "white" people in Virginia who would have had some African and/or Native American ancestry. Some of their ancestors would have married "white" and successfully passed into the majority community, while others may have married more deeply into the African-American community. At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing there and in other southern states to overturn segregation and regain civil rights lost to Jim Crow laws in the South, including disfranchisement for the majority of the black community. Established in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in filing lawsuits to overturn such provisions.
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[edit] Anti-miscegenation marriage laws
By the early 1940s, of the thirty U.S. states that had anti-miscegenation laws, seven states (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia) had adopted the one-drop theory for rules prohibiting interracial marriages. (Finkelman, "The Color of Law," 955, note 96). This was part of a continuing hardening of racial lines after southern states imposed legal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans at the turn of the century.
Other states applied the hypodescent rule without carrying it to the "one-drop" extreme, using instead a blood quantum standard. For example, Utah's anti-miscegenation law prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a negro, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Mongolian, or member of "the Malay race" (here referring to Filipinos). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people who were not "white persons." Utah passed its anti-miscegenation law in 1888 as part of an anti-polygamy marriage law when the state legislature was dominated by non-Mormons. The law was repealed in 1963.
[edit] Other examples of application
- In the United States, hypodescent was used to define the race of children of mixed-race couples where one of the parents was classified as "black" or either was considered to have any trace of African descent. That practice seems to be diminishing; on the other hand, some members of the African-American community now insist that all mixed-race individuals should be identified as black if they have any African-American ancestry. In the US, people less consistently applied hypodescent in intermarriage between whites and Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc.).
[edit] Evolution
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and Great Britain, children with one "black" parent/grandparent/great-grandparent have been consistently classified as "black" instead of "mixed race" or "white" or something else (402-403). He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to do this. See Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 401-02.
[edit] References in culture
In the novel Pudd'n'head Wilson, by Mark Twain, the character of Roxy is deemed "Negro", even though she could pass for white. This characteristic is passed on (mistakenly) to her son Chambers.
The US late 19th century author Charles Chesnutt, of mixed European and African heritage, wrote numerous stories set in the post-Civil War South about the social issues related to the choices of people of color.
In the musical Show Boat, a white man in love with a mulatto woman is accused by the sheriff of violating the state's anti-miscegenation laws. The white man promptly pricks the woman's finger with a knife, swallows a drop of blood, then tells the sheriff "I'm no white man -- I've got negro blood in me." The sheriff lets him off.
[edit] References
- Finkelman, "The Color of Law," Northwestern University Law Review, Spring, 1992, Vol. 87, 955, note 96.
- 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.
- Thomas e. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke University press, 1993)
- Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NY: New York University Press: 1996)
- Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 401-02.
