Who Is Black?

Winner of the 1992 Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States

This volume is the Tenth Anniversary Edition of a book that was honored in 1992 as an "Outstanding Book" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States. Reprinted many times since its first publication in 1991, Who Is Black? has become a staple in college classrooms throughout the United States, helping students understand this nation’s history of miscegenation and the role that the "one-drop rule" has played in it. In this special anniversary edition, the author brings the story up to date in an epilogue. There he highlights some revealing responses to Who Is Black? and examines recent challenges to the one-drop rule, including the multiracial identity movement and a significant change in the census classification of racial and ethnic groups.

“This is a very well-written book that communicates complex ideas with clarity and interest. It is rare, in my experience, for an academic book written by a social scientist to be as interesting and exciting as a piece of fiction. This book is hard to put down because Davis’s story of how the United States as a nation came to define who is black reads like a mystery novel in which every historical event provides one more clue to the final murder of a people.”—Aida Hurtado, American Journal of Sociology

“Davis has given us a brilliant and informative history of the fateful policy commonly called the rule of hypodescent (the ‘one-drop’ rule) and the impact it has had psychologically, socially, economically, and politically on African-American history. Davis’s book is the most recent in the series of works written on this topic, but is by far the most thorough and insightful.”—G. Reginald Daniel, Contemporary Sociology

“This is an eye-opening appraisal of an issue often taken for granted in America.”—Publishers Weekly

F. James Davis is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Illinois State University and the author of Society and the Law (1962), Social Problems (1970), and Minority-Dominant Relations (1978).

Epilogue to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

While I was completing this book in the late 1980s, I was unaware that a multiracial-identity movement had been developing momentum. Among the first communications I received after publication were those from some of the leaders of the movement, who welcomed me as an ally. Although my purpose was to advance understanding of the deeply entrenched one-drop rule and its effects, not to advocate its end, the analysis does provide much material that can be used to support the multiracial-identity movement. More later about this movement and about the racial categories in the census and on other official forms. The American public has been made more aware of mixed-race issues in the past dozen years. Books, articles, films, news coverage, and talk shows have all contributed to this increased awareness. One of the most dramatic news stories of the 1990s was about the DNA testing that showed that Thomas Jefferson was most likely the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s last son, Estes, with the probability of chance error less than 0.1 percent (Foster, 1998). Although the amount of media treatment has been modest, the one-drop rule has been mentioned often enough that it has entered the national vocabulary.

As noted in Chapter 6, Alex Haley’s book Roots, and the highly popular television series based on it, demonstrated how fully both African Americans and whites accept the one-drop rule. It seemed only natural for Haley to persist in the pursuit of the African roots of his family tree. In his later book, Queen, however, Haley dramatized his white ancestry and focused on his grandmother, who looked white (Haley and Stevens, 1993). Although that book received less acclaim that Roots did, it too was made into a television series, with Halle Berry playing the role of Queen. This actress has reported being called such epithets as ‘‘Zebra’’ and ‘‘Oreo’’ when she was at school and since.

As my book emphasizes, a major consequence of the one-drop rule has been the wide variation in physical traits in the American black community. In his musical film School Daze (1988) and later in Jungle Fever (1991), Spike Lee dramatized the conflicts over differences in skin color and hair within the black community itself and stressed that such conflicts are especially intense in dating, sexual relations, and marriage. These films challenge the taboo in the black community against discussing such ‘‘dirty little secrets’’ before whites.

Lee’s films helped pave the way for a book entitled The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (1992) by Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall. The authors, two of whom are black, stress the marked preoccupation with skin color and hair and provide vivid illustrations of conflicts over differences in physical traits in black families and communities. They demonstrate that discrimination by blacks against blacks occurs not only in intimate relations but also in the workplace, schools, the media, and elsewhere, and they attribute this ‘‘colorism’’ to white racism and the one-drop rule (Russell, Wilson, and Hall, 1992:79–80, 107–62).

After publication of a remarkable book called The Sweeter the Juice (1994) by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, the author and members of her family from both the black and the white communities were featured on the Oprah Show of February 8, 1994. Haizlip’s genealogical search had reunited her mother with a sister and the families of other siblings who had passed into the white world when Shirlee’s mother was a child. Her mother had remained in the black community, not knowing where the rest of the family had gone. I was asked to appear on the show to explain how this can happen, which required an explanation of how the one-drop rule operated.

When Renee Tenison was hailed as the first black woman to be Playboy’s ‘‘Playmate of the Year,’’ in 1990, she asserted that it was unfair for her to have to deny her white ancestry; her mother is white (Russell, Wilson, and Hall, 1992:78, 152–54). In 1995 the Miss USA Pageant was won by Chelsi Smith, who, when asked how it felt to be the first black to win, replied that she is both black and white. This rejection of the one-drop rule set off a flurry of controversy in the black press, which usually portrayed Smith’s stance as a threat to black unity. (Actually, the first black Miss USA was Carole Gist, in 1990.)

Professional golfer Tiger Woods also publicly repudiated the one-drop rule when he won the Masters Championship in 1997. When asked on the telecast how it felt to be the first black to win the tournament, he replied that he is not only African American. His mother, he pointed out, is from Thailand. He apparently is one-fourth Thai, one-fourth Chinese, one-fourth black, one-eighth Native American and one-eighth white. He says he has checked ‘‘Asian’’ as his race (Page, 1996:285). It seems unlikely that such celebrities as Tiger Woods, Chelsi Smith, and Renee Tenison would have so publicly rejected the one-drop rule before the rise of the multiracialidentity movement and a certain amount of public attention given to mixedrace issues in the 1990s.

Many of the readers who have communicated with me about the book have given me valuable information and raised excellent questions. Some of the mixed-race respondents have described embarrassing, frustrating, and painful experiences with the ambiguities of racial identity. Of these, some retain a firm black identity, while others embrace a biracial or multiracial identity. Some have remained in correspondence with me for some time, and I have been privileged to meet a few in person.

A law professor who responded to my book and became a personal acquaintance is now dean of a major law school. He looks white and thought he was white until he was ten years old. Up to that point he had lived with a middle-class white family in Virginia, but following a divorce and financial disaster, the boy’s father took him and his younger brother to live in his home neighborhood in Muncie, Indiana. A younger brother and sister stayed with their mother in the white world in Virginia. En route to Muncie by bus in January 1954, the father told the boys that he had passed as white. While living as ‘‘white blacks’’ in the black community in Muncie, these boys were harassed and discriminated against by both whites and blacks. Yet the older boy, encouraged by his father and by ‘‘Miss Dora,’’ who took the boys in, managed to excel academically and in sports. He worked his way through college and law school, and through it all he developed a firm black identity in spite of his white appearance. In a poignant book, he has recorded the painful experiences through which his racial identity was transformed from white to black (Williams, 1995).

Another law professor with whom I have been in touch teaches in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. She is a white-appearing woman who identifies herself as a white black and who prefers the terms ‘‘bicultural’’ and ‘‘bilingual’’ to ‘‘biracial.’’ Her relatives range in skin color from dark brown to light brown to white. Sometimes, she says, she feels she is a black passing for white, and sometimes that she is a white passing for black. Her experience has taught her that, despite the racial purity laws and the one-drop rule, race is a social construct rather than a biological fact. Once this woman was in a taxi that hit a car and the investigating officer checked her race as white. When she informed the white officer that she is black, his bored response was, ‘‘Sure, Lady, if you say so.’’ The officer acted as if she had arbitrarily invented the centuries-old one-drop rule. She has written a very insightful book about her experiences and her ideas on teaching about differences (Scales-Trent, 1995).

A courageous woman living in San Francisco wrote and telephoned, and eventually we met. Her ancestry includes Mexican American, French, Irish, African American, Choctaw, and Cherokee. Raised as a black, living with her mother and black stepfather in a black community in Iowa, she aroused hostility because of her ambiguous appearance and long hair. She tried to be a ‘‘good black’’ but was not accepted. When she tried to date black men, one angry black woman told her, ‘‘Leave our black men alone!’’ At age nineteen, she was raped and severely beaten by a group of young black males because she did not ‘‘fit in.’’ As they beat her face, the attackers said they would break her nose because it was ‘‘too white.’’ Many years later, after a visit to her mother’s family in Mexico, she identified much more with her Mexican ancestry and began to feel that was what she was ‘‘meant to be.’’

One correspondent is a professor of philosophy in the SUNY system and a prolific scholar on mixed-race issues. Her father was African American and Native American, and her mother was the daughter of Jews from Lithuania. Her identity dilemma has been greatly complicated by the complexities of the Jewish ethnic identity. The illogic of adopting any particular identity—black, white, or Jewish—has led her to question any kind of racial classification, including multiracial. If biologically separate races are unreal, she asks, is not mixed race also? She believes the ultimate answer is the elimination of racial classification, but that America is not ready for it yet (Zack, 1993: 1995:x–xi).

Some of the mixed-race respondents have no black ancestry, but seem well aware that the one-drop rule for blacks has been responsible for the ‘‘check only one’’ instruction for official lists of racial categories. Thus, mixed-race persons who have Native American, Mexican, Asian, or Pacific Islander forbears, have not been able to acknowledge their two or more racial ancestries. Although the majority of Mexican Americans are Mestizos, they have had to check ‘‘black,’’ ‘‘white,’’ or ‘‘other.’’ In the 1990 census, 51 percent of Mexican Americans checked ‘‘white,’’ 1 percent checked ‘‘black,’’ and 48 percent checked ‘‘other.’’ In that census, 97 percent of Americans who checked ‘‘other’’ were Hispanics, who may be of any race or blend.

One Amerasian who responded to my book had grown up in Japan as the daughter of a Japanese mother and an American of Irish and Welsh descent. Now a professor of sociology in the California State University system, she focuses her research and teaching on mixed-race and multicultural experiences. In her research on the children of Japanese mothers and American military men, she has compared the identity problems of Japanese/ European Americans with those of Japanese/black Americans (Williams, 1992). In studying the impact of phenotype on the racial identity and minority status of Amerasians, she has observed the pervasive influence of the American one-drop rule (Williams, 1995).

This same professor has noted that the U.S. government in effect used a one-drop rule for the Japanese Americans in imprisoning them in relocation camps during World War II. The operating rule was that everyone with one-eighth or more Japanese ancestry was to be apprehended and removed to the camps. In view of the fact that the Japanese had been emigrating to the United States only since 1885, this one-eighth criterion was a sure way to intern everyone with any Japanese ancestry at all (Williams, 1996:199). This rule ceased to function when the relocation was terminated. I am indebted to Professor Ruth Colker of the School of Law of the University of Pittsburgh for pointing out my error when I wrote (pp. 8–9) that the U.S. Supreme Court took ‘‘judicial notice’’ of Homer Plessy’s race in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case (163 U.S. 537). Plessy’s lawyer did not raise the issue of racial classification before the Supreme Court, although he had done so in the lower courts. However, we may note that, in accepting the stipulation by the parties that Plessy was a Negro, the Court com1 mented that it is commonly accepted that anyone known as a member of the Negro community is a Negro. That has been a customary indicator used, especially in the South, to implement the one-drop rule. If the Court had not accepted this indicator of Plessy’s racial identity, it apparently would not have heard the issue of racially segregated seating on interstate trains. Perhaps we might call this ‘‘informal judicial notice.’’

Rather than mounting an explicit attack on the one-drop rule, the multiracialidentity movement people emphasize the freedom to affirm one’s whole self by acknowledging all of one’s ancestries. This is claimed as a fundamental civil and human right. One scholar and movement leader suggests that the establishment of this right is the next logical step in the civil rights movement (Daniel, 1992:334). Some movement organizations have centered attention on getting official acceptance of the multiracial category, while others see themselves primarily as support groups for interracial marriages, interracial adoption, or education on mixed-race issues. The movement includes all racial blends, not just those with African black ancestry. Movement spokespersons have argued that the public schools, which exist for the pursuit of truth, have violated the truth when they have followed the ‘‘check only one’’ instruction in classifying multiracial children. Procedures that have commonly been used to classify the race of children when they first attend school, such as the ‘‘eyeball test,’’ also violate the child’s and the family’s right to privacy. A child may get classified differently from the way the family identifies itself. In the area of health, incorrect classification of multiracial children may jeopardize medical diagnosis and treatment (Fernandez, 1995:196–98).

Concerning the fear among blacks that persons who opt for a multiracial identity want to deny their black heritage, the movement’s answer is that such individuals want to be free to affirm all their ancestries, including black. The one-drop rule has for centuries suppressed white and other nonblack ancestries. Movement leaders repudiate the charge that they seek to create a class with a status above that of racial minorities, or a system of ‘‘colorism’’ like Latin America’s. To bolster the human rights theme, it has been argued that multiracial persons have a moral right to claim as much of their own heritage as they want (Zack, 1993). Furthermore, forcing individuals to deny part of their ancestry violates the right to free association, as defined by the Charter of the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

An empirical argument for recognizing multiracial identity is the marked increase in interracial marriages. The proportion of all marriages that are interracial is still small, but the trend that began in the 1960s and 1970s has continued and accelerated. Mixed-race marriages in the United States tripled from 1970 to 1991, from 310,000 to 994,000. From 1968 to 1989, children born to mixed marriages increased from 0.7 percent of all births to 3.4 percent, or from 22,100 to 110,500. During this same period, births for one black and one white parent increased more than fivefold. The next largest group was children of one Asian and one white parent. Chinesewhite births nearly quadrupled. More Japanese Americans married outside the Asian category than within it. For every 100 births in which both parents were Japanese, there were 139 in which only one parent was Japanese and the other non-Asian (Page, 1996:286–87).

There have of course been a great many racially mixed children in the United States for centuries, most of the black-white ones without benefit of marriage and automatically defined as black by the one-drop rule. That rule faces a greater challenge in the black-white marriages of recent decades, the large majority of which involve a black father and a white mother.Many of these wives do not want their children to have to deny their mother’s ancestry. It has been estimated that at least 30 percent of black-white couples in recent decades have wanted to identify their children as biracial or multiracial, not just black.

Another empirical argument for the multiracial identity is the increasing diversity of the American population, racially and ethnically, since the national origins immigration quotas were abolished in 1965. Although whites made up 69 percent of the population in the year 2000, both the 1990 and 2000 censuses showed large increases in minority populations. From 1990 to 2000, blacks increased about 21 percent, to 35.5 million people, while Hispanics (white and nonwhite) increased about 58 percent, to 35.3 million. Both Asians and Native Americans also registered explosive growth. Immigrants come from countries that have no one-drop rule and many, including the majority of Hispanic immigrants, are racially mixed. The multiracial-identity movement made gains in the 1980s, but the fastest growth came in the early 1990s. By 1992 there were some thirty movement organizations across the country, and this later grew to forty or more. Some of the organizations are small, but others, such as theMultiracial Americans of Southern California, are quite large. These groups, many of which were organized in university communities, are scattered from Southern Florida to Boston to Anchorage, Alaska. Evidently the first such organization was I-PRIDE, founded in 1979 in Berkeley, California, to support racially intermarried couples. In the 1979–80 school year, this group got the public schools in Berkeley to add the multiracial category on school forms.

A national confederation of local organizations called the Association of Multiethnic Americans (AMEA) was formed in 1988 in Berkeley to support the interests of interracial persons, couples, and families. This organization, headquartered in San Francisco, has promoted local groups and has done much to coordinate their activities. Some national periodicals, Interrace, New People, Mavin, and Biracial Child have emerged to focus on multiracial identity. There are also two such journals on the internet, Interracial Voice and The Multiracial Activist.

The effort to get government recognition of a multiracial category has been spearheaded by Susan Graham, executive director of PROJECT RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally), started in 1991 and headquartered in Roswell, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Graham, a newspaper columnist and the mother of two multiracial children, reasons that omission of the multiracial option is a form of racial discrimination and thus a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Graham, 1995:188). She has testified before many state legislatures and has done much to mobilize support for the movement. In June 1993 both PROJECT RACE and the AMEA gave written testimony in favor of the multiracial option to the Subcommittee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel of the U.S. House of Representatives. Both organizations later gave written testimony to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which sets standards for racial classification for all levels of government in the United States, including the public schools (Fernandez, 1995 [1991]:191).

In 1994, in a bill developed by PROJECT RACE, the Georgia state legislature mandated a multiracial category for racial lists on all state forms. By 1996 five other states had accepted the multiracial option for state forms: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Wyoming. Two other states, North Carolina and Florida, had added the category but limited it to the Department of Education (Graham, 1996). Maryland added the multiracial category for state forms in 1998, and at least nine other states have considered it. Some school districts in a number of states have added the category, and the American College Testing Program (ACT) did so in 1995.

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, which sets standards for federal statistical surveys, in 1977 issued Directive No. 15, which established four racial categories: black, white, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Asian or Pacific Islander. An ‘‘other’’ category was to be continued for the census. The traditional (since 1920) instruction to ‘‘check only one’’ was continued.

The AMEA spearheaded the push to add a multiracial category for the 1990 census, but the OMB decided against this addition in 1989, after vigorous opposition to it by federal agencies, corporations, the NAACP, and other black organizations. The issue had become very political. The Congressional Black Caucus, and Democrats in general, opposed this addition, assuming that a multiracial category would reduce the size of the black community and divide it. Republicans generally seemed to favor the addition, apparently assuming that a multiracial category would help counter affirmative action and dilute the political significance of race.

In June 1994 the OMB began an extensive review of its racial classification system, and pressure to make some changes for the 2000 census grew. The barrage of requests for new or revised racial categories prominently included adding the multiracial option, a change tested by the Census Bureau in 1996, with ambiguous results. Various response formats were proposed and debated by the AMEA, PROJECT RACE, and other groups (Daniel, 2001: chap. 7). Again the Republican preference was to add the multiracial category while the Democrats and major black organizations favored changing only the response instruction from ‘‘check only one’’ to ‘‘check one or more.’’ Either change would be a significant departure from the one-drop rule and the binary tradition (‘‘black’’ or ‘‘not black’’).

The OMB and the Census Bureau created an Interagency Task Force, composed of about thirty federal agencies, to recommend changes in the collection of racial data. In July 1997 this task force presented its report, recommending the ‘‘check one or more’’ change but rejecting the addition of a multiracial category or any mention of the word ‘‘multiracial’’ in the race question. The OMB decided in October 1997 to accept this recommendation for the 2000 census. The multiracial-identity movement had not succeeded in getting its category added to the census forms, but the decision was still a victory: The federal government had officially acknowledged the reality of multiple racial ancestries.

Another change was to divide the ‘‘Asian and Pacific Islander’’ category into ‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander.’’ When ‘‘other’’ is added to the list, the instruction to check ‘‘two or more’’ creates 63 possible combinations. When responses to the ethnic item ‘‘Hispanic/ Latino’’ are taken into account, the racial/ethnic combinations total 126. What a change from the binary tradition!

Tabulating racial and ethnic data in different ways for the many different purposes of govenment is crucial in determining the ultimate outcome of the ‘‘check one or more’’ format (Daniel, 2001: chap. 7). The OMB announced recommendations for tabulating racial and ethnic data under the new standards in February 1999. Persons checking more than one race were not to be called ‘‘multiracial’’ but instead ‘‘persons reporting two or more races.’’ Even the latter designation was objectionable to civil rights groups. However, in March 2000 the OMB announced that persons who check ‘‘white’’ and any minority race on the census form are to be counted as members of that minority for purposes of enforcing voting rights, job discrimination laws, and other civil rights. Combinations that include two or more minority races are to be allocated to the group cited as the basis of the discrimination.

When the 2000 census offered Americans the opportunity to check more than one race for the first time, 2.3 percent did so. Among blacks, 8.3 percent of those age 18 or younger checked two or more races, but only 2.3 percent of those age 50 or over. This age difference is probably due in part to the increase in interracial parenting. Also, the multiracial identity movement and the rejection of the one-drop rule by a number of black celebrities probably influence younger blacks more than older ones.

The ‘‘check one or more’’ format is consistent with the aim of affirming all one’s ancestries, and some mixed-race people argue that it is preferable to having a multiracial category. The term ‘‘multiracial’’ masks the particular ancestries and suggests that all people with multiple backgrounds are culturally tied together by similar experiences. What they share, actually, is an ambiguous status. The experience of a black/Japanese person, for example, has little in common with that of a European/Native American (Thornton, 1992:324–25).

The census issue has no doubt increased political awareness of multiracial identity at the federal level, just as the efforts of PROJECT RACE have done at the state and school-district levels, yet many questions remain. How much will the OMB extend the ‘‘check one or more’’ format as a standard for collecting other governmental data? How many states and school districts will follow suit? How much will the one-drop rule be followed when such data are tabulated and interpreted? To what extent will other government agencies heed the OMB’s admonition to the Census Bureau not to use the term ‘‘multiracial’’ in interpreting the multiple response data? What about those states and school districts that had already established the multiracial category?

Government involvement in multiracial identity questions has been limited to the legislative and executive branches. So far the U.S. Congress has played a limited role, in contrast to several state legislatures. If the courts become involved, it is difficult to predict their inclinations, especially in the absence of directive legislation. Racial classification lawsuits were few in the twentieth century, and the one-drop rule survived the challenges. However, these cases were initiated by persons seeking to be declared legally white, not multiracial. How the courts might react to public-policy questions, such as racial categories in the census or on other public agency forms, remains to be seen. In any event, it appears that the public demand for information on race will remain strong, especially for civil rights, business, and school purposes.

Have we seen the beginning of the end of the one-drop rule, or only more patterned deviations that leave the rule intact and possibly even reinforced? Some of the states that have added the multiracial category have found the statutes difficult to implement. Black organizations have opposed both the multiracial category and the ‘‘check one or more’’ instruction. One suggestion is that the black community must be convinced that the gains of accepting the multiracial identity will be greater than the losses. Apparently this will take a lot of convincing.

However, exceptions to a rule, even one with a very long tradition, can become so numerous and conspicuous that the rule finally becomes obsolete. Evidently the OMB was persuaded in the mid-1990s that both the number of mixed-race people in the United States and the organized demands to recognize multiracial ancestries had reached a critical mass. The decision to drop the ‘‘check only one’’ instruction reflected the conviction that the one-drop rule could no longer be treated as sacred. Further government steps in this direction seem likely to occur while public beliefs and attitudes lag behind. It may well be a long time, perhaps many decades, before both blacks and whites generally can put aside the culturally ingrained rule that all persons with any black ancestry are black and nothing else. On the other hand, momentum sometimes builds to a point where major changes can happen surprisingly fast, as it did when the Apartheid system finally fell in South Africa.

We have seen (in Chapter 5) that the implicit Hawaiian rule for determining the status of racially mixed persons stands in sharper contrast to the one-drop rule than any of the world’s other status rules. Yet in the long run, the Hawaiian rule may be the one most likely to be accepted in the United States. We have seen that mainlanders who move to Hawaii seem able to accept the island pattern in a few months. The Hawaiian rule confers on racially mixed persons a status equal to that of all parent groups, enabling one to acknowledge and be proud of all of one’s ancestries.

A social construction created to support slavery and solidified to enforce Jim Crow segregation is incongruous in a nation dedicated to liberty and equal opportunity for all. Increasing global awareness puts a spotlight on the illogic of America’s one-drop rule and its uniqueness in the world. The rule may well die a long, lingering death, but sooner or later it will probably become history. The chances for this seem much greater now than they did when this book was written in the late 1980s. Finally, the demise of the one-drop rule will be facilitated if the parent social construction—race itself—declines in importance.

© 2006 The Penn State University

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