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46-438: Governments of the time sometimes incorporated the terms in law, defining rights and restrictions. The use of such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent , which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate. The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African ancestors or equivalent, emphasizing

92-516: A throne or fief to male heirs descended from the original title holder through males only. Traditionally, agnatic succession is applied in determining the names and membership of European dynasties . The prevalent forms of dynastic succession in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa were male-preference primogeniture , agnatic primogeniture , or agnatic seniority until after World War II . The agnatic succession model, also known as Salic law , meant

138-665: A knife, swallows a drop of blood, then tells the sheriff "I'm no white man – I've got negro blood in me." The sheriff lets him off. Sinclair Lewis's novel Kingsblood Royal uses hypodescent and the "one drop" principle as principal plot elements. Numerous memoirs have been published by African Americans who explore growing up as mixed race with a white parent, such as The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride . Bliss Broyard, in One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life , wrote about her father Anatole Broyard 's decision to live and work as

184-554: A limited-term indenture for her as a girl. But the guardian sold her indenture and left the colony, and the next master did not free her. When he died, his estate claimed her and her son as slave property. However, following Key's victory, Virginia established the principle in law in 1662 of partus sequitur ventrem , from Roman law ; that is, children born in the colonies would take the social status of their mothers. This meant that all children born to enslaved women would be born into slavery, regardless of their paternity and race. This

230-479: A person whose parents are both mulatto. In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on U.S. census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries. The term octoroon referred to a person with one-eighth African/Aboriginal ancestry; that is, someone with family heritage equivalent to one biracial grandparent; in other words, one African great-grandparent and seven European great-grandparents. An example

276-470: A person with any known African ancestry, regardless of the number of intervening generations. The same Act established a binary classification system for vital records, classifying people as 'white' or 'black' (Negro at the time). The latter was effectively a 'catch all' term for all people of color. Native Americans were classified as colored, a clear indication of the then-prevalent local attitude to all races other than white. In its most extreme form in

322-536: A person with one-sixteenth African ancestry. The terms quintroon or hexadecaroon were also used. In the French Antilles , the following terms were used during the 18th century: In some countries in Latin America, the terms griffe or sambo were sometimes used for an individual of three-quarters black parentage, i.e. the child of a mulatto parent and a fully black parent. In the period before

368-532: A reservation. White people referred to Fontenelle as chief of the Omaha, and he was one of the signatories of the treaty along with Omaha chiefs, perhaps because he spoke English. Various places in the city of Omaha were named after Fontenelle. But among the Omaha, Fontenelle was considered a white man because his father was white, and he was never a recognized chief. As the Omaha had a patrilineal kinship society, hereditary chieftainship and descent were passed through

414-405: A variety of terms for racial groups, some terms for quadroons were morisco or chino , see casta . Terceroon was a term synonymous with quadroon, derived from being three generations of descent from an African ancestor, counting the ancestor as the first generation. The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one fully black parent and one fully white parent, or

460-532: A white and anyone considered a negro , mulatto , quadroon (one-fourth black), octoroon (one-eighth black), Mongolian , or member of "the Malay race " (here referring to Filipinos ). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people who were not "white people". The law was repealed in 1963. In the United States , hypodescent has often defined children of mixed-race couples as black when one parent

506-561: A woman of partial African descent. Other mixed-race children were left enslaved; some were sold away by their fathers. Research by historians and genealogists has shown that unlike the above examples, most free African Americans listed in the first two US censuses in the Upper South were descended from relationships or marriages in colonial Virginia between white women, indentured servant or free, and African or African-American men, indentured servant, free or slave. Their unions reflected

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552-451: A writer, rather than a black writer, largely separating from his mixed-race, Louisiana Creole family. He married a white woman of Swedish descent and their children appear white. Patrilineality Patrilineality , also known as the male line , the spear side or agnatic kinship , is a common kinship system in which an individual's family membership derives from and is recorded through their father's lineage. It generally involves

598-672: Is believed to be descended through his maternal line from John Punch , the first African documented historically as a slave in Virginia. The genealogical company Ancestry.com sponsored a study of his family history and documented this connection. Punch's descendants increasingly married white and are believed to have been accepted as white by the early 18th century. In the history of the US, people have less consistently applied hypodescent in intermarriage between white people and people of other racial groups, such as Native Americans, and Asians. There

644-507: Is born into slavery and is 1/32 part black. He is mistakenly switched in infancy with the white son of the master's household, and each grows up to fulfill his social role. The US late-19th century author Charles Chesnutt , who grew up free in Ohio and was of mixed African-European ancestry, wrote numerous stories set in the post-Civil War South. He explored the issues encountered by people of mixed race, in some cases relating what became known as

690-707: Is classified as "black", or either is thought to have African descent. Since the 1960s particularly and the rise of the Black Power movement, many members of the African-American community have emphasized that mixed-race individuals of African descent should identify as black in order to maximize their political power as a group in the United States. Leaders say they were historically discriminated against as black by white people, so should identify as black to assert their power in numbers. President of

736-528: Is three-quarters white and one-quarter Amerindian ), especially in Caribbean South America . Quadroon was used to designate a person of one-quarter African/ Aboriginal ancestry, that is equivalent to one biracial parent (African/Aboriginal and Caucasian) and one white or European parent; in other words, the equivalent of one African/Aboriginal grandparent and three White or European grandparents. In some countries in Latin America, which had

782-558: The American Civil War , mixed-race slaves with predominantly white features were depicted in photos and other media to show whites that some slaves were visually indistinguishable from themselves, thus preventing them from seeing slaves as an ethnic " other ", in order to further the abolition movement . Hypodescent In societies that regard some races or ethnic groups of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent refers to

828-535: The Civil War -era, that "any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds." Fanny Kemble , the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men sexually abused slave women and left their mixed-race children enslaved. Sometimes

874-456: The one-drop theory for rules prohibiting interracial marriages . This was part of a continuing social hardening of racial lines after the turn of the century, when southern states imposed legal segregation and disfranchised African Americans. Other states applied the hypodescent rule without carrying it to the "one-drop" extreme, using instead a blood quantum standard. For example, Utah 's anti- miscegenation law prohibited marriage between

920-405: The tragic mulatto genre. Passing is a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen , dealing with mixed-race African-American women who choose alternate paths for marriage and identity. In the musical Show Boat (1927), a white man is married to a mixed-race woman passing for white. He is accused by the sheriff of violating the state's anti-miscegenation laws. The white man pricks his wife's finger with

966-470: The 1660s, the Assembly stated that "any English servant that shall run away in company with any Negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by addition of time shall serve for the time of the said Negroes absence", indicating that at least some Africans could not "make satisfaction" by serving longer if recaptured (presumably because they were already indentured for life). This device gave legal status to

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1012-509: The South, even in areas where there were black majorities, largely by a process of violence and intimidation of black Republicans. The Democrats gradually imposed white supremacy in law and practice. From 1890 to 1908, beginning with Mississippi, the state legislatures passed new constitutions and laws that created barriers to voter registration by such means as the poll tax , literacy tests , record requirements and others. The number of voters on

1058-498: The United States Barack Obama is often referred to as the first black or African-American President. He has said as a youth that he chose to identify as black and worked in community organizing in a black community. His mother and her parents were of European descent; his father and his family are sub-Saharan African from Kenya . But, in a case exemplifying the complex racial history of the United States, Obama

1104-950: The United States, hypodescent was the basis of the " one drop rule ", meaning that if an individual had any black ancestry, the person was classified as black. Laws were passed in southern states and others in the early 20th century, long after the end of slavery to define white and black, under associated laws for segregation: Tennessee adopted such a "one-drop" statute in 1910; Louisiana ; Texas ; Arkansas in 1911; Mississippi in 1917; North Carolina in 1923; Virginia in 1924; Alabama and Georgia in 1927; and Oklahoma in 1931. During this same period, Florida , Indiana , Kentucky , Maryland , Missouri , Nebraska , North Dakota , and Utah retained their old "blood fraction" statutes de jure , but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirtysecond) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto . By 1924 many "white" people in Virginia would have had some African and/or Native American ancestry, given

1150-415: The United States. While customs, practices and systems of belief emphasizing the value of purity of descent are arguably as old as mankind, few societies systematically codified them, or legally enforced their outcome. Practices were enforced in communities. Such was the case in classical Greece – which made clear distinctions between Greeks and Barbarians. The Roman Republic had a different pattern. While it

1196-408: The automatic assignment of children of a mixed union to the subordinate group. The opposite practice is hyperdescent , in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior. Parallel practices include patrilineality , matrilineality , and cognatic descent , which assign race, ethnicity, or religion according to the father, mother, or some combination, without regard to

1242-581: The direction of European colonists and colonial authorities were joined by enslaved Africans that from the 16th century onwards were transported to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade . But while the freed captives were Christians, these individuals were classified as indentured workers. Virginia formally enacted a slave code in 1705. There is documentary evidence from the 1650s that some Africans in Virginia were serving lifelong terms of indenture. In

1288-559: The father. For example, a person is considered to be a priest or Levite , if his father is a priest or Levite, and the members of all the Twelve Tribes are called Israelites because their father is Israel ( Jacob ). In the first lines of the New Testament , the descent of Jesus Christ from King David is counted through the male lineage. Patrilineal or agnatic succession gives priority to or restricts inheritance of

1334-686: The first child born to a monarch inherits the throne, regardless of the child's sex. The fact that human Y-chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) is paternally inherited enables patrilines and agnatic kinships of men to be traced through genetic analysis. Y-chromosomal Adam (Y-MRCA) is the patrilineal most recent common ancestor from whom all Y-DNA in living men is descended. An identification of a very rare and previously unknown Y-chromosome variant in 2012 led researchers to estimate that Y-chromosomal Adam lived 338,000 years ago (237,000 to 581,000 years ago with 95% confidence ), judging from molecular clock and genetic marker studies. Before this discovery, estimates of

1380-713: The fluid nature of relationships among the working classes before slave caste was hardened, as well as the small households and farms within which many people worked. The children of white mothers were born free. If they were illegitimate and mixed race, they were apprenticed in order to avoid the community being burdened with upkeep, but such people gained a step in freedom. By the turn of the nineteenth century, many of these families of free African Americans, along with European-American neighbors, migrated to frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and then further west. Such families sometimes settled in insular groups. Mixed-race people of African-European descent are believed to have been

1426-467: The inheritance of property, rights, names, or titles by persons related through male kin. This is sometimes distinguished from cognate kinship, through the mother's lineage, also called the spindle side or the distaff side. A patriline ("father line") is a person's father, and additional ancestors, as traced only through males. In the Bible , family and tribal membership appears to be transmitted through

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1472-496: The late 18th century, there were numerous families of majority-white slaves, such as the mixed-race children born to the slave Sally Hemings and her master Thomas Jefferson . She was three-quarters white and the half-sister of his late wife; their children, born into slavery, were seven-eighths white. Jefferson gave the four surviving children their freedom as adults; three assimilated into white society. The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie , of

1518-458: The male line. A person whose father was white was not considered Omaha unless he was formally adopted by a male Omaha member. Both African-American and white authors have explored issues related to mixed race and hypodescent in fiction and non-fiction. In the novel Pudd'nhead Wilson , by Mark Twain , the character of the enslaved woman Roxy is described as "Negro", although she has considerable white ancestry and could pass for white . Her son

1564-472: The mixing over the centuries. At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing to overturn segregation and regain civil rights, that had been lost to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement of the majority of the black community. By the early 1940s, of the thirty U.S. states that had anti-miscegenation laws , seven states ( Alabama , Arizona , Georgia , Montana , Oklahoma , Texas , and Virginia ) had adopted

1610-513: The origin of some isolated settlements, which have long claimed or were said to be of American Indian or Portuguese ancestry. As an example, a 21st-century DNA study of a group of Melungeon families in Tennessee and Kentucky, long rumored to be descendants of Turks or Native Americans, showed they were overwhelmingly of African and European ancestry. By the late 1870s, conservative white Democrats regained power in state legislatures across

1656-438: The practice of lifetime enslavement of people of African descent; in subsequent statutes the legislature defined conditions of lifetime servitude. In 1655, Elizabeth Key Grinstead , a mixed-race woman, fought and won the first freedom suit in Virginia. Her English father had acknowledged her as his daughter, had her baptized as Christian, and, falling ill, established a legal guardian to care for her after his death, arranging

1702-671: The quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry. The word quadroon was borrowed from the French quarteron and the Spanish cuarterón , both of which have their root in the Latin quartus , meaning "a quarter". Similarly, the Spanish cognate cuarterón is used to describe cuarterón de mulato or morisco (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter black) and cuarterón de mestizo or castizo , (someone whose racial origin

1748-483: The race of the other parent. These systems determine group membership based on the gender of the parent rather than the social dominance of the group, and thus can be hypodescent or hyperdescent depending on the genders of the parents and the views of the culture in which they live (i.e. patriarchal vs matriarchal societies). Attempts to limit (or eliminate) mixed-race populations by legal means are defined in anti-miscegenation laws , such as passed by various states in

1794-554: The rolls fell drastically and most blacks and many poor whites were disenfranchised for decades. The whites also passed Jim Crow laws , such as racial segregation of public facilities. African Americans and whites established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 to fight against legal discrimination and disenfranchisement. Each time they won a court case, for instance, against

1840-523: The total exclusion of women as hereditary monarchs and restricted succession to thrones and inheritance of fiefs or land to men in parts of medieval and later Europe. This form of strict agnatic inheritance has been officially revoked in all extant European monarchies except the Principality of Liechtenstein . By the 21st century, most ongoing European monarchies had replaced their traditional agnatic succession with absolute primogeniture , meaning that

1886-412: The use of white primaries , white-dominated legislatures would pass new laws to exclude blacks from the political system. In the 20th century, under influences of eugenics and racial discrimination, states enacted laws classifying people as black who had any traceable evidence (or perception of any African ancestry). Under Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the 'One-drop' rule defined as black

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1932-471: The white fathers freed the children and/or their mothers, or provided education or apprenticeship, or settled property on them in a significant transfer of social capital. Notable antebellum period examples of fathers who provided for their mixed-race children were the fathers of Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston and the father of the Healy family of Georgia . Each had a common-law marriage with

1978-676: Was Russian poet Alexander Pushkin . Octoroon was applied to a limited extent in Australia for those of one-eighth Aboriginal ancestry, as the government implemented assimilation policies on the Stolen Generations . The term mustee was also used to refer to a person with one-eighth African ancestry. The term sacatra was used to refer to one who was seven-eighths black or African and one-eighth white or European (i.e. an individual with one black and one griffe parent, or one white great-grandparent). The term mustefino refers to

2024-510: Was certainly discrimination against people of mixed European and Native American, and European and Asian ancestry, however. Hypodescent is not only practiced by people of European ancestry. In Omaha, Nebraska , white people have celebrated Logan Fontenelle , a mixed-race man of the late 19th century who served as interpreter for a major treaty between the Omaha Nation and the United States that ceded most of their land before they moved to

2070-467: Was expansionist, and militarily and culturally aggressive, it actively encouraged the Romanisation of client kingdoms, which included intermarriage of Romans with their elite citizens and making this class citizens of Rome as reward and as exemplars. The North American practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began during the colonial era when indentured servants and transported convicts working at

2116-405: Was in contrast to English common law, by which the status of children of English subjects was determined by the father. As slavery became a racial caste system, people of only partial African ancestry and majority European ancestry were born into slavery. African descent became associated with slavery. By hypodescent, people of even partial African ancestry were classified socially below whites. By

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