The One Drop Rule
Some years ago, during my time as a police officer, I was dispatched to a address for an auto theft. When I knocked on the door a man of obvious mixed racial ancestry answered the door. While I was taking the complaint I happened to observe a photo on a table. It was my complainant posed with another male who may have been his brother, an older woman of European ancestry, and an older male of African ancestry.
I then drove into the station to finish off the report and have the stolen car teletyped. That way, any cop running an inquiry on the license plate would have it come back as stolen. While I was there, I stuck my head in the Lieutenant’s office to complain. On the report, I was only given four choices for the race of the victim: “W” for white, “B” for black, “I” for Native American, and “A” for Asian.
“Why don’t we have a box for people of mixed racial ancestry?” I asked him.
“What race is the victim?” he asked.
“His father is black, and his mother is white,” I answered. The Lieutenant stared at me for a moment before answering.
“Then he’s black,” he answered.
Whether he knew it or not, my boss had invoked the “one drop rule.”
Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I went to the computer and ran his driving status. The Division of Motor Vehicles had his race listed as “W” on his driver license. The civil servant sitting behind the counter at the DMV didn’t really care what race you were as long as you had one of the four boxes checked.
One night I arrested a 19-year-old male on warrants. I transported him to the city jail, and as we were waiting in line for him to be booked, I grabbed an arrest report and started to fill It out. When I got to the four boxes for race, I asked him what race he was.
“I’m an American of mixed racial ancestry,” he replied with, I think, a note of pride in his voice.
That’s when I stood next to him and showed him my report. He was still handcuffed. City jail policy required me to keep him handcuffed until he was booked even though he seemed like a decent kid and had been very cooperative up to that point.
“I have these four boxes,” I said, indicating the four boxes with my finger, “and I can check only one box. Which box do I check?”
He sighed heavily and said dejectedly, “Check the ‘B.’”
Once again, his spirit was crushed by the “one drop rule.”
What is the “one drop rule?” Simply put, it’s a cultural belief, unique to the United States, that if you have one African ancestor, you are considered black, and it manifested itself often during my police career in the forms and reports I wrote every day.
To be fair, I haven’t filed a police report in 15 years. Maybe they’ve updated the boxes. Or maybe not.
I had always thought that the “one drop rule” was a relic of the slave era, but in researching this, I found that that wasn’t necessarily the case. One article I read cited a 1662 Virginia law as invoking the rule, but upon reading that law, it doesn’t define what makes one a “Negro.” It reads:
“WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by an Englishman upon any negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shallbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall commit ffornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.”
This law was passed as a result of the verdict in the Elizabeth Key case in which Elizabeth, who was the daughter of an enslaved African woman and her English owner, won her freedom by citing an English law that decreed that the condition of the child followed the condition of the father. Elizabeth’s father was free, therefore Elizabeth was free.
By doubling the fines, there appears to have been enough interracial coupling occurring to draw the attention of the House of Burgesses.
A 1693 law read that, “It is hereby enacted, for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negro, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever…”
The same law read that any free white woman who had an illegitimate child with any “negro or mulatto” would pay a fine, and the child would be indentured for a period of 30 years. If the offending woman was unable to pay the fine, she would be indentured for a period of five years.
This same law read that if any African slave were set free, they were to be transported out of Virginia.
A 1705 law further clarified who may be made a slave. Any person imported into the colony from a non-Christian country not in amity with the crown, and themselves not a Christian, was to be considered a slave for life. No indentures for these people.
These laws were a reaction to Bacon’s Rebellion which started in 1676. Led by Nathaniel Bacon, himself a wealthy elite, an army formed consisting of free people, indentured servants, and African slaves. At issue was the colony’s refusal to deal with the intermittent troubles with Native Americans on the western frontier, and the aristocratic government of the colony in Jamestown. In the words of Howard Zinn, it was both antiaristocratic and anti-Indian. Governor Berkeley appealed to England for help and a couple of thousand British soldiers were sent over to restore order. Nathaniel Bacon died during the conflict, other leaders were rounded up and hanged. By 1677 it was mostly over.
The year 1676 had been a bad year. Drought conditions ruined the corn crop, the main food supply, and the tobacco crop, the main source of income for the farmers.
Some historians believe that Bacon’s Rebellion was the start of American racism as we know it today. Before then, the notion of classifying people according to skin tone was not used. There is some evidence to bear that out. Prior to the rebellion, language in the laws used terms such as “Englishmen,” “Negros,” “Mulattos,” and “Indians.” Afterwards, the term “white” was substituted for “Englishmen.”
After the rebellion, more rights were bestowed upon the European indentured class than the African slaves. The 1705 law mandated that “servants” would be fed a “wholesome and competent diet,” and prohibited “immoderate correction.” A “christian white servant” could not be whipped naked without an order from a Justice of the Peace. “Servant” meant an indentured person. An indentured servant of color could be whipped naked without permission. None of those protections were extended to slaves.
Indentured servants, not slaves, could complain to the Justice of the Peace about their treatment, and the Justice could call the master to answer those charges.
These historians argue this was done by design to control the population of the colony. They conquered by dividing, and their arguments are not without merit. So, the “one drop rule” grew out of the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, and it grew out of slavery. The condition of the child followed the status of the mother.
The much written about and researched Sally Hemings, slave of Thomas Jefferson, was, in reality, only one-quarter African, but because her mother had been a slave, she was a slave. Some of her descendants though, married, and lived with all the rights and privileges of a person of European descent. Other descendants married and lived with all the disadvantages of a person of African descent.
I came across this story about Fredrick Douglass, who was a mixed-race individual, but his African heritage condemned him to a life of slavery until he escaped. In 1848 Douglass was on board a Great Lakes boat enroute to a convention in Buffalo, New York. His fellow passengers entreated him to give a speech, and he complied. A passenger of European descent who heard the speech told other passengers that he disagreed with some points in the speech, but said he would not “discuss this question with a nigger.”
Word got back to Douglass about this man’s statement. Douglass sent word back to the man that he was “much mistaken in supposing me to be a nigger, that I was but a half Negro – that my Dear Father was as white as himself, and if he could not condescend to reply to the Negro blood, to reply to the European blood.”
Samuel Clemens published his satirical novel Pudd’nhead Wilson -under his pseudonym of Mark Twain – in 1894. It’s about a slave woman, Roxy, who is 1/16th African descent, but is still a slave. Her son is of 1/32nd African descent but is still a slave as well. Fearful that she and her son will be sold down the river, she switches her infant son with the infant son of her owner. Both boys are the same age and similar in appearance. Her son grows up to be a spoiled aristocrat while the son of her owner grows up a slave.
However, the “one drop rule” became a social norm, almost universally accepted by everyone in the United States as evidenced by my former Lieutenant’s remark. He was a man who I would never, ever accuse of being a racist.
My father tried invoking the “one drop rule” once. My dad broke his left kneecap when he was a teenager. When the break healed, he couldn’t bend his left leg at the knee. He told me a story that happened in the 1950’s when our family was living in Memphis, Tennessee. He took the bus, and because of his leg, he had to sit on the aisle on the right side of the bus so he could extend his leg into the aisle. No such seat was available except in the “Colored” section in the back of the bus, so he sat back there. The bus driver noticed it, stopped the bus, walked to the back, and ordered my dad to move.
“I’m 1/16th black,” my dad told the driver. The bus driver didn’t buy it, and my dad had to move.
When Barack Obama was running for president of the United States, there was some mention made in press stories of his Irish ancestry, but when the election results came in, pats on the back were made by some of this country’s citizens that the country’s first black president had been elected.
A 2010 Harvard University study found that most people do not see biracial people as equal members of both parents’ groups, but as a member of the lowest status group of either parent. In other words, others tended to identify children of a European descended person and African descended person as black.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. Occasionally, at my job, descriptions of people will be sent out to all security by other security officers for one reason or another. Those descriptions never contain a racial descriptor except for one time a couple of weeks ago when one of my colleagues described someone as “uh…Caucasian.”
We have no problem picking out people based solely on clothing, hair, and approximate age descriptions.
The United States Census Bureau has added additional boxes for people of more than one race to check. The census bureau reported that in 2010 nine million people self-identified as multiracial. In 2020, that number ballooned to 33.8 million, a 276% increase.
A video popped up in my Twitter…oops…X feed recently. It was a clip from the CBS news program “Face the Nation.” The host, Margaret Brennan, asked Democratic Congresswoman Summer Lee this question.
“This was a historic nomination of Vice-President Harris, is the first black, first South Asian nominee of a major party. She’s chosen not to talk about the historic nature of that. Do you think she should?”
Congresswoman Lee answered, in part, “I think it speaks for itself. I think there is zero chance that folks all across America do not recognize that she would be the first black woman, the first South Asian woman and person to be not just our party’s nominee, but hopefully, our president. So, to talk about it is almost a filler.”
Have we moved beyond the “one drop rule?” I don’t think so. It is so ingrained in our culture, it will take some time to completely go away, if it ever does.
I used a multitude of sources in this one.
The story about Frederick Douglass I got here: https://escholarship.org/content/qt91g761b3/qt91g761b3_noSplash_0a796cdb24059058c5fcd734be4d73b3.pdf
A story on the 2010 Harvard study is here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/one-drop-rule-persists/
The census information came from here: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-population-much-more-multiracial.html
The Virginia slave code of 1705 came from here: https://slaverylawpower.org/virginia-slave-code-1705/
Other information came from here: https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/863
I also used Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the 2005 edition published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Thanks for reading. Next one in two weeks.