Hypodescent

In societies that regard some races of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent is the assignment of mixed-race children to the race that is considered subordinate or inferior. The opposite practice is hyperdescent, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.

Parallel practices include agnatic descent and cognatic descent, which assign race according to the father or mother, respectively, without regard to the race of the other parent. Since either parent (or both) might be of mixed-race, hypo- and hyper-descent can operate in tandem with, or separately from, a system of agnatic or cognatic racial assignment.

History

The American practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began its development in the colonies, as slavery was established. But, it developed in its most strict application after the end of slavery, when Democrats regained power in southern states after the Reconstruction era and reasserted white political supremacy through the passage of disfranchising legislation and constitutional amendments, as well as Jim Crow laws, including racial segregation. In Thomas Jefferson's time, a person with one-eighth or less African ancestry could be considered white. By 20th century Virginia, the state passed a law defining as black a person with any known African ancestry, no matter how many generations in the past.

Because slavery was made an inherited caste, passed through the mother, the slave states did not have to worry much about social control of the products of mixed-race unions. They were typically the children of white planters, or their sons or overseers, who had relationships with enslaved women. By the 18th century, in Virginia, travelers already noted the high rate of mixed-race people, and many shades of color found among slaves. There were traveler reports of "white slaves", meaning those who looked white and had only a small part of African ancestry. White planters who were widowed, such as John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, and Thomas Jefferson himself, took slave women as companions in longterm relationships and had several children with them. Each had a relationship with a slave woman of mixed race.

The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie of the Civil War-era about the hypocrisy of a woman's recognizing white men's children among the slaves in every household but her own. Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men used slave women and left their mixed-race children enslaved.

In the US, when slavery became an inherited lifelong legal status, children were assigned the status of the mother. In that context, most mixed-race slave children had white fathers who were planters or their sons, or overseers, and mothers who were enslaved. Men took advantage of the power relationship inherent in slavery. Sometimes the fathers freed the children and/or their mothers, or provided education or apprenticeship, or even settled property on them, but other children were left enslaved and even sold away by their fathers.^[1]

Research by historians and genealogists has shown that most African Americans free in Virginia and nearby states in the colonial period, however, were from relationships between white women, indentured servant or free, and African or African-American men, indentured servant, free or slave. This reflected the fluid nature of relationships among the working classes before slave rules were made so strict. Because the mothers were white, the children were free born. Many free African Americans migrated to frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and then further west. Such families sometimes settled in insular groups and were the origin of some isolated settlements that have long claimed Indian or Portuguese ancestry.^[2]

In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent was the basis of the "one drop rule", meaning that if a person had one drop of black blood, he was considered to be black. New laws arose long after the end of slavery, such as the Virginia's 1924 Act for the "Preservation of Racial Integrity", which defined as white a person with "no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian." This may have been in reaction to general social tensions of the post-WWI years, and to increasing agitation by African Americans to regain civil rights.

By 1924 there would have been many "white" people in Virginia who would have had some African and/or Native American ancestry. Some of their ancestors would have married "white" and successfully passed into the majority community, while others may have married into the African-American community. At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing there and in other southern states to overturn segregation and regain civil rights lost to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement of the majority of the black community. Established in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in filing lawsuits to overturn such provisions.

Anti-miscegenation marriage laws

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 the one-drop theory for rules prohibiting interracial marriages.^[3] 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 a white and anyone considered a negro, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Mongolian, or member of "the Malay race" (here referring to Filipinos). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people who were not "white persons". Utah passed its anti-miscegenation law in 1888 as part of an anti-polygamy marriage law when the state legislature was dominated by non-Mormons. The law was repealed in 1963.

Other examples of application

• In the United States, hypodescent is used to define the race of children of mixed-race couples where one of the parents is classified as "black" or either is considered to have any trace of African descent. That practice seems to be diminishing; on the other hand, since the 1960s particularly and the rise of the Black Power movement, many members of the African-American community have insisted that all mixed-race individuals should be identified as black if they have any African-American ancestry.

In the US, people less consistently apply hypodescent in intermarriage between whites and other ethnic groups, such as Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.

Evolution

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and Great Britain, societies have developed something like "genetic dominance" in our use of language to identify children from mixed race unions. He notes first, that people seem to be eager to embrace racial classification, even when talking about people of obviously mixed parentage; and second, that we tend not to describe people as of mixed race. Mixed-race children of European-African unions tend to be identified as "black", in what Dawkins calls a "cultural or memetic dominant."^[4] He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to recognize and differentiate among minor superficial differences, in contrast to what we share in our "unusually high level of genetic uniformity in the human species."^[5] It is difficult to say what evolutionary purpose such differentiation served; perhaps it contributed to group solidarity when groups lived further apart in different regions and were divided by many cultural factors. He suggests that such differentiation may be an "information-rich way to classify people."^[6]

References in culture

In the novel Pudd'n'head Wilson, by Mark Twain, the character of Roxy is deemed "Negro", even though she could pass for white. This characteristic is passed on (mistakenly) to her son Chambers.

The US late 19th century author Charles Chesnutt, of mixed European and African heritage, wrote numerous stories set in the post-Civil War South about the social issues related to the choices of people of color.

In the musical Show Boat, a white man in love with a mulatto woman is accused by the sheriff of violating the state's anti-miscegenation laws. The white man promptly pricks the woman's finger with 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.

See also

• Race
• Miscegenation
• Matrilineality
• Patrilineality
• Mestee
• Mestizo
• Racial segregation
• Racialism
• Racism
• Racial purity

Citations

Additional reading

• Thomas e. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke University press, 1993)
• Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NY: New York University Press: 1996)
• Pierre Savy, « Transmission, identité, corruption. Réflexions sur trois cas d’hypodescendance », L’homme. Revue française d’anthropologie, 182, 2007 (« Racisme, antiracisme et sociétés »), p. 53-80.