Barbara Yanez and Frank Sweet

Few topics conjure up the unease, surprise, and chagrin as the topic of the color line in the U.S. Exactly who is black? And who is white? What do ‘black’ and ‘white’ mean? And how do so-called “Hispanics”, “Middle-Easterners” and Native Americans, not to mention other ethnic groups, fit into these “neat categories,” if at all?

It is not clear that many Americans fully grasp the ludicrousness of the infamous ‘One Drop Rule.” For as long as any living American can remember, one drop of black blood placed one in the “black” racial category. Period. Waves of immigration of peoples from all over the world have forced the adoptions of increasingly broader (and therefore meaningless) definitions of both the terms “white” and “black” – as today, the former group includes black and mullato-looking Middle-Easterners and Latinos, while the latter group includes completely “white” –looking “blacks” - persons with no detectable traces of African ancestry whatsoever.
“We are all mixed. We always have been.” states Frank Sweet, author of several published books and essays on this and related topics, presenter of scholarly papers at historical conferences, and host of a popular online discussion group on the history of the U.S. “race” notion. “It turns out that about one-third of White Americans have between two and twenty percent recent African genetic admixture, as measured by the ancestry-informative markers in their DNA. This comes to about 74 million White Americans. Black Americans have European admixture averaging about 75 percent African and 25 percent European.”
In the questions and answers below, Mr. Sweet takes on the tough, uncomfortable questions that swirl around the one-drop notion in the United States.
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Q: It seems that the U.S. has taken a path not taken in many other countries- in fact in any other country. In the U.S., traditionally – to present day - it is almost as though we have, as you call it “two castes” - blacks, and “everybody else.” For some odd reason, most all immigrant groups have gradually “melted” in and become seen as some variant of “white.” This is regardless of physical appearance (we have all see very black and also curly and even “kinky” haired Eastern Indians, Middle-Easterners, Southeast Asians, and so on). How did this come about?

A: It came about by the imposition of an endogamous barrier called “the color line.” Let me explain.

Americans have many overlapping names for demographic groups, names like: Jews, liberals, Hispanics, Blacks, and the like. Many of the groups (conservatives, liberals, pro-choice, pro-life) are seen as ideological voting blocs, whose members share no cultural or biological traits in common. Other groups (Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans) are perceived as sharing national origin. Still other groups are supposedly delineated by ethnic traditions of language or religion rather than by nationality (Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, Slavs). Finally, a few groups (Blacks, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, Whites) are visualized as comprising people who share unique biological traits. These last groups are called “races” on U.S. government forms.

The U.S. distinction between “race” and ethnicity is not always clear. Until about 1945, most Americans considered Jews to be a separate “race,” and some Americans still see them as such (many Orthodox and Hassidic Jews, for example, see themselves thus). Similarly, many matriculation or employment application forms that collect data for federal agencies tell the applicant to check off only one of the following labels: Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, or White, thus implying that Hispanics cannot see themselves as White. The distinction between ethnicity and national origin is also unclear, especially if the nation in question did not exist when the label was coined (German-American, Italian-American). Nevertheless, although the definitions are sometimes blurred or confusing, most Americans would recognize such terms as Irish-American or Black.

The group labeled Black or African-American is unique because, judging by intermarriage rates, it is the most segregated from mainstream society of all U.S. groups (whether defined by political ideology, national origin, ethnicity, or physical traits). No other U.S. group routinely considers Blacks to be suitable marriage partners. And most Blacks do not routinely consider any other group to be suitable marriage partners for themselves. Anti-miscegenation laws enforced Black endogamy for about 270 years, and it has been enforced by custom since 1967. The out-marriage rate of the Black community has been negligible for three centuries, and remains, as of the 2000 census, much smaller than that of any other U.S. social segment. In other words, no other U.S. group is as harshly endogamous as is the community of Black Americans. The United States has never had more than two endogamous groups. One U.S. endogamous group comprises everyone who is considered African-American. This group is usually called “Black.” The other U.S. endogamous group comprises everyone else. This group is usually called “White.”

Q: It is curious that you use the word “caste.” That word conjures up images of a very fixed social stratification system that flies in the face of American ideals and principles. Do you think the word “caste” is the correct word to use to describe this phenomenon?

A: Not any more. I used “caste” in my Paths Not Taken series of booklets because the word’s technical meaning in anthropology is simply “endogamous group.” But members of my dissertation committee have pointed out that, like it or not, the word “caste” drags in images of the Hindu religious-based system, or reminds scholars of a semantic controversy that erupted in the field in the 1950s. They suggested that I should simply use “endogamous group.” I have taken their advice and no longer use the term “caste” when writing for the general public. I use the term “endogamous group” because lack of out-marriage is what makes the U.S. Black community world-unique.

Q: As you point out, the exogamy rate is incredibly low for blacks - in contrast to the other groups. You state, “There are blacks, and then there is ‘everybody else.’” However, the Irish, when they first came to the U.S. were not considered to be altogether white. I believe this was also the case for Italians. What is the process under which these groups or any group makes it to the mainstream “caste?” Do you think it will ever happen for “blacks?”

A: As a practical matter, since around 1700 the word “White” has simply meant “British North America’s mainstream society.” And so, every immigrant group was initially seen as non-White. It seems strange today, but German immigrants in the 1740s were not considered White. Benjamin Franklin lamented German-Americans’ failed attempts to “pass for white” in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. Later, after the Germans had become White, the 1860 American Encyclopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge said that “[The Irish race shares] inherited features such as “low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian [ape-like] and sensual....” Even later yet, after the Irish had been embraced under America’s ever-expanding blanket of Whiteness, Italians were still non-White. Eleven Italian-Americans who tried to “pass for White” were lynched in 1891 New Orleans and five more were lynched for the same reason outside the Madison Parish, Louisiana, courthouse in 1899. Before World War II, some Italian-American children in the South were forced to attend Black segregated schools. Slavs, Greeks, Arabs were all non-White until recently.

Perhaps the strangest example of non-White Europeans dates from 1911. Franz Boas (1858-1952) said, in his groundbreaking book, The Mind of Primitive Man, that “No real biological chasm separated recent immigrants from Mayflower descendants.” In reply, the New York Times book review told readers that the book was “the desperate attempt of a Jew to pass himself off as white.”

Many authors have explained how each immigrant group became accepted into mainstream American society and thereby redefined as “White.” Some of my favorites are Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University, 1998), Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1998). To become accepted as White, immigrants had to learn a few vital American attitudes: tolerance of the religion and customs of others who have already been accepted as White, respect for education (for generations, Irish-Americans forbade their children to learn to read because they feared that it was a Protestant plot), acceptance of class mobility (the idea of the self-made man), and finally, they had to learn to display open contempt towards members of the U.S. Black endogamous group. I am sorry to mention the third item, but the evidence is incontrovertible. You can find a good summary and bibliography of the elements of ethnic acceptance, especially that last one, in Jonathan W. Warren and France Winddance Twine’s “White Americans, the New Minority?,” Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 2 (1997): 200-218.

Q: You contrast the systems of other countries with that of the U.S. For example, you state that in Spain and Portugal, negroes constituted about ten percent of Portugal’s population and eight percent of Spain’s at their peak population, and yet within a few generations, Iberia’s blacks had almost completely genetically assimilated into the European genetic pool. One always hears that “African genes dominate” etc., and therefore it is surprising to hear that the genes can and did assimilate in this manner in Iberia (as well as populations in Arabia, etc.) This has this not happened in the U.S. But could it not just be there have not been a sufficient number of generations?

A: Whether there has been sufficient time is a good question. After all, Latin America had a one-hundred-year head start over British North America. When John Smith met Pocahontas in Jamestown, printing presses, iron foundries, weaving mills, even firearms factories were operating in Latin America. Accredited universities were graduating students every year in Mexico City, Lima, Quito, Bogota, and Santo Domingo. The university in Santo Domingo had been in routine operation for nearly a century. During the hundred years before Jamestown’s founding, Spanish ships had carried between 200,000 and 300,000 colonists to the New World and had shipped 25,000 tons of silver back to Spain (to say nothing of gold, chocolate, hides, and other cargoes).

Nevertheless, lack of time turns out not to be the explanation. The physical appearance difference between the two U.S. endogamous groups is due to selection. The recent decoding of the human genome enables molecular anthropologists to track recent population admixing. Everyone carries traces of the past in his or her DNA—markers that identify the populations and sub-populations to which your ancestors belonged. After Columbus, the New World was repopulated by millions of Europeans and Africans who blended with the few natives that had survived Afro-European diseases for which they lacked immunity. Almost all inhabitants of the New World today have DNA that is a mixture from European, Native American, and, yes, African ancestors. It has become routine to identify what fraction of a person’s genome comes from each of the continents. This is usually done for medical purposes, but for about $160, you can order it done just out of curiosity.

It turns out that about one-third of White Americans have between two and twenty percent recent African genetic admixture, as measured by the ancestry-informative markers in their DNA This comes to about 74 million White Americans. And yet, your day-to-day experience teaches that virtually all White Americans look, well, White. Some may look more Mediterranean and others may look more Nordic, but very few White Americans have a distinctively African appearance. How can one reconcile DNA measurements with common experience?

There is an immediate answer to this question, and a deeper answer. The immediate answer is that many different genes identify continent of ancestry. Labs use as many as 175 markers to determine a person’s ancestral continent-of-origin admixture ratios. On the other hand, only a handful of genes encode for the few superficial, externally visible features (skin color, hair curliness, etc.) that Americans see as “racially” significant. Parental genes are randomly recombined at each passing generation. And so it often happens through sheer chance that an individual inherits many invisible African DNA markers, but few or none of the handful of alleles that encode for “racial” appearance. Another person can inherit those few alleles that encode for visible “racial” appearance but otherwise inherit invisible but ancestrally informative European admixture markers.

The deeper answer is that detailed analysis of the range of phenotype variation (like skin tone, for instance) shows that a long-term biological selection process has unmistakably affected the genetics of White Americans. Few if any White Americans display a strongly African appearance, despite having detectable African admixture because those Americans who “look Black” have for three centuries been assigned involuntarily to the Black endogamous group, whatever their genetic admixture. Centuries of court records show that people of mixed ancestry who “looked White” often had the option of either adopting a White self-identity, thus joining the White endogamous group, or a Black self-identity, thus joining the other group. But people of mixed ancestry who “looked African” lacked such a choice. U.S. society has always assigned such people to membership in the Black endogamous group, like it or not. In short, U.S. society has unwittingly applied selection pressure to the color line. The only American families accepted into the White endogamous group have been those whose African admixture just happened not to include the half-dozen alleles for dark skin (or the other traits associated with “race”). Since those particular alleles were sifted out of the portion of the White population that originated in biracial families, the result has been genetic selection of the White U.S. population for a European “racial” appearance, regardless of their underlying continent-of-ancestry admixture ratio.

For the technical details of this explanation, which is common knowledge among molecular anthropologists but oddly unknown to the general public, refer to my essay titled “Afro-European Genetic Admixture in the United States.”

Q: You state that the world’s first inhabitants resembled today’s San people, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, who are/were of light brown complexion with reddish highlights in curly black hair. This is in contrast to the popular belief that the worlds’ first inhabitants were very black skinned with very curly or “kinky” hair. Is this to say that both black skinned persons and white persons mutated from/came from this people of light brown complexion?

A: Well, short of time-travel we can never really know for certain what people looked like before portrait-painting became common. Nevertheless, two lines of evidence suggest that before the Neolithic (agricultural) revolution, people tended towards a light-brown skin tone.

The first line of evidence comes from comparing the genomes of the Khoisan and Ethiopians with everyone else. Ethiopians and Khoisan are genetically the same people (or at least more alike than most populations). More importantly, you can tell by the number of harmless mutations that have accumulated in the DNA how old a population is—how long since they split off from neighboring populations. It turns out that the Khoisan/Ethiopians are the oldest living group of humans yet discovered (the Mbuti pygmies come in second). Apparently everyone else on the planet descended from them (or from their ancestors), and they have a light-brown skin tone. (The Khoisan have probably the kinkiest hair on earth, called “peppercorn” hair.) Of course, it might be possible be that their ancestors were dark but, if so, why would most of their descendants (everyone outside of Africa) have reverted to light-brown? A good source on this is Ornella Semino et al, “Ethiopians and Khoisan Share the Deepest Clades of the Human Y-Chromosome Phylogeny,” American Journal of Human Genetics 70 (2002): 256-268.

The second line of evidence is that both the extraordinarily dark skin of the Bantu peoples and the extraordinarily light skin of the European peoples can be shown to date from after the Neolithic (agricultural) revolution, about 10 millennia ago. Apparently, both extremes are recent adaptations to agrarian life under different levels of solar ultraviolet. For more details, about a dozen scholarly journal articles on this topic are available for download, but I suggest that you start by downloading “The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Color” at since it summarizes the evidence and offers a large bibliography.

Q: Africans and Europeans are closely related groups, you write, from Phase One migration (the first of three great migratory patterns for the human species). But Phase One migration is also the oldest - most ancient. Is it really fair to say that are “closely” related - given the length of time (100,000 years ago) - as opposed to 10,000 and 5,000 years ago for Phase Two and Phase Three?

A: The three phases that I describe in my booklet, America’s Odd Two-Caste System: Paths Not Taken, Part 1, simplify a more complex picture. Other migrations happened between the (phase one) original African Diaspora that colonized the planet about 60 millennia ago and the (phase two) migrations of agriculturalists about 10 millennia ago. The most important in-between migration took place about 15 millennia ago.

What happened was this. Starting about 50 millennia ago (10 millennia after the Diaspora), the planet got colder and Europe slowly became covered by glaciers. The people who lived in Europe were gradually forced out. There were two species of humans in Europe back then: us and the Neanderthals. By 16 millennia ago, Europe, except for the Mediterranean coast, had become uninhabitable. Ice covered it all. Then the glaciers began to melt, much faster than they had formed. The Neanderthals had all vanished and Europe was suddenly prime real-estate. Waves of people came in from all around to recolonize Europe for the second time. Call these migrations “phase one-point-five.” You can find an entertaining account of their mixing (or not, in some cases) in Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, 1st American ed. (New York: Norton, 2001). One of the groups that repopulated Europe after the glaciers melted came all the way from Africa (oddly enough, they came the long way around, through Lebanon, instead of simply crossing the Straits of Gibraltar). That this group assimilated into Europe is why Europeans today are more closely related to Africans than, say, East Asians are.

Q: You write about the phenomenon of “passing,” which you define as those who were identified as one race as children but another as adults, generally ‘black’ as a child and ‘white’ as an adult. One sees that this was relatively common in the past - but how common is this today, when we are more careful about civil records, tracking, driver’s licenses, etc.? Is this in fact a common, modern-day phenomenon? How difficult it must be for someone to cut all ties to family and literally walk away!

A: Nowadays (as of the 2000 census), about 60,000 young adults every year, who previously were identified by their parents as “Black,” switch to identifying themselves publicly (on the census, say) as “White” or “Hispanic.” The number has fallen and risen more or less in step with the intermarriage rate over the decades and it is higher today than during Jim Crow, when switching “racial” identity was considered criminal fraud.

There are several ways of measuring the annual rate of Black-to-White self-identity switching, but the most straightforward is simply to ask large numbers of people how they self-identify, repeat the question every few years, and then count how many changed their answer from Black to White. The Departments of Labor and of Health and Human Services do precisely this (along with many other questions) in longitudinal studies meant to track life-long earnings and health, respectively, of large numbers of Americans. For example, the Department of Labor’s NLS79 National Longitudinal survey has interviewed 12,686 young men and women yearly since 1979 to measure their career progress. Each year they are asked the same hundred or so questions. Between 1979 (when they were 14 to 22 years old) and 1998, 1.87 percent switched from answering “Black” to the interviewer’s “race” question, to answering either “White,” “I don’t know,” or “other.” The data can be downloaded from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics website.

I hesitate to call this phenomenon “passing” because the word has become associated with deceit or pretense. As far as I can tell, most of the individuals who redefine themselves make no secret of their partial African ancestry. They just do not feel that this trivial fact should stop them from adopting a “racial” self-identity that matches their appearance. The few civil records today that capture one’s “race” (jobs, school matriculation, etc) are voluntary. You can check off or write in whatever you want and, with one exception, nobody questions it. If you look European and claim to be White, nobody cares. There is no need to “cut all family ties and walk away.” In the schools in the deep South where my wife has taught, when a White third-grader tells her friends that she spent the weekend with her Black grandmother, it no longer even raises an eyebrow. It is because switching sides has risen in the past few decades that I suspect that many switchers are following the example of the millions of Puerto Ricans who have come to the mainland since 1950. Most Puerto Ricans have obvious African ancestry, but 90 percent of us check off “White” on the census form anyway. (But then, I am Puerto Rican, so my impartiality may be weak on this point.)

The one exception, where you can still be prosecuted in America for claiming to be of a “race” to which you do not “really” belong, is if you claim Blackness in order to reap Affirmative Action benefits. In such cases, your “true race” is determined by the testimony of Black politicians. Your appearance is irrelevant. If the leaders of the local Black community disown you, you may be found guilty of criminal fraud. There are many cases of this, but three of them are famous. The first is that of the Malone brothers in 1987 Boston. They were disowned by Black community leaders and were convicted. Their story can be found in newspaper articles spanning a one-year period. See, for instance, Peggy Hernandez, “Two Fight Firing over Disputed Claim They are Black,” (The Boston Globe, September 29, 1988) and Peggy Hernandez, “Firemen Who Claimed to be Black Lose Appeal,” (The Boston Globe, July 26, 1989). The second is the case of blonde, blue-eyed Mary C. Walker of 1988 Denver. She was supported by Black leaders and so exonerated. See “Rewriting Her Story,” (The National Law Journal, September 18, 1989). The third case is that of Mostafa Hefny, a completely African-looking immigrant, actually from Africa, who has been rejected by local U.S. Black leaders as not being “Black” in the sense intended by U.S. Affirmative Action. See http://edition.cnn.com/US/9707/16/racial.suit .

Q: One thing you mention is that races did not exist before 1676 Virginia. This is surprising. Most people harbor the belief that there are three, some say four “world races” - and that we each belong to one degree or another to one of them. The conventional “wisdom” is that the concept of “race” is real and has existed for centuries. You say not so?

A: It depends on what you mean by “race.” That no one can define the concept in a scientifically rigorous or replicable fashion is one reason for its abandonment by science over the past century. Many good discussions of this point abound in scholarly journals of medicine, genetics, and anthropology, and the point is covered in every current introductory college-level textbook of those three fields, so I shall not get into the history of the concept of “race” in anthropology.

I think that what most non-scientist Americans mean by “race” nowadays is connected to a person’s continent of ancestry. I suspect that most Americans think of Africans, Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans as four different “races.” But nobody else on earth sees it this way. Australian Aborigines, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Japanese, Mongolians, Turks, Maoris, Syrians, and Israelis are all Asians but no one of them would consider themselves to be of the same “race” as any of the others. On the other hand, Native Americans are genetically identical to a small subpopulation of Mongolians (presumably their ancestors). Even the discredited craniofacial anthropometry of the past does not match lay Americans’ preconceptions. Carleton S. Coon, the greatest race-defining physical anthropologist of the century, whose definitions filled the U.S. textbooks of a half-century ago, considered neither Ethiopians nor Khoisan to be of the “negroid race.”

And so, what your question comes down to is “when did the odd world-unique American notion of race (which no one else agrees with, not even U.S. anthropologists in the past) begin?” When did this strange idea first emerge? To quote Ivan Hannaford, “there is very little evidence of the conscious idea of race until after the Reformation” (see Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1996), p. 187). The best short discussion of the origin of the peculiar U.S. “race” notion in the 17th-century Chesapeake is the first 61 pages of Lerone Bennett Jr., The Shaping of Black America (Chicago: Johnson, 1975). The most detailed account is Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994). Other good accounts include Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1999) and Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, New ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1997).

Q: Indeed, most people believe that the “One Drop Rule was created as a result of slavery. You deny this, offering that many dozens of nations imported African slaves and all but one, that country being the U.S., eventually intermarried with them to a much greater degree than ever happened in the U.S. Repeatedly, you characterize America as having a “horror” of intermarriage unlike that of any other country. However, intermarriage taboos happened at some periods in other countries as well. One does hear that there is marked racism in countries like Cuba and Brazil and the Dominican Republic, where there are significant numbers of blacks. What are the differences between the U.S. and those countries?

A: We have to be precise in what we mean by “one-drop rule.” Many use it as synonymous with Marvin Harris’s term “hypodescent,” meaning that Americans of slight visible African admixture are considered Black, even if that admixture is less than 50 percent. In much of the Caribbean, in contrast, you are White if you look mostly European. I have no objection to people using “one-drop rule” thus. But when I use the term, I mean something else entirely. I use “one-drop rule” to mean that an American who looks completely, utterly European, without even a hint of Africa, is still classified as a member of the Black endogamous group (that is, seen as an unsuitable marriage partner by Whites but suitable by Blacks) because of an immeasurable, invisible touch (one drop) of Black ancestry.

Seen thus, the one-drop rule is not necessarily connected to “racism.” Mary C. Walker of 1988 Denver had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pink skin and yet she was accepted as Black and received Affirmative Action benefits because local Black community leaders accepted that she had an invisible drop of Black blood in her. This is clearly an example of the one-drop rule as defined, but it is hard to see any “racism” here. Also, the one-drop rule has no cause-and-effect relationship with the endogamous U.S. color line. The endogamous U.S. color line has existed for over three centuries, but the one-drop rule was not adopted until the turn of the 20th century. It is hard to say whether an endogamous color line would have anything to do with a one-drop rule in other countries because no other country has an endogamous color line and no other country has a one-drop rule. Other lands have unimodal (one central clump) Afro-European genetic admixture scatter diagrams (meaning that Europeans and Africans thoroughly intermarried). And in other lands, if you look White, you are White.

The only other intermarriage taboos that are as rigidly adhered to in practice as the U.S. endogamous color line (less than 4 percent intermarriage rate) are those in the Hindu caste system or its derivations (like the Burakumin of Japan). Latin Americans have intermarriage preferences based on skin tone (light tends to be preferred over dark), but a glance at any Latin American street-corner shows that such preferences are utterly ineffective at preserving two endogamous groups separated by a color line.

I have no opinion as to whether other lands have more or less “racism” than the United States. I have never been able to work out a measurable definition of “racism.” The word connotes prejudice or discrimination. Everyone agrees that “racism” is undesirable, and almost everyone believes that he knows it when he sees it, but people disagree over specific examples. For instance, most Anglo-Americans and Puerto Ricans would agree that the murder of Emmett Till (a dark-complexioned 14-year-old who was lynched in 1955 Mississippi for whistling at a White girl) was triggered by “racism.” And both cultures would agree that the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 gangland Chicago was not caused by “racism.” But a Puerto Rican mother might advise her daughter, “My dear, whatever you do, be sure to marry someone either light-skinned or rich.” Most Americans would see this as “racism,” but most Puerto Ricans would not. And a U.S. African-American father might disown his daughter for marrying a White man. Most Puerto Ricans would see this as “racism,” but most Americans would not. It is not that attitudes do not differ; they do. Different concepts of “race” produce different attitudes. But, without some objective way of measuring it, I cannot compare “racism” between different countries. On the other hand, the prevalence of a one-drop rule, or the effectiveness of an endogamous color line are easily defined and measured.

Getting back to one-drop, the evidence shows that the one-drop rule’s rise was unrelated to slavery; the one-drop rule did not become widespread until around 1910, a half-century after slavery had ended. Instead, the best evidence of the rise of the one-drop rule comes from the 300 legal cases held between 1770 and 1990 to determine people’s “racial identity,” where appellate judges wrote down the reasoning behind their decisions ruling someone to be White or Black. Until about 1790, judges tended to go by appearance (sort of like in England or South Africa today—if you looked White you were White). Then around 1830, courts began shifting to fractional-ancestry reasoning. You were Black if you had “X” percent Black ancestry. Eston Hemings (Jefferson’s son), for instance was listed as a White man in the 1830 Charlottesville VA census, even though his mother (living with him at the time) was listed as Black. Finally, in the 1890s, a few courts began using one-drop (ruling a White-looking person to be Black because of an immeasurable touch of Black ancestry). The first state to make it statutory was Tennessee in 1810 and other states soon followed. The spread of the one-drop rule in popular literature and legislative debates matches the same timing.

Q: One surprising conclusion you draw is that in Virginia the two-caste system came about to split society into two mutually antagonistic groups so as to create a “yeoman” class very quickly. Your contention is that, back then, the circumstances of both white “indentured servants” and “black slaves” were frequently very similar, and overlapping, contrary to widespread belief. Since a yeoman class is necessary for aristocrats to rule, as the yeoman class tends to deter insurrection by those at the very bottom, allowing the top level to stay in power. So a two-caste system was created quickly in Virginia to split the three groups into two, and make the “white” “caste” the yeoman class - regardless of previous social class standing. Does this not seem a bit contrived - that such a far-reaching, long range solution would be adopted - and in such a short time? One that eventually metamorphosed into the One Drop Rule and fed into what became centuries of horrific atrocities against “blacks” including lynchings? Could a convention that started so “innocuously” have developed and heightened to the levels of racial hatred the U.S. saw throughout later years? And why did states in the North, whose histories were much different from Virginia’s eventually adopt and adhere so dearly to the One-Drop Rule?

A: That a divide-and-conquer tactic was adopted in the Chesapeake after 60 years of threatened servile insurrection (and two actual bloody revolts of forced laborers) is not really all that short a time, considering that the tactic was well-known and of ancient usage among military governors. The British used the technique in their 1796 treaty with the Jamaica Maroons, whose 1,500 ancestors had fled slavery a century before. The treaty guaranteed the Maroons their lands and freedom in return for their promise to crush any future slave uprisings without British army help. Both sides lived up to the bargain, and Jamaican slavery was stabilized. Spain’s king ordered an endogamous color line to be enforced in the New World, to stop Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans from intermarrying. The New World hidalgos ignored him and their non-European wives and mixed children became the New World’s de facto nobility. Come to think of it, a militarily-enforced endogamous barrier between Protestants and Catholics was applied in mid 17th century Ireland by some of the very same men who applied it later in the Chesapeake. Again, I recommend Lerone Bennett’s The Shaping of Black America or Theodore Allen’s, The Invention of the White Race. The story is well known among historians. Edmund Sears Morgan told it in, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975) and, more recently, Ira Berlin tells the story in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1998). Finally, Audrey Smedley and Thomas F. Gossett (mentioned earlier) also cover the events.

The origin of the U.S. endogamous color line seems strange because we expect great results to emerge from great acts and trivial results from trivial acts. And yet here was an act that was done in an off-hand manner, without serious forethought, just to keep some forced laborers under control. A few people worried about the long-term consequences when Governor-General William Gooch decreed an endogamous color line. Gooch’s own Attorney-General Richard West reported to their bosses, the Lords of Trade and Plantations in London, that he had misgivings about interfering with the Christian tradition that marriage was a sacrament between a pledged couple and their God. Gooch brushed him off and went ahead with the plan. The long-term consequences have been horrific for the United States, of course. Even worse: after three centuries of this bizarre social pathology, Americans are still coming up with fresh new rationalizations as to why it must be preserved for their grandchildren. Every historian who researches this tale feels the same way about it. It was such a silly decision by such a few shortsighted men. I really wish I could tell you that the U.S. endogamous color line began in some cataclysmic occurrence, a plague, or a war that slew millions, but there you have it. I am embarrassed to say it, but trivial events sometimes have horrific consequences.

Why other North American British colonies joined in adopting the endogamous color line is harder to say. It must have benefited mainstream society in some way. It spread slowly, not reaching Pennsylvania and Massachusetts until a generation later, and those states were the first to repeal the ban on intermarriage (in 1780 and 1843, respectively). South Carolina, on the other hand, did not outlaw intermarriage until 1895.

A possible hint is that the endogamous color line was stronger in the early 19th-century northeast (less intermarriage) than it was in the deep South. I suspect that the endogamous color line was reinforced in the northeast by the in-your face ethnicities of the Jacksonian era. Aggressively ethnic voting blocs were unique to the embryonic democratic system of the Jacksonian northeast. You can get a good idea of how it was from the Miramax film “Gangs of New York,” which was taken from Herbert Asbury's book, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York: Paragon House, 1990). The endogamous color line may have been more strongly enforced in the northeast than in the slave states because it reinforced the political system there. The slave states, by deliberate social policy, had nothing resembling the powerful ethnic voting blocs of the northeast. I suspect that the endogamous color line was weaker in the deep South back then because of French culture (in Louisiana and Alabama), Spanish culture (in Florida), and Barbadian culture (in South Carolina). Among other useful recent works on the invention of aggressive political ethnicity during this period are: David A. Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1989), Elliott J. Gorn, “‘Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American’: Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (1987): 388-410; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University, 1985); Richard Briggs Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1990); Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1986); and the eponymous collection, Werner Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University, 1989), especially Sollors’s introduction and the article by Kathleen Conzen.

To put all this in perspective, the forcibly endogamous barrier that the same British elite implemented in Ireland is also still in place to this day. Irish Protestants very seldom marry Irish Catholics (indeed, it can be dangerous to do so). Of course, Ireland never came up with segregation or a one-drop rule, either.

Q: What ongoing purpose did the One Drop Rule serve, if it did not have its genesis in slavery?

A: “Why was the one-drop rule first invented?” and “What ongoing social purpose did it serve?” are two different questions. The same two questions can be asked about any folkloric belief or myth.

Consider the two questions applied the endogamous color line itself. We will come back to the one-drop rule in a moment. I already explained that the endogamous color line was invented in a shortsighted off-hand manner merely to keep some forced laborers under control. But it took on a life of its own because it served the social purpose of delineating northeastern voting blocs. The color line really blossomed in the 1840s, when it stopped the United States from having a socialist revolution, as most industrializing countries of the time did. Each time that mid-19th-century northern laborers tried to organize, the industrialists threatened to replace them with Black workers. Divide-and-conquer works for corporations too. But this tactic could work only if an endogamous color line were solidly in place and maintained. To grasp this point, just imagine the futility of factory owners threatening to replace strikers with Capricorns. “But Capricorns are just ordinary folks like anyone else,” you ask, “How on earth could you get non-Capricorns to see Capricorns as alien ‘others’?” That is precisely the point—only a forcibly endogamous barrier would let you pull it off. [A good account of this social purpose of the color line is David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the America Working Class (London: Verso, 1991)].

Returning to the one-drop rule, the answer to the first question, “Why was it originally invented?” takes us to 1831. The answer to the second question, “What social purpose did it serve?” takes us to 1910.

First look at 1831. Recall that I define “one-drop rule” as the idea that “White-looking Black people can exist.” The phrase seems reasonable only because we are used to it. If I said “tall-looking short people can exist” or “fat-looking thin people can exist,” you would laugh at my silliness. But you do not laugh at the notion of “White-looking Black people,” although a person from any other nation on earth would laugh. Why not? It is because at some point in America’s past, membership in the Black endogamous group switched from reflecting appearance (recall that Eston Hemings was fully accepted as White in 1830) to reflecting ideology. To see this, compare the three phrases above with comparable ideological phrases: “Christian-looking Jews” or “American-looking communists.” Suddenly, the phrase is not silly. The very earliest that anyone has been able to find this peculiar usage was shortly after 1831.

In 1831, a wave of panic and dread swept the nation, terror that the Blacks were plotting to massacre all of the Whites. Three historical threads just happened to come together at this point in time: first, secret meetings of Black leaders; second, published calls for Black violence against Whites; third, a massacre of over 50 unarmed White women and children at the hands of U.S. Blacks. Together, the three threads created an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Whites came to suspect that, among the Blacks who were secretly plotting to kill them, were some who looked just like their friends and neighbors. That is, some treacherous Blacks who looked White.

The first secret meeting of Black leaders was summoned by Richard Allen. In September of 1830, Baltimore ice dealer Hezekiah Grice suggested to Philadelphia AME Church founder Richard Allen that he convene a national meeting of leaders of the Black endogamous group. The goal was to collect money for 1200-2000 Black refugees who had been deported from Cincinnati to Canada on short notice. (The reason for the deportations is not relevant to this story.) Allen contacted other leaders and forty Black delegates from Brooklyn, Rochester, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Boston met in secret for five days at Bethel Church, Philadelphia, that very month. No member of the White endogamous group was allowed inside. Despite the attempt at secrecy, the White press reported that a clandestine meeting of Black leaders had been held. The reality of the meeting’s discussion would have been anticlimactic, had it been reported. The agenda of the first meeting of what was to become the National Convention Movement actually focused upon two mundane topics. The first was support for the Ohio refugees. The second was rejecting the American Colonization Society’s plan to exile free Blacks to Africa. But imagined White fears trumped prosaic Black reality and White Americans became uneasy with the secrecy of it all. [There are many excellent accounts of the rise and fall of the National Convention Movement. One that focuses on the exclusion of White observers (to say nothing White delegates) and consequent fear and suspicion among members of the White endogamous group is Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 83-4, 116, 124, 127-38.]

The published calls for Black violence against Whites appeared in a book by Boston haberdasher David Walker, titled Appeal in Four Articles (Boston, 1829). According to Walker, members of the U.S. Black endogamous group were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject beings that ever lived since the world began.... Can our condition be any worse?” “They [Whites] are afraid to treat us worse, for they know well, the day they do it they are gone.” “They [Whites] think nothing of murdering us... therefore, if there is an attempt by us, kill or be killed.” Despite Walker’s mysterious death after his book’s publication (or perhaps because of it), it immediately went through three editions. Four states (Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana) ruled it seditious and demanded the author’s arrest. Northern White abolitionists were horrified. Antislavery publisher Benjamin Lundy wrote, “A more bold, daring, inflammatory publication, perhaps, never issued from the press of any country. I can do no less than set the broadest seal of condemnation on it.” Even William Lloyd Garrison deplored it as “most injudicious,” although he also said that it held “many valuable truths and seasonable warnings.” Valuable truths, however were not what White Americans sought. Walker’s book raised the question in White minds of just what those secret Black meetings were all about. [The impact of Walker’s book on White fears is best described in Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961), 232-5.]

The massacre of over 50 unarmed Whites at the hands of Blacks was led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, on the night of August 21, 1831. Reports of the event spread terror among White people across the nation from Boston to Jacksonville. That it was an insurrection employing bloody violence against their tormentors, by people who were kept in chains by equally bloody violence, seemed to escape White readers. That it was an unprovoked attack by Blacks against defenseless White women and children was clear to the same White readers. [The impact of Nat Turner’s rebellion on White fears is best described in Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Free Press, 1974), 188-9.] To many fearful Whites, Nat Turner’s rebellion answered the question about what the secret meetings were about. Blacks, many Whites feared, were plotting another large-scale extermination of all the Whites, like the one that had taken place in El Cibao, Santo Domingo, in February of 1805 at the hands of Haitian Emperor Dessalines. [For details, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d , rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 370.]

And so, the three threads came together in late 1831: secret meetings of Black leaders, public calls for organized Black-on-White violence, and the reality of a Black-on-White massacre in Virginia. It was a tiny step for Whites to suspect that “they” might be secretly among “us.” Newspapers fanned the flames of fear by suggesting that some people who pretended to be White were secretly Black. Again, the mental image resonates with “Christian-looking Jews” or “American-looking communists,” not with short-looking tall people or thin-looking fat people. Like the McCarthy scare of 1952, the 1831 panic eventually blew over, but the notion of “White-looking Blacks” became embedded in the American mind, spawning the very first of dozens of “passing” novels that would be published regularly over the coming centuries.

And yet, the notion of “White-looking Blacks” (the one-drop rule) was never made law or judicially enforced until around 1910. What social purpose did it then serve? The answer is that it preserved the Jim Crow system from collapse for nearly a century.

The Jim Crow system, which began around 1900, was the worst wave of race-hatred that America has yet seen. Millions of Americans of the Black endogamous group were disfranchised, killed, brutalized, and discouraged even from their kids learning the three Rs. Mere words cannot describe the horror. [Although Leon Litwack makes a great attempt to describe it in his Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).] Even though only about 20,000 American citizens were murdered outright by the system—tortured to death in public rituals called lynchings—the number of people affected, and its duration, far exceeded the Nazi holocaust.

The causes of the Jim Crow event, which lasted nearly a century, have been well studied by historians. The totalitarian Jim Crow system was a response to modernity, urbanization, and industrialization. Urbanization generally promotes more individual freedom and anonymity; people had become less controllable than they were in the South’s old agricultural society. The White elites feared cooperation between laboring Blacks and Whites. Jim Crow was necessary to check this. [The best recent account of the causes and origin of the Jim Crow phenomenon is Joel Williamson’s The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University, 1984) or its abridgement, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University, 1986).]

The problem is that ordinary folks are just not cruel enough to maintain such an oppressive system without coercion. Families make friends with other families. Businessmen make deals with other businessmen. Laborers organize with other laborers. And young people fall in love with other young people. Left to their own devices, ordinary people would have woven at least a partly colorblind network of such family alliances. If this had been allowed to happen, Jim Crow would have collapsed within two generations (as, indeed, prior waves of racial hatred had collapsed in 1670 and 1770).

The purpose of the one-drop rule (the idea that an utterly White-looking person could be secretly Black on the inside) was to keep Whites in line. In the many court cases of the time, when a family’s racial identity was decided, parades of prosecution witnesses testified, one by one, that a grandmother was once seen talking to a Black tradesman, that an uncle was once seen shaking hands with a Black businessman, that a teenaged boy once schemed a silly prank with a Black youngster. “Who cares?” you ask, “Surely they did not think you can inherit African genes by speaking, shaking hands, or goofing off!” But the record makes it clear that the one-drop rule was never just about biological ancestry. It was always about family friendships and family alliances. Any White family who got too close to a Black family risked expulsion from the White endogamous group, along with their progeny, for all generations to come—a horrific fate, back then. If White families had been allowed to befriend Black families, the whole system of Jim Crow tyranny would have collapsed.

The public back then well knew that the purpose of the one-drop rule was to keep Whites in line. This is clear in the record of Black legislators. When Jim Crow first began, Blacks could still vote and so most states had Black legislators. When anti-miscegenation laws were debated, Black politicians argued vigorously against maintaining the endogamous color line. When bills were debated take away from Blacks the right to vote, Black leaders fought tenaciously against the change. But in every legislative debate over adopting the one-drop rule that I have uncovered, the Black delegates stood aside because they felt that it was a White-on-White squabble that simply did not affect them.

In almost every post-1900 appellate court case that I have been able to find where a family’s “racial” identity was resolved on the basis of the one-drop rule, the families in question were apparently genetically, ancestrally White in every sense. They had simply made the terrible mistake of befriending Blacks at a family-to-family level.

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Final Comment: Thank you, Mr. Sweet, for taking the time to enlighten readers about this peculiarly American phenomenon. I am sure most readers will, like me, find any of the answers you have given both surprising and highly enlightening. Are there any final thoughts you can leave us with?

A: Thank you for letting me answer your questions. If there is just one thought that I would like you to take away, it is this. None of what I have said is new or unknown. My only personal contribution to the history of the U.S. “race” notion (my doctoral dissertation, in fact) has been to amass a database of 300 court cases spanning over two centuries that that shows how perceptions of “race” slowly changed in the minds of judges and juries over the years. And even this contribution merely adds to the work of others. Everything else that I have said: the endogamous color line, waves of immigrants becoming White, America’s actual genetic mixture, prehistoric migrations, identity-switching, perceptions of race slowly changing from appearance to blood-fraction to ideology, the color line’s trivial origin, the panic of 1831, the one-drop rule keeping Whites in line so that Blacks could be terrorized, all of these things are routinely found in college-level history and anthropology textbooks. Why none of it is taught in K-12 baffles me as much as it does you.

* * * * *

Frank W. Sweet is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is the author of several booklets currently sold at museum and state park gift shops throughout Florida. He has published numerous essays in the online magazine Interracial Voice, given scholarly papers at historical conferences, and hosts an online discussion group on the history of the U.S. “race” notion. He and his wife, Mary Lee, interpret living history by performing 19th-century songs and stories at Florida schools and museums. Links to all of these resources can be found at their web site http://backintyme.com. For Mr. Sweet’s CV details, visit http://www.mylitsearch.org/mbrz/11084339.

Barbara Yanez is a writer who lives in Los Angeles, Ca. She has written articles for El Boricua and Writing World. You may contact her at anutha_writer1@yahoo.com, or visit her site http://www.barbarisms.netfirms.com..

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