I’m Black. Kamala Harris is Black. So are millions of Black people who have multiple heritages.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As Trumpublicans try desperately to find something, anything to attack VP Kamala Harris with, their recent resort to challenging her “blackness” has not gone over well. The sheer stupidity of questioning someone’s “race” given the rules laid down with its invention, which have been in place here for hundreds of years is weak tea, and has unleashed a massive pushback.
As a cultural anthropologist, whose area of study was racial hierarchies in the Caribbean and the U.S this is not my first venture in writing about the subject here at Daily Kos. I wrote Teaching about "race" in the US. Part 1 in 2009, a year after I joined here, following up in 2011 with Teaching about Race: 101 (there’s a quiz attached — if you haven’t taken it, please do)
What is key in all the ways Black people have been socially constructed as a “race” here, is the rule of “hypodescent” also known as the “one drop rule.”
For years, racial classification in America was determined – for African Americans – on the basis of hypodescent or the “one drop” rule. The hypodescent rule meant that any degree of African ancestry was sufficient to classify the person as “Negro” or “Black.”
Attempts to precisely define degrees of racial intermixture were expressed through commonly used terms until the 1940s. The offensive descriptors mulatto (one half black), quadroon (one-fourth), octoroon (one-eighth) quintroon (one-fifteenth) and mustee (one sixteenth) were all in regular usage. It has been estimated that at least three-fourths of all people defined as “black” or African American have some white ancestry. Hypodescent had implications of racial purity. The widely held belief was that anyone unable to pass for white – in the context of the U.S. racial hierarchy – was assigned the lower status of being non-white or Colored.
Ironically, that one drop has given the Black community some of it’s most powerful historical figures.
Heh. Here’s an example: