The "1 Drop Rule" explained and how it's tied to AfroAmerican identity

[marcuz]

"Blackness" in the USA isn't fully based on phenotype as I explained earlier. All you need is the African ancestry which is usually combined with shared experiences of other "black" people. Usually people will come from generations of acknowledged African descent or if they're biracial or something, recent African descent. You have to look at the concept of "Blackness" in the AfroAmerican way of seeing things in the way "Latino" is used in the USA but the difference being "Black" people in the USA will all have African ancestry regardless of phenotype whereas "Latino" might not have a common racial bond since you can be full blown Amerdindian, 100% AFro and/or 100% Euro from Latin America and all get grouped together.

:one drop rule yourself into european status just stop quoting me

 

[IllmaticDelta]

:one drop rule yourself into european status just stop quoting me

One drop isn't going to make anyone whiter. All of these students (Howard University) were AfroAmerican's that identified as "Black" regardless of how light some of them were. Embracing blackness regardless of phneotype

 

[IllmaticDelta]

USA way of seeing things is better than Latin America IMO. USA, black people view "Blackness" in shades of diversity kind of way. Latin Americans run away from blackness and towards whiteness. They have a reverse type of One Drop system.


People of Color Who Never Felt They Were Black

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer

At her small apartment near the National Cathedral in Northwest Washington, Maria Martins quietly watched as an African American friend
studied a picture of her mother. "Oh," the friend said, surprise in her voice. "Your mother is white."

She turned to Martins. "But you are black."

That came as news to Martins, a Brazilian who, for 30 years before immigrating to the United States, looked in the mirror and saw a morena
-- a woman with caramel-colored skin that is nearly equated with whiteness in Brazil and some other Latin American countries. "I didn't realize
I was black until I came here," she said.

That realization has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-complexioned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Colombia, Panama
and other Latin nations with sizable populations of African descent. Although most do not identify themselves as black, they are seen that way
as soon as they set foot in North America.

Their reluctance to embrace this definition has left them feeling particularly isolated -- shunned by African Americans who believe they are
denying their blackness; by white Americans who profile them in stores or on highways; and by lighter-skinned Latinos whose images
dominate Spanish-language television all over the world, even though a majority of Latin people have some African or Indian ancestry.

The pressure to accept not only a new language and culture, but also a new racial identity, is a burden some darker-skinned Latinos say they
face every day.

"It's overwhelming," said Yvette Modestin, a dark-skinned native of Panama who works as an outreach coordinator in Boston. "There's not a
day that I don't have to explain myself."

E. Francisco Lopez, a Venezuelan-born attorney in Washington, said he had not heard the term "minority" before coming to America.

"I didn't know what it meant. I didn't accept it because I thought it meant 'less than,' " said Martins, whose father is black. " 'Where are you from?' they ask me. I say
I'm from Brazil. They say, 'No, you are from Africa.' They make me feel like I am denying who I am."

Exactly who these immigrants are is almost impossible to divine from the 2000 Census. Latinos of African, mestizo and European descent -- or any mixture of the
three -- found it hard to answer the question "What is your racial origin?"

Some of the nation's 35 million Latinos scribbled in the margins that they were Aztec or Mayan. A fraction said they were Indian. Nearly forty-eight percent
described themselves as white, and only 2 percent as black. Fully 42 percent said they were "some other race."

Between Black and White

Race matters in Latin America, but it matters differently.

Most South American nations barely have a black presence. In Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, there are racial tensions, but mostly between indigenous Indians
and white descendants of Europeans.

The black presence is stronger along the coasts of two nations that border the Caribbean Sea, Venezuela and Colombia -- which included Panama in the 19th
century -- along with Brazil, which snakes along the Atlantic coast. In many ways, those nations have more in common racially with Puerto Rico, Cuba and the
Dominican Republic than they do with the rest of South America.

This black presence is a legacy of slavery, just as it is in the United States. But the experience of race in the United States and in these Latin countries is separated by
how slaves and their descendants were treated after slavery was abolished.

In the United States, custom drew a hard line between black and white, and Jim Crow rules kept the races separate. The color line hardened to the point that it was
sanctioned in 1896 by the Supreme Court in its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that Homer Plessy, a white-complexioned Louisiana shoemaker, could
not ride in the white section of a train because a single ancestor of his was black.

Thus Americans with any discernible African ancestry -- whether they identified themselves as black or not -- were thrust into one category. One consequence is
that dark-complexioned and light-complexioned black people combined to campaign for equal rights, leading to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

By contrast, the Latin countries with a sizable black presence had more various, and more fluid, experiences of race after slavery.

African slavery is as much a part of Brazil's history as it is of the United States's, said Sheila Walker, a visiting professor of anthropology at Spelman College in
Atlanta and editor of the book "African Roots/American Cultures." Citing the census in Brazil, she said that nation has more people of African descent than any other
in the world besides Nigeria, Africa's most populous country.

Brazil stands out in South America for that and other reasons. Unlike most nations there, its people speak Portuguese rather than Spanish, prompting a debate over
whether Brazil is part of the Latino diaspora.

Brazilian slavery ended in 1889 by decree, with no civil war and no Jim Crow -- and mixing between light- and dark-complexioned Indians, Europeans, Africans
and mulattoes was common and, in many areas, encouraged. Although discrimination against dark-complexioned Brazilians was clear, class played almost as
important a role as race.

In Colombia, said Luis Murillo, a black politician in exile from that country, light-complexioned descendants of Spanish conquistadors and Indians created the
"mestizo" race, an ideology that held that all mixed-race people were the same. But it was an illusion, Murillo said: A pecking order "where white people were
considered superior and darker people were considered inferior" pervaded Colombia.

Murillo said the problem exists throughout Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries with noticeable black populations. White Latinos control the
governments even in nations with dark-complexioned majorities, he said. And in nations ruled by military juntas and dictators, there are few protests, Murillo said.

In Cuba, a protest by Afro-Cubans led to the arming of the island's white citizens and, ultimately, the massacre of 3,000 to 6,000 black men, women and children in
1912, according to University of Michigan historian Frank Guridy, author of "Race and Politics in Cuba, 1933-34."

American-influenced Cuba was also home to the Ku Klux Klan Kubano and other anti-black groups before Fidel Castro's revolution. Now, Cuban racism still
exists, some say, but black, mulatto and white people mix much more freely. Lopez, the Afro-Venezuelan lawyer, said, "Race doesn't affect us there the way it does
here," he said. "It's more of a class thing."

Jose Neinstein, a native white Brazilian and executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington, boiled down to the simplest terms how his
people are viewed. "In this country," he said, "if you are not quite white, then you are black." But in Brazil, he said, "If you are not quite black, then you are white."

The elite in Brazil, as in most Latin American nations, are educated and white. But many brown and black people also belong in that class. Generally, brown
Brazilians, such as Martins, enjoy many privileges of the elite, but are disproportionately represented in Brazilian slums.

Someone with Sidney Poitier's deep chocolate complexion would be considered white if his hair were straight and he made a living in a profession. That might not
seem so odd, Brazilians say, when you consider that the fair-complexioned actresses Rashida Jones of the television show "Boston Public" and Lena Horne are
identified as black in the United States.

Neinstein remembered talking with a man of Poitier's complexion during a visit to Brazil. "We were discussing ethnicity," Neinstein said, "and I asked him, 'What do
you think about this from your perspective as a black man?' He turned his head to me and said, 'I'm not black,' " Neinstein recalled. " . . . It simply paralyzed me. I
couldn't ask another question."

By the same token, Neinstein said, he never perceived brown-complexioned people such as Maria Martins, who works at the cultural institute, as black. One day,
when an African American custodian in his building referred to one of his brown-skinned secretaries as "the black lady," Neinstein was confused. "I never looked at
that woman as black," he said. "It was quite a revelation to me."

Those perceptions come to the United States with the light- and dark-complexioned Latinos who carry them. But here, they collide with two contradictory forces:
North American prejudice and African American pride.

'I've Learned to Be Proud'

Vilson DaSilva, a native of Brazil, is a moreno. Like his wife, Maria Martins, he was born to a black father and a white mother. But their views on race seem to
differ.

During an interview when Martins said she had no idea how they had identified themselves on the 2000 Census form, DaSilva rolled his eyes. "I said we were
black," he said.

He is one of a growing number of Latin immigrants of African descent who identify themselves as Afro-Latino, along the same color spectrum as African Americans.

"I've learned to be proud of my color," he said. For that, he thanked African American friends who stand up for equal rights.

An emerging cadre of Latinos in Washington are embracing their African identities and speaking out against what they say is a white Latino establishment, in the U.S.
and abroad.

Lopez, the Afro-Venezuelan lawyer, who lives in Columbia Heights, said there was prejudice even in such Hispanic civil rights organizations as the League of United
Latin American Citizens, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Council of La Raza, where, he said, few dark-complexioned
Latinos work in the offices or sit on the board. "La Raza? Represent me? Absolutely not," Lopez said.

Charles Kamasaki, an analyst for La Raza, disagreed. "I don't think you can make snap judgments like that," he said. "The way race is played out in Latino
organizations is different. There are dark-complexioned people on our board, but I don't know if they identify as Afro-Latino. Our president is mestizo. I would
resist the assertion that this organization is excluding anyone because of race."

Yvette Modestin, the black Panamanian who identifies as an Afro-Latina, said that although she accepts her blackness, she's also an immigrant who speaks Spanish.
In other words, she's not a black American. "My brother's married to a Mexican," she said. "My brother's been called a sellout by black women while walking down
the street with his wife. They are both Latino. They think he married outside his race."

DaSilva agreed that nuances separate African Americans and Afro-Latinos, but he also believes that seeing Latin America through African American eyes gave him a
better perspective. Unfortunately, he said, it also made him angrier and more stressed.

When DaSilva returned to Brazil for a visit, he asked questions he had never asked, and got answers that shocked him.

His mother told him why her father didn't speak to her for 18 years: "It was because she married a black man," he said. One day, DaSilva's own father pulled him
aside to provide his son some advice. " 'You can play around with whoever you want,' " DaSilva recalled his father saying, " 'but marry your own kind.' " So DaSilva
married Martins, the morena of his dreams.

She is dreaming of a world with fewer racial barriers, a world she believes she left in Brazil to be with her husband in Washington.

As Martins talked about the nation's various racial blends in her living room, her 18-month-old son sat in front of the television, watching a Disney cartoon called
"The Proud Family," about a merged black American and black Latino family. The characters are intelligent, whimsical, thoughtful, funny, with skin tones that range
from light to dark brown.

The DaSilvas said they would never see such a show on Latin American TV.

Martins said her perspective on race was slowly conforming to the American view, but it saddened her. She doesn't understand why she can't call a pretty black girl
a negrita, the way Latin Americans always say it, with affection. She doesn't understand why she has to say she's black, seeming to deny the existence of her
mother.

"Sometimes I say she is black on the outside and white on the inside," DaSilva said of his wife, who threw her head back and laughed.

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/latinos/latinos-race.htm

 

[SmoothOperator88]

Just saying some I think some powerful knowledge has been dropped.

I second this. It got me thinking about how many people who identify as white now actually would be legally black in the Jim Crow era.

At first I was at that Rachel Dolazal chick and now I'm like . What if she legit does have black ancestors? And its crazy how quickly, relative to history, the idea of the one drop rule has been lost from our consciousness.

Spoiler

 

[How Sway?]

 

[How Sway?]

One drop isn't going to make anyone whiter. All of these students (Howard University) were AfroAmerican's that identified as "Black" regardless of how light some of them were. Embracing blackness regardless of phneotype

Are these Men Suppose To Represent A complexion gradient?

From the whitest 'black' man to the blackest broth a who just happened to be put at the back

 

[Oceanicpuppy]

How come I can't be white then I have one drop?

 

[TMNT4000]

I can't believe this thread is tying to justify mix people who look white as black.

Y'all even trying to claim white people who have one black grandparent as black.

 

[notwhoiusedtobe]

OP, I admire your effort butI don't agree with everything and your motivations are a lil sus....But I'll contribute

Both of these women ID as African American, of course, because that's literally what they are. One is 56% African and one is 51%.

Who cares what the rules were? If you have significant African ancestry/black parentage/identify as AfAm, then that's literally what you are.

I don't claim anyone who can't and doesn't want to be claimed. That includes white presenting people and "I don't see race" new blacks.

 

[Judgement!]

Watched this about a month ago



If you idenitfy and you have a black parent, I'm not going to deny you. We have enough enemies

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Are these Men Suppose To Represent A complexion gradient?

From the whitest 'black' man to the blackest broth a who just happened to be put at the back

Yup

 

[notwhoiusedtobe]

Yoooo, I think I found Da'hell's great great grandpappy Da'hellington. The resemblance is uncanny

 

[Yup]

I can't wait when white folks will start catfishing black american and claiming reparations under the guise that they have black ancestry and descendent of the slave trade then you'll see how stupid this looks. That will be epic

I see these transracial whites going after aa 10 acres and a mule real soon. And as always, black american will start pulling their pity party when they get choked by the same concept/ideology they love so much. These whites aren't black but keep telling yourself otherwise.

If anything they reinforce the stereotype that any accomplishments made by blacks is really made by white people with distant black ancestry. The ideology is flawed...it may have helped the past but in thos generation it's hurting y'all. These people aren't light skinned, they're white.

Blackness is based on heritage/ethnicity...not shared experience. What does it even mean? White jews have been discriminated against and some even enslaved, are they black too because they may have some distant aa heritage and "shared experience"?

If y'all cannot delineate your in group and leave that up to white people than you guys are more hopeless than I thought.

 

[Krispy]

Can I claim white then considering I have white ancestry, and that includes being accepted by white people in the way we accept biracials

 

[IllmaticDelta]

How come I can't be white then I have one drop?

You have to look "white"in order to pull that off as I explained here...

King's ability to conceal a black wife and children who lived in the same city was only possible because of New York's unique attributes, Sandweiss said.

"New York had segregated neighborhoods and excellent public transportation," she pointed out. King lived as a bachelor in all-white gentleman's clubs in Manhattan, and hopped on the streetcar when he wanted to visit his family in another borough.

But the most amazing part of King's story is that someone with fair hair and blue eyes was accepted as a black man. He managed it, Sandweiss said, because of the so-called "one-drop" laws passed in the South during Reconstruction, which declared that someone with one black great-grandparent was considered legally black.

"The laws were meant to make it very difficult to move from one racial category to the other," Sandweiss said. "Ironically, they made it very possible to do that, because you could claim an ancestry -- or more often hide an ancestry -- that was invisible in the color of your skin."




AT LEFT: This 1879 photo of Clarence King was taken while he served as director of the United States Geological Survey. (Photo: Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library) AT RIGHT Ada Copeland King, pictured in 1933, is accompanied by her son, Wallace, whose father was Clarence King. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York Daily News)

Again, the one drop rule only applies to people who look "white". Everyone else is "black" based on obvious visible African features alone. Many fair skinned AfroAmerican did this from time to time and many did this all the way to never return...



"This infiltration was common not just in Virginia but all over the United States. The most interesting document listed in the amicus briefs for Loving vs. Virginia is a statistical study called "African Ancestry of the White American Population" by Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist from Ohio State University. Stuckert's statistical models are tough going, but eye-opening for what they show. Simply put, he examined census and fertility data to arrive at estimates of how many white Americans had African blood lines and how many fair-skinned blacks had crossed over the line to live as white. Stuckert's tables show that during the 1940s alone, roughly 15,550 fair-skinned blacks per year slipped across the color line--about 155,500 for the decade. Stuckert estimates that by 1950 about 21 percent of the whites--or about 28 million of the 135 million persons classified as "white" in the census--had black ancestry within the last four generations. He predicted that the proportion would only grow in the coming decades. The belief that one's ancestors are "racially uniform" is a basic American fiction, Stuckert wrote, but a fiction nonetheless."


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...ute/1999/10/the_real_american_love_story.html

Harry Pace

the founder and CEO of Black Swan records, the first African American music recording company. Harry Pace was born January 6, 1894 in Covington, Georgia. to Charles and Elizabeth Pace. He graduated Valedictorian from Atlanta University in 1903. He married Ethylynde Bibb in 1917. He worked with W.E. B. DuBois on the Moon Illustrated Weekly which was the precursor to The Crisis which became the official publication for the NAACP

He eventually passed for white after always having a "black" identity


words from his granddaughter:

Susan Pace Hoy

https://www.blogger.com/profile/07279795613147873259

My name is Susan Pace Hoy and I am the granddaughter of Harry Herbert Pace. I grew up in an all white neighborhood in a small town, went to an all white school during elementary and high school, attended an all white Episcopalian church on Sundays and grew up with the understanding that my roots were possibly Italian. I never was told anything about my father’s heritage and he never offered any information to us.
About two years ago, my brother told me of my real roots. His wife discovered from the internet, a story of a man- an incredible man. This was the story of a scholar, lawyer, author, entrepreneur, philosopher, insurance executive & record producer. This was a story of a man who founded the largest black insurance company in America, who partnered with W.C. Handy, “Father of the Blues”, founded Black Swan records and produced the first black recording artists in America. This man was an advocate for the black race for nearly his lifetime until he passed into the white world. The article I read off the internet that evening was by Jitu K. Weusi. “The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records.”

It was written how this man was very light-skinned and could pass for white. That is exactly what he did-years after the fall of Black Swan Records. I was stunned that the man I was reading about was in fact my grandfather. I was the granddaughter of this incredible person. How could this have been kept from us? How could my father go to his death without telling us this unbelievable story? How could he have been married to my mother for so many years and never told her? I always struggled with why my father never could tell us anything about his childhood. He never talked of his Dad unless we questioned him and then I suppose it was all false. My father had only one sibling, a sister, and she is alive and living in the mid-west. “The Secret” that my aunt and my father harbored almost their entire life is now out to the family.
My nephew asks the question how a discovery such as this could make a person question their sense of identity?
Perhaps when you are young and still have so much of life to live and are only just formulating your identity it may not pose as such an issue. Young people today have been around a multitude of cultures for most of their lives. Growing up in the 50’s, 60’s & 70’s, I remember the civil rights movement, and when busing was being used as a way of integration of the schools. When you have lived 50 + years as one race and then suddenly find you’re bi-racial, it has been not an easy adjustment. These past two years have been tough. Our family has been ripped apart. Some are not speaking to one another and some are. Some do not want to delve deeper into this while my brother and I clearly want to know it all. I have shared the story with my very closest friends. They have embraced me and given me their ear while others I have not, just because of the magnitude of the story. At times I feel conflicted. I am so proud to be related to this man. On the other hand, I feel ashamed of myself for the hesitation when asked about my heritage. Now I am constantly questioning myself. Could it be that I am perpetuating racism by these feelings? I am who I have always been- I am the same person, just a lot more enriched. Aren’t we all just a melting pot of cultures? Perhaps this stereotype of what equates whiteness or blackness will someday disappear. I would like to think that as time goes on race can be a thing of the past.

His grandson:

Peter Pace

https://www.blogger.com/profile/15490075348065506314

My sons question about how discovering that you have african ancestry later in your life affects your sense of identity is a difficult and subtle issue. My wife points out that I have been utterly changed by the knowledge. A person reflects on the world through the filter of identiy. Any change to that sense of identity, changes how you look out at the rest of the world and calls into question assumptions about your own life. Anecdotal incidents from childhood that were always considered benign,take on new interpretation. Why was it kept secret from me and what are my responsibilties of disclosure to friends, family and the world at large? The secret becomes my secret. My family is still struggleing with all of this. Some wish that we had never found out, others have become obsessive about finding out more but all of us have been irreversibly changed by this knowledge.

http://harryherbertpace.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-name-is-peter-pace.html



https://www.blogger.com/profile/07279795613147873259