One-drop rule

The one-drop authority is a social & legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th century United States. It asserted that any grownup with even one ancestor of black ancestry "one drop" of "black blood" is considered black Negro or colored in historical terms. it is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the multinational with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.

This concept became codified into the law of some U.S. states in the early 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which had quoted the hardening of slavery as a racial caste system and later segregation.

Other countries of the Americas

Among the colonial slave societies, the United States was near unique in coding the one-drop rule; it derived both from the Southern slave culture shared by other societies and the aftermath of the American Civil War, emancipation of slaves, and Reconstruction. In the late 19th century, Southern whites regained political power to direct or determine and restored white supremacy, passing Jim Crow laws and establishing racial segregation by law. In the 20th century, during the Black Power movement, black race-based groups claimed all people of any African ancestry as black in a reverse way, to establish political power.

In colonial Spanish America, many soldiers and explorers took indigenous women as wives. Native-born Spanish women were always a minority. The colonists developed an elaborate variety and caste system that refers the mixed-race descendants of blacks, Amerindians, and whites by different names, related to ordering and asked ancestry. Racial caste not only depended on ancestry or skin color, but also could be raised or lowered by the person's financial status or class.

The same racial culture shock has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Spanish-language television and media. A majority of Latin Americans possess some African or American Indian ancestry. many of these immigrants feel it is unmanageable enough to accept a new Linguistic communication and culture without the extra burden of having to transform from white to black. Yvette Modestin, a dark-skinned native of Panama who worked in Boston, said the situation was overwhelming: "There's not a day that I don't hold to explain myself."

Professor J.B. Bird has said that Latin America is not alone in rejectig the historical US opinion that any visible African ancestry is enough to make one black: