One-drop rule

The one-drop rule classified people with any known Black ancestry as Black. It became a powerful convention in the United States, enforced through law and social practice.

Racial Integrity Act of 1924: A Virginia law that defined racial identity by ancestry and barred interracial marriage. It codified an especially strict ancestry rule in Virginia.
Hypodescent: A system that assigns a person of mixed ancestry to the socially subordinate parent group. It describes the general logic behind assigning mixed-ancestry people to the Black category.
Anti-miscegenation laws: Laws prohibiting marriage or sexual relationships between people classified as belonging to different races. Ancestry rules determined which couples these laws treated as interracial.
Blood quantum laws: Rules that define eligibility or identity through a specified fraction of Indigenous ancestry. They quantify ancestry, unlike the one-drop rule's threshold of any known Black ancestry.
Walter Plecker: Virginia's registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946, known for enforcing racial classification laws. He altered records and pressed officials to classify people with mixed ancestry as Black.
Racial classification: The assignment of people to racial categories by governments, institutions, or social conventions. The one-drop rule supplied an ancestry criterion for assigning racial categories.
Racial segregation in the United States: The enforced separation of people by race in U.S. institutions and public life. The rule expanded the population subjected to segregation as Black.
Racial formation theory: A framework describing how social, political, and economic forces create and transform racial categories. It explains racial categories as historically made rather than biologically fixed.
Virginia v. Loving: A 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that invalidated state bans on interracial marriage. The decision struck down Virginia's marriage restrictions, which relied on racial classification.
Birth certificate: An official record documenting a person's birth and, often, parentage and sex. Officials could use birth records and parentage to impose racial classifications.

Linked from 8 pages