On Slavery and the “One Drop” Rule

(Letter)

23 August 2019

Dear Workers Vanguard,

As a longtime regular reader of WV, I would like to raise a question regarding the “one-drop rule” referred to in your article “In the Predominant Imperialist Power” in the section on “Black America: What Makes America America,” where you state that the “one-drop rule,” which deemed anyone with any African ancestry as black, existed under slavery: “Under slavery this was wielded to ensure that the offspring from the rape of a slave by anyone in the master’s house would remain in bondage.” Indeed, children born to enslaved black women as a result of rape by white men were considered black and remained in bondage, but this was because women were considered the carriers of identity. The sexual transgressions of white men were regarded as “individual and limited,” whereas those of white women struck “mortally at the existence of the family itself” (William Smith), which was understood as “blurring” the race line and threatening lines of inheritance. The one-drop rule, which evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, was not codified as a legal principle until 1910, although a focus on blood and genealogy by the end of the eighteenth century certainly established the basis for it.

A statute passed by the Virginia legislature in 1662, before the focus on blood and genealogy, provided that “children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman…shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” This was a departure from English common law based on patriarchal descent and allowed white men to shirk responsibility for their children with black women and slaveholders to enslave their mixed-race children. It also meant that children fathered by black men and born to white women were free, starting the class of free mulattos (when they weren’t abandoned, secretly sold, or killed). By 1785, Virginia legally defined a Negro as an individual with a black parent or grandparent, so that anyone having one quarter or more of African blood would be considered a Negro and therefore presumed to be a slave. Anthropologists regard this as an example of “hypodescent,” meaning the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union to the group with the lower status. Yet before and after the Civil War, free people of mixed race who “looked white,” even if an eighth or quarter black, were considered legally white (depending on the state) and were absorbed into the majority culture based on appearance, associations, and community acceptance rather than ancestry. The language of the one-drop rule was first used by the government in the Fourteenth Census in 1920 when the Census Bureau dropped the term “mulatto” and substituted the one-drop rule, effectively ending the category of mixed race and establishing the binary of “white” or “black” identity during the period that also saw the rise of eugenics, Jim Crow laws, black disfranchisement, and spectacle lynchings.

None of this is meant to diminish the enormously destructive and ongoing racist effects of the “one-drop rule,” which applies to no other minority group anywhere except for African Americans, but only to show the lengths to which whites went in order to protect white men who raped black women during slavery, creating a matriarchal rationale for identity in an otherwise deeply patriarchal society.

Comradely,
Dora A.

WV replies:

As we explained in WV No. 1158 (26 July): “The concept of race—and racism—was perfected in American slavery, in which black skin was deemed a sign of inherent ‘inferiority.’ Permanent and hereditary, the color line was enforced so rigidly that anyone who had ‘one drop’ of African ancestry was branded as black.” To this day, black people are confronted by the legacy of slavery, embodied in the enduring reality of racial oppression: segregation, poverty, police terror and mass incarceration.

Dora challenges the part played by the “one drop” principle in reinforcing slavery, arguing that the offspring of white male slaveowners and black female slaves were branded as slaves because women were “the carriers of identity.” Falsely equating matrilineal descent with matriarchy, she further contends that a “matriarchal rationale for identity” was created in order to “protect white men” by allowing them to “shirk responsibility” for their mixed-race children.

In reality, that the children of black slaves remained in bondage was about perpetuating black chattel slavery, that is, maintaining a supply of labor in the form of human property deemed racially inferior. The radical black abolitionist Frederick Douglass got to the crux of the matter when he wrote, “By the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to the condition of their mothers. This arrangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit” (My Bondage and My Freedom [1855]). White male slaveowners did not need to be “protected” from doing as they willed with what the law recognized as their property; slavery was based on horrific violence and domination, including rape.

The 1662 Virginia statute cited in the letter above decreed that the child of a black woman and a white man would inherit the status of the mother—that is, as a free black person or a slave. The statute codified the hereditary, lifelong condition of bondage for children born to black slave mothers. It was perhaps the earliest legal example in the colonies of hypodescent, expressed in American society as the “one drop” rule, which was further refined up through the 20th century, and widely enforced through custom and practice.

The statute came at the time when black chattel slavery was beginning to replace overwhelmingly white indentured servitude as the primary system of labor. During the earlier colonial period, racial classifications had been somewhat fluid: English colonists were the dominant group, and social and sexual relations among “un-English” indentured servants—which included French, Scots, black people and others—were common. Sowing divisions among white and black toilers was critical in consolidating a slave system based on the concept of race.

Our reader erroneously presents the 1662 Virginia statute as a break from “patriarchal descent.” In fact, two years later, Maryland passed a law that the children of white women who “inter marry with Negro slaves” would also be slaves; that is, bondage was contingent on either parent being a slave. By 1691, Virginia passed a new law that a free white woman who had a child by a black father would face banishment from the colony, while the child would be enslaved for 30 years. The institution of slavery made black people the “carriers of identity.”

Racial classification in legal code was well underway by the early 1700s for both free and enslaved blacks. Laws determined race based on ancestry, appearance and/or algebraic definitions. Criteria varied: often, having one black grandparent made a person black, and sometimes having just one black great-great-grandparent. On Southern plantations, light-skinned slaves were common, with some even appearing white, a phenomenon that mystified foreign travelers.

Dora’s letter asserts that, even under slavery, free mixed-race people who “looked white” were “absorbed into the majority culture.” Such a statement underplays the deeply entrenched and brutal racism in this society. It also contradicts the fact that, more often than not, those with even a small trace of African ancestry were presumed to be slaves in antebellum America, unlike in other slave societies, such as Brazil. Runaway slaves, including those with lighter complexions who could “pass” as white, faced legal punishment or extralegal terror if they got caught. Whether before or after the Civil War, black people who tried to “pass” to gain upward mobility had to deny their ancestry and cut family ties.

Following the crushing of the slavocracy, the brief and tumultuous period of Radical Reconstruction, which posed the potential for equal political rights for black people, was defeated by the bourgeoisie. Black people were subsequently consolidated as an oppressed race-color caste and forcibly segregated at the bottom of society; those with lighter skin or of mixed race were considered black. The victory of white-supremacist rule paved the way for legal Jim Crow segregation at the end of the 19th century, and “one drop” governed. In the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Homer Plessy, a man of mixed-race ancestry who could pass as white but was arrested for sitting in the “white” car on a train. The racist Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal” came to pervade every sphere of life.

The letter writer asserts that “one drop” was not codified until 1910. Such a focus on legality dismisses over two centuries of social reality. As stated by sociology professor F. James Davis in his book, Who Is Black? (1991): “The definition of a black person as one with any trace at all of black African ancestry is inextricably woven into the history of the United States. It incorporates beliefs once used to justify slavery and later used to buttress the castelike Jim Crow system of segregation.”

A central aim of the “one drop” statutes was to draw a sharp black-white divide and prohibit interracial sex and marriage, particularly between black men and white women. For any suspicion of racial “mingling,” black men faced the terror of the lynch rope. The early 20th century white-supremacist William Benjamin Smith, who is cited by our reader, railed against “blood mixing” and denounced white women’s sexual transgressions as a threat to so-called racial purity and to the “sanctity” of the family—the main source of the oppression of women and a key prop of the racist rulers in upholding their capitalist system. Laws against interracial marriage stayed on the books until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia.

The “one drop” rule applies to no other population in the U.S. than black people, whose race-color caste oppression is intrinsic to the American capitalist order. To achieve black freedom requires nothing less than socialist revolution, in which black workers will play a key leadership role. For more on the centrality of the black question, see the two-part article “Black Liberation Struggle: The Key to American Socialist Revolution” (WV Nos. 1148 and 1149, 8 February and 22 February).