The rule of hypodescent: some theoretical Considerations

The rule of hypodescent is a social code that designates racial group membership of the first-generation offspring of unions between European Americans and Americans of color exclusively based on their background of color. Successive generations of individuals who have European American ancestry combined with a background of color, however, have more flexibility in terms of self-identification (Daniel, 2002, 2012; Lee and Bean, 2011; Root, 1998). The one-drop rule of hypodescent designates as black everyone with any African American ancestry (“one drop of blood”) and precludes any choice in self-identification (Davis, 1991).

The dominant European Americans began enforcing rules of hypodescent in the late 1600s as part of anti-miscegenation legislation aimed at prohibiting interracial intimacy, particularly racial intermarriage, as well as defining multiracial offspring as black in attempt to preserve so-called white racial “purity” and white racial privilege. Hypodescent conveniently exempted white landowners (particularly slaveholders) from the legal obligation of passing on inheritance and other benefits of paternity to their multiracial offspring. Most of these progeny originated in coercive sexual relations involving extended concubinage or rape of indentured or slave women of African descent (Davis, 1991; Spickard, 1989).

Colonial codes varied in terms of the ancestral quanta defining blackness. The one-drop rule gained currency as the informal or “commonsense” (Omi and Winant, 1994, p. 106) definition between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. It did not become a normative part of the legal apparatus in the United States until the early twentieth century (circa 1915) (Davis, 1991). The rule has supported legal and informal barriers not only to interracial intimacy and racial self-identification but also racial equality in most aspects of social life. At the turn of the twentieth century, this culminated in Jim Crow segregation.

Those proscriptions were officially dismantled beginning in the mid-1950s and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, which removed the last laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The United States has repudiated notions of racial “purity”that supported the ideology of white supremacy. Rules of hypodescent have been removed from the statutes of all states.