Most physical anthropologists today reject bio-race (the biological "race" concept) as useless.⁴ According to Matt Cartmill,

[If "races" are defined as] geographically delimited populations characterized by regionally distinctive phenotypes that do not occur elsewhere in significant numbers, then races no longer exist and have probably not existed for centuries, if ever. And if races are not geographically delimited, then racial classificatory categories are merely labels for polymorphisms that vary in frequency from one part of the world to another, like redheadedness or Type A blood. If "Negroid" and "Caucasoid" people occur on every continent, it makes no more sense to describe these groupings as geographical subspecies than it would to describe redheads or people with Type A blood as human subspecies.⁵

Loss of support for bio-race among physical anthropologists is not new. Its gradual abandonment by science began around the turn of the twentieth century, and may have had an unexpected side effect. It may have been one of the triggers of the 1890s' shift in Americans' conceptualization of "race" (especially in the lower South), from a basis in looks or blood-fraction to one of invisible ancestry. In any event, scientific support for bio-race has fallen steadily over the past century. Where 78 percent of the articles in the 1931 Journal of Physical Anthropology employed the bio-race paradigm, only 36 percent did so in 1965, and just 28 percent did in 1996.⁸

At yet, despite the rejection of bio-race by most scientists, the social impact of U.S. racialism on society at large continues to be horrific. Hundreds of laws currently in force regulate how Americans are expected to address "race." Federal and state statutes, local ordinances, and agency regulations control: education,⁹ employment,¹⁰ voting,¹¹ housing,¹² contract law,¹³ adoption,¹⁴ home buying,¹⁵ and environmental policy,¹⁶ all in terms of the "race" notion.

Furthermore, "race" is becoming more important, not less important, in segregating Americans via a Black/White color line. The U.S. Black/White intermarriage rate is the strongest direct measure of color line strength. As shown in the graph at left, this rate has tripled from under one percent to over three percent since 1970.¹⁸ But the truth is that even if this rate of increase were to continue unabated, African-American acceptance into mainstream U.S. society would not reach the 50 percent exogamy rate typical of Japanese-Americans or Hispanics for another six centuries (2.5 percent in three decades equals 50 percent in sixty decades).

More importantly, a close-up view of the decade 1990-to-2000, as shown in the graph at right, reveals that U.S. Black/White intermarriage actually peaked in 1996, and has trended (very slightly) downwards ever since.¹⁹ This confirms other indicators of a recent hardening of the color line. Between 1980 and 1995, Black male earnings fell from 75.1 percent of White male earnings to 71.2 percent. In the same period, the net worth of the median Black family fell from $8,400 to $7,500, while median White family net worth rose from $54,600 to $59,500.²⁰ Such color line hardening is national, not global. As a reality check, one observes that Blacks in the United Kingdom out-marry with Whites at a 20-to-40 percent rate.²¹ This is comparable to the exogamy rate of Japanese-Americans or Hispanic Americans. In other words, "race," in the sense of an endogamous caste, is a U.S. phenomenon, not one of Western or even of Anglo-Saxon culture. The numbers reveal that, whatever the fate of the one-drop rule, racialism itself shows no sign of weakening its hold on the American mind. On the contrary, it is becoming stronger as we speak, and there is evidence that the U.S. version of the "race" notion may now be spreading to Latin America.²²

Examples abound of ongoing government enforcement of racialism. In 1976, California's Los Angeles Unified School District implemented a program where hundreds of schoolteachers were compulsorily transferred to distant schools in order to achieve racial balance throughout the county. Unsurprisingly, the teachers resisted having to commute for hours after having made homes near the schools where they taught. To avoid being transferred, some formerly White teachers declared themselves Black, some formerly Black teachers insisted that they were White, and others (of both former "races") asserted that they were of American Indian origin. The predictable bureaucratic response was to create an Ethnic Designation Committee, which justified its existence by launching a multi-million-dollar investigation to sniff out teachers' true ethnicities. In one of the spasms of rooting out evil, to which Americans seem to succumb every so often, teachers were ordered to produce their birth certificates, as well as those of their parents and grandparents, and to bring in notarized sworn affidavits by school administrators and clergymen in order to prove each teacher's racial identity.²³

One cause of the tenacity of U.S. racialism today may be that so many people make a living from it. With disarming candor, the Census Bureau explains that they demand citizens' racial identity in order to implement and enforce: the Native American Programs Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Public Health Act, the Healthcare Improvement Act, the Job Partnership Training Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Census Redistricting Data Program, and many more.²⁴ If America were to become non-racialist tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of employees of government agencies and in private firms responding to those agencies would be thrown out of work. As Luther Wright, Jr. puts it:

Race dominates our personal lives because it manifests itself in our speech, dance, neighbors, and friends, and in our ways of talking, walking, eating, and dreaming. It determines our economic prospects, screening and selecting us for manual jobs and professional careers, red-lining financing for real estate and green-lining access to insurance. Race permeates politics by altering electoral boundaries, shaping the disbursement of local, state, and federal funds, fueling the creation and collapse of political alliances, and affecting efforts of law enforcement. In short, race permeates every aspect of our lives.²⁵

Focusing on the one-drop rule, two groups of English-speaking Americans with fractional African ancestry may determine its fate. Both have recently become statistically identifiable. The first group defies the one-drop rule by considering themselves White, while simultaneously acknowledging partial African heritage. Such a racial identity contrasts with the traditional literary concept of "passing," which denotes those who "falsely" claim to be White when they know that they are "really" Black.²⁷ Instead, these Anglo-Americans either claim to be solely White or they reject racialism entirely by refusing to adopt any "race" at all, thus emulating U.S. Hispanics and Muslims.²⁸

The second group comprises Anglo-Americans of partial African descent who also look European, but who affirm the one-drop rule by calling themselves Black. This self-labeling has been traditional among Americans with fractional African ancestry since the collapse of the three-caste systems of the lower South. It has become even more popular since the 1965-75 Black Power phase of the Civil Rights movement. As we shall see momentarily, the federal decennial census of the year 2000 is the first to enable measurement of the size of this second group.

The two groups are today roughly equal in numbers. The first flouts the one-drop rule in how they conduct their lives while the second upholds it just as sincerely. The remainder of this paper discusses the intellectual struggle between the two over allegiance to the one-drop rule and the predictable consequences of either one's victory. Either the U.S. one-drop rule will loosen its grip on Americans' cultural understanding of "race" while racialism itself remains strong, or the one-drop rule will remain strong while racialism retains its hold as well. As mentioned above, a decline in U.S. racialism itself is unlikely.

"Race" as Voluntary Ethno-Political Affiliation

In 1988, 39-year-old Mary Christine Walker, a Denver schoolteacher with fair complexion, green eyes, and light brown hair claimed on a job application to be Black. Her prospective employer obtained Ms. Walker's birth certificate, found her listed there as "White," and accused her of "lying to take advantage of minority-hiring policies." Walker promptly filed suit in State District Court. She claimed to be Black, despite her looks. She said that her parents (an interracial couple) had listed her as White on her birth certificate so that their daughter could take advantage of her European appearance when she grew up. Noting that Ms. Walker had the support of the Black community, Judge John Brooks Jr. on September 6, 1989, ordered the state Department of Vital Statistics to issue the woman a new birth certificate.³⁰

Why was Phipps stopped from correcting her birth certificate's racial designation but Walker was allowed to do so? Some believe it is because the former wanted to change from Black to White and the latter wanted to change from White to Black. They suggest that U.S. courts have traditionally tended to protect White racial purity.³¹ We shall argue that this explanation is inadequate. Reverse examples abound of courts allowing Blacks to become White and rejecting White claims to Blackness. Instead we shall show that, when it comes to racial identity, courts tend to follow local community leaders. But first, let us understand the stakes by considering White Americans with recent African ancestry.

Times are changing. On a 1982 TV talk show, a Jamaican singer said in her clipped British accent, "I like to do Black songs sometimes. I am half Black, you know." According to F. James Davis, the statement startled American viewers. One could not be "half Black" in the United States of 1982.³² Twenty-one years later, a magazine article about a professional tennis star headlined, "James Blake may hit the books as hard as the ball, but that doesn't mean this young, gifted, half-black [emphasis mine] Harvard-educated heartthrob isn't the future of tennis."³³ Apparently, today one can.

Such racial ambiguity is increasing. Census data show that about two million non-Hispanic, White-labeled American adults alive in 1990 started life as Black-labeled children. This comes to seven percent of the Black population, a record-breaking cumulative rate of caste permeability. This level of race-switching had not been seen in the United States since the censuses of 1850 and 1860, and yet it has held firm since 1970. It corresponds to an annual transition rate of 0.25 percent. This is numerically comparable to the Black/White intermarriage rate, because zero net allele flow is necessary to maintain Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium within a population defined by its phenotype.³⁴ Although counting them from census data is straightforward, it is difficult (with one exception) to identify just who these individuals are without violating their privacy.

The exception is the entertainment industry. Actors, musicians, and professional athletes find that acknowledging a trace of African ancestry helps, rather than hinders, one's career. And so, the official web sites of many such entertainers claim mixed ancestry. As of July 1, 2003, URL addresses www.mixedfolks.com/africans.htm and www.multiracial.com/links/links-celebrities.html provide links to hundreds of such sites.

Do not misunderstand. This discussion is not about the thousands of Hispanic entertainers, such as Geraldo Rivera, Jimmy Smits, Jennifer Lopez, or Mariah Carey, who claim African as well as Spanish roots through their Latin American heritage. Hispanics, like Muslim Americans, have been exempt from (or have ignored) the one-drop rule since its inception. The census shows that 93.7 percent of Hispanics check off only one "race." Of these, 90 percent check off "White" or write-in an equivalent designation.³⁵ Also, it does not include the thousands of biracial Americans in the entertainment industry who, like Tiger Woods, claim multiple racial heritages, one of which happens to be African. Instead, this discussion is about Anglo-Americans who see themselves and are seen by the public as simply White, nothing more, and yet who acknowledge recent African ancestry nonetheless. At one complexion extreme, they include blue-eyed blondes like Heather Locklear, star of the TV show Melrose Place (she descends from the Lumbee tri-racial-isolate community of western North Carolina). At the other extreme are brunettes like Jennifer Beals, star of the movie Flashdance (who has a Black father). In between, complexionwise, are those like Oscar-winning film and TV star Martin Sheen (an Afro-Cuban grandmother) and Emmy-winning vocalist Linda Ronstadt (an Afro-Mexican grandfather).

Self-identification as White along with public pride in fractional African ancestry is not limited to the entertainment industry, where such a strategy is admittedly lucrative. A survey of 177 Detroit college students, each with one Black and one White parent, offered the subjects seven choices of racial self-identification. The choices were: (1) exclusively Black, (2) sometimes Black and sometimes not, (3) biracial but "experience the world as Black", (4) exclusively biracial, (5) exclusively not Black, (6) "race is meaningless," and (7) other.³⁶ Notice that "White" was not offered as an option. This was because, according to the lead researcher, "current research... assumes that individuals with one black and one white parent have only two options for racial identity: 'black' or 'biracial.'"³⁷ Also, the survey was limited to first-generation biracials. This made a "White" self-image exceedingly unlikely because, assuming that the Black parent looks African, the subject will appear mulatto (like Oscar-winning film actress Halle Berry or TV star Gloria Reuben, say). And yet, despite these odds stacked against White self-identity, 3.6 percent of the subjects deliberately ignored the given choices and wrote in "White" (only).³⁸

Although perhaps surprising to older Americans, such an identification strategy is the international norm. One's appearance unambiguously determines one's racial designation in the United Kingdom, as well as in all of the other former slave-importing nations of the Indian Ocean (four million Africans imported between 1400 and 1900), the Mediterranean (eight million), and the New World (eleven million).³⁹ The United States is the exception.

"Race" as Involuntary Invisible Caste

Then, a fire commissioner who had been reviewing promotion paperwork observed the Malones and accused the brothers of racial fraud. The accusation sparked a political firestorm. One minority leader claimed that as many as 60 of Boston's 351 Black and 51 Hispanic firefighters were actually lying Whites. Another complained that the authorities had "looked the other way" for ten years. "If a black person came waltzing into the fire department in the '70s and it was in his interest to claim he was white, I have no doubt the Boston Fire Department would say, 'Wait a minute, you're not white." [But] When a white person said he is black, they look the other way."

Stung by the attacks, Boston's enraged Mayor Flynn ordered investigations into all city departments -- fire, police, schools -- to root out other Whites who may have fraudulently claimed minority status. As in 1976 Los Angeles (see above), a frenzy of bureaucratic evil-seeking ensued. The fire department's investigation turned up eleven Spanish-surnamed individuals who were accused of not being "racially" Hispanic enough. Seven were exonerated; two resigned under pressure; the other two remained under investigation until the firestorm dwindled away. Two departments -- Police and Schools -- refused to participate in the widening hunt for racial frauds and the mayor complained publicly about their insubordination. The following year, a twenty-three page ruling by Justice Herbert Wilkins of the state Supreme Judicial Court convicted the Malones of fraud and upheld their expulsion. In his decision, Justice Wilkins referred to the position taken by the Black political leadership. Had the Black community supported the Malone brothers (and presumably the disgraced Hispanic firefighters as well), they would have been allowed to keep their jobs.

That some Euro-Americans with presumed African ancestry have chosen to consider themselves Black is not historically new. "Passing," in the literary sense, has always been bi-directional. Myrdal and others have tabulated numbers of White-born women who, after marrying into the African-American community, dye their hair and claim hereditary Blackness.⁴¹ It remains common today. Women who marry into an alien culture (Black, Jewish, Muslim, Puerto Rican, whatever) often suffer from social pressure. Becoming Black is easier than most transformations. It demands no change in religion or learning a new language.⁴² E. Franklin Frazier knew of two Euro-American girls who claimed Blackness in order to avoid being separated from their Afro-American half sisters.⁴³ Since the days of the minstrel shows, many musicians have found it necessary to become Black in order to have successful careers.⁴⁴ Finally, some people like the Malone brothers apparently switch races with the intent of reaping affirmative action benefits.⁴⁵

Again, we are not discussing the many Afro-Americans who look partly African and so label themselves "Black." This discussion is about Americans who consider themselves Black despite looking completely European (a policy common among Americans of slight African ancestry since Reconstruction). A rough estimate of their numbers can be made using a unique feature of the 2000 census.

Although censuses since 1960 have enabled Americans to choose their own "race," only in 2000 were they allowed to check off more than one box. The decision was made by Congress responding to a campaign launched by more than thirty multiracial organizations across the country, which coalesced into a nationwide political advocacy group: the Association of Multiethnic Americans (AMEA). The "multiracial movement," as it was then called, lobbied to add a "multiracial" box to the census "race" question. The movement failed due to intense pressure by the Congressional Black caucus, who feared that it would dilute Black political influence. Nevertheless, Congress compromised by ordering the Census Bureau to allow Americans to check off "all boxes that apply." This partly satisfied those like the multiracial movement who wanted to undermine the census "race" question, those like the American Anthropological Association who wanted to do away with census "race" entirely, and those like Hispanic and Black advocacy groups who wanted to maximize their constituencies' visibility.⁴⁶

The decision to allow Americans to "check all race boxes that apply" was met with overheated enthusiasm by some social scientists. According to two sociologists,

[The new federal regulation] illustrates a seismic shift in our understanding of... racial group membership. In fact, the very idea [emphasis in original] of races... will never be the same. ... The Census Bureau has dealt a deadly blow to the idea that 'pure' races exist, shattering the... notion of races as genetically distinct groupings of human beings.⁴⁷

The notion that Anglo-Americans of European appearance but part-African heritage who choose to label themselves as "Black" do so freely and without stress is incorrect. From childhood, such individuals are disdained by their darker peers and seen as weak and mentally unstable because of their mixed ancestry.⁴⁹ When Sharon Dixon (a fair-complexioned woman who identified as Black) ran for mayor of Washington DC, her Black opponents argued that she was too White-looking to understand Black problems.⁵⁰ When Washington DC mayor Mayor Marion Barry was under political pressure for drug taking, he tried to get his fair-complexioned wife to have her skin darkened in order to stabilize his waning Black support.⁵¹ Some Blacks in 1983 criticized the Miss America pageant when Vanessa Williams won, precisely because Ms. Williams was not dark enough to represent Blacks.⁵² Children suffer the most. In addition to the adjustment problems that all children endure during puberty, White-looking teenagers with Black parents are remorselessly persecuted by darker classmates for being "stuck-up," "snooty," "toms," or "Oreos" (black outside, white inside), merely because they physically resemble those whom they have been taught to regard as hated oppressors.⁵³

Consequently, I suggest that only those individuals -- those discriminated against by dark-complexioned Blacks for being too White-looking -- have the motivation or incentive to check off both the "Black" and the "White" census boxes. If this is the case, then the census shows that this group (Anglo-Americans of European appearance but part-African heritage who self-identify as Black) amount to 1.76 million people.⁵⁴ By coincidence (or perhaps not), this number is comparable to the 2.23 million Anglo-Americans of European appearance but part-African heritage who self-identify as White.

There is a curious role-model asymmetry between the two groups. As mentioned, members of the entertainment industry (actors, musicians, athletes) are leading in deconstructing the one-drop rule by their example. Some, like TV and movie star Gloria Reuben, even identify themselves differently in different interviews, further trivializing the one-drop rule of racial identity. On the other hand, many academics in the social sciences (professional sociologists, anthropologists, historians) are leading in preserving the one-drop rule by their example. I do not mean to imply intentional bias. It is simply that academics, who must answer to department heads, trustees, regents, and peer reviewers, tend deeply and unconsciously to internalize the value judgments of their predecessors.

For example: The author of an outstanding overview of the multiracial movement of the 1990s writes that White-looking Anglo-Americans of partial African descent who label themselves White represent "psychosocial pathology" and are "insidious toxins in the racial ecology," "fraudulent," and "racial thieves."⁵⁵ Upon discovering that a significant number of Detroit college students with one Black and one White parent considered themselves only White, the survey authors reported that: "There exists a growing proportion of the black population who no longer view themselves as black."⁵⁶ (My point being that to call them a "proportion of the black population" when the youngsters flatly refuse to see themselves as such, reveals researcher bias so tenacious as to fly in the face of their own data.) Another scholar reports that multiracials who do not identify as solely Black are "in denial," and suffer from psychosocial marginalization.⁵⁷ (An observation that few entertainers would agree with.) A highly acclaimed author of the gender/race intersection informs us that she (the author) is Jewish, that all Hispanics are colored, and that she (the author) is white. She repeats the latter two assertions relentlessly, over a dozen times in the first sixty-nine pages.⁵⁸ (My point being that she exploits self-identification as a right for herself, but denies it to the subjects of her study.)

It is a Political Struggle

In 1940 South Carolina, at the height of the Jim Crow era when the one-drop rule was the supreme law of the land (at least on paper), Louetta Chassereau, an orphaned infant of known, documented, but invisible African ancestry was placed in a White orphanage and adopted by a White family. As the little girl matured, her White adoptive family became influential in the White community. She married very well indeed, to a wealthy White man (F. Capers Bennett), in an upscale White church (Spring Street Methodist Church in Charleston). Throughout her marriage to Bennett, she voted in White primaries (Democrat), her children attended White schools and when they grew up, joined White churches (two became Episcopalians and two were Methodists). The godparents of her children were White (Mr. and Mrs. I. M. Fishburne), he being the president of the local Farmers & Merchants Bank. Upon Mr. Bennett's death, his relatives contested his will leaving all to Louetta, on the grounds that their long and fruitful marriage had been illegal because Louetta had started life as a Black baby. In a terse opinion (most of which is the above summary), South Carolina Supreme Court Justices Milledge L. Bonham, C. J. D. Gordon Baker, E. L. Fishburne, Taylor H. Stukes, and L. D. Lide ruled that over her lifetime, Louetta had become irrevocably White, and they dismissed the will contestation unanimously.⁵⁹

Debate over the one-drop rule is often couched in scientific terminology, referring to genetic "dominance" or to the detection of ethno-racially correlated DNA polymorphisms. For example, in a letter to the editor of Interracial Voice magazine, a writer cited a well-known DNA study of genetic admixture in the U.S. population to claim that, "when a mixed person has children with a black person, the children's genes get more predominantly African."⁶⁰ And yet, despite its scientific façade, the debate over the one-drop rule is actually raw politics. Specifically, it shares the three distinguishing features of a purely political struggle: the real issue is power, written rules are unintelligible, and status-quo-preserving organizations (the Church, veterans group) line up on one side while innovative ones (entertainment, technology) support the other.

The real issue is power. In some recent one-drop cases, courts have allowed Blacks to become White (Louetta Bennett) and Whites to become Black (Mary Christine Walker). In other cases, they have forbidden the switch and punished Blacks wanting to become White (Susie Guillory Phipps) and Whites wanting to become Black (Phillip and Paul Malone). At first glance, it seems that every possible permutation has been ruled both ways and that every hypothesis fails. The idea that the courts try to protect White racial purity is disproved by Bennett, but that they defend affirmative action is contested by Walker. That they side with those who desire Blackness is negated by the Malones, but that they side with those who seek Whiteness is invalidated by Phipps. At a second glance, however, a single principle threads its way through every case. What they have in common is that all of the courts relied on the wishes of the receiving caste. In the White-to-Black cases, the Black community's leaders rejected the Malones but accepted Walker, and both courts went along. In the Black-to-White cases, White leadership rejected Phipps but embraced Bennett, and the courts followed suit.

The most illustrative case is that of Stockton Councilmen Stebbins and White. There, the struggle was an internal one within the Black community, and the authorities resolved it by holding recall vote after recall vote until one or the other gave up (in this particular case, until Stebbins ran out of money). The point is not that Black community leaders or White ones accept or reject newcomers. The point is that politicians of both "races" demand (and get) gatekeeper power to choose who is accepted and who is rejected. They have the authority to open the gate or close it. Once this principle is recognized, it seems obvious: political leaders, logically enough, are more interested in possessing the power to bar or admit passage through the color line than in either ethnicity or biology. Scientific terms are merely tools.

Written rules are unintelligible. Political power is weakened to the extent that leaders are constrained by written laws. The essence of political power is that it can be wielded arbitrarily (or at least perceived to be thus). The "race" notion offers such leverage and the opportunity of arbitrary power, precisely because, to quote Paul Finkelman: "The word 'race' defies precision in American law. No physical attribute -- or even collection of physical attributes -- adequately defines race. It is much like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of hardcore pornography -- 'I know it when I see it.'"⁶¹

Because census "race" is self-determined, it is useless for addressing discrimination claims. (If the Malone brothers were conclusively deemed Black under the law merely because they said so, there would have been no lawsuit.) Hence, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, an executive agency that investigates discrimination and negotiates settlements under 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e-4 to 2000e-5b) was given the responsibility of defining racial classifications for federal litigation.⁶² The EEOC recognizes five "races" (they differ from the self-labeling boxes provided in the census). They are: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. None of the definitions are internally consistent or even make logical sense. The definition of the "Hispanic Race" is probably the most glaring example of internal self-contradiction. According to the EEOC, the Hispanic race [emphasis mine] is defined as comprising: "All persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race [emphasis mine]."⁶³

Other federal and state regulations refer to minority set-asides, but the term "minority" is not defined in law. Perhaps this is because it seems mathematically to be based on population counts. And yet, when asked to identify their "ethnic heritage" on the census long form, fewer than one percent of Americans claim to be "White." The most popular choices of ethnicity are: German (23.3%), Irish (15.6%), English (13.1%), African-American (10.0%), and Italian (5.9%). In other words speaking mathematically, self-assessed Blacks are among the four largest "majorities" in America (pluralities, actually) and Whites are insignificantly buried just below Puerto Ricans and Slovaks (0.7%) and just above Danes and Hungarians (0.6%).⁶⁴ The point, of course, is not that Blacks rule or that Whites are subordinate, but that, like "race" and "ethnicity," the term "minority" itself is carefully crafted to be ambiguous.⁶⁵

Another illustration of the arbitrary nature of racial labeling ambiguities is that, because they provide power leverage, they are not to be questioned. Sometimes, persons in authority (in contrast to politically powerless academics) complain about the illogic of racial definition. They are punished. In 1996, a Missouri jury convicted Herbert Smulls of first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced him to death. The murderer's appeal argued that he had been denied a jury of his peers in that he was Black and none of the jurors looked as African as he. When the complaint was brought up during trial, the judge had overruled it, saying that it was up to the defense to determine whether or not the jurors were Black enough to satisfy the Constitutional requirement for a jury of one's peers. "I believe that's counsel's responsibility to prove who is black and who isn't or who is a minority and who isn't. There were some dark complexioned people on this jury. I don't know if that makes them black or white. As I said, I don't know what constitutes black. Years ago they used to say one drop of blood constitutes black. I don't know what black means. Can somebody enlighten me of what black is?" The case was overturned on appeal because the majority of the Supreme Court justices held that, "The judge's gratuitous remarks manifest a lack of understanding of the import of the issues underlying Batson, and of what the codewords 'one drop of blood' mean to many participants in the judicial system. ... 'One drop of blood' is an offensive phrase because it is reminiscent of the manner in which slaveholders sought to increase the supply of slaves, and by which laws denied many legal protections to mixed-race citizens."⁶⁶ In short, a murderer's conviction was remanded because a judge openly admitted that he could not identify peoples' "race" by sight.

Organizations that resist change (the Catholic Church, news media, veterans groups) line up to support the status quo (the one-drop rule). In 1815, Irish immigrant Michael Morris Healy founded a slave plantation near Macon, Georgia. He and his biracial wife, Eliza Clark Healy, raised ten children. All were educated in the North and five subsequently achieved success as Irish-Americans: James Augustine Healy became Bishop of Portland, Maine, Patrick Francis Healy became president of Georgetown University, Michael Morris Healy, Jr. became a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard and the sole U.S. government representative in newly purchased Alaska, Alexander Sherwood Healy became rector of the cathedral in Boston, and their sister became mother superior of a convent. Their photographs show no sign of African features. Their writings show them to have been neither more nor less prejudiced than other prominent Irish-Americans of their time, but one thing is overwhelmingly clear: they saw themselves and were seen by their community as White. They left numerous written documents to this effect, and even the sea-captain's teenaged son once scratched his name on a remote rock above the Arctic Circle during an exploration voyage as "the first white boy" to have visited the region.⁶⁷ And yet the Catholic Church today publicizes James as the first Black bishop,⁶⁸ Georgetown University publicizes Patrick as the first Black university president,⁶⁹ and the National Archives and Records Administration publicizes Michael as the first Black Coast Guard captain.⁷⁰ Each of these sources refers to these men as African-Americans, each portrays them as praiseworthy, and each laments that their only moral flaw was to falsely deny their actual "race."

Calvin Clark Davis of Bear Lake, Michigan, died heroically in 1944 while attacking the oil refineries in Meresburg, Germany with the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was posthumously awarded several medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. Davis considered himself to be White, nothing more, and his neighbors agreed. Staffers for a U.S. congressman recently discovered and made public that Davis had undetectable but known African ancestry. Only the BBC reported his story as a "white airman with black ancestry." Other newspapers portrayed him as: "passed for white" (Traverse City Record-Eagle), "lied about who he was" (Traverse City Record-Eagle), "claimed to be white" (Chimes, student newspaper of Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI), "pretended to be white" (Associated Press, Los Angeles Times), "concealed his race" (Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Holland, MI), "faked being white" (Associated Press, Los Angeles Times), "black man who pretended to be white" (The Holland Sentinel).⁷¹ As contrast, consider that a scholarly account of racial identity in early twentieth-century Michigan reads, "Crossing over was not the silent mechanism that some historians have indicated. It involved not only racial heritage but, ironically, family and personal identity. Could an individual known to have an African ancestry be regarded and defined as white? Yes, the interracial backgrounds and unions of the Fosters and the Duncansons were matters of public knowledge. Each of the families had a long, continuous heritage in Monroe, and descendants residing in the community today bear no stigma of race and are generally viewed as Caucasian."⁷²

The Catholic Church recently nominated Mother Henriette Delille, the founder of the Order of the Sisters of the Holy Family, for canonization. The honor is due to the aid that she and her order gave selflessly to slaves, freedmen, gens de couleur libre,⁷³ children, elderly and the sick, from 1842 to 1862, when no one else in Louisiana seemed to care. Mother Henriette Delille was the daughter of Jean Baptiste Delille Sarpy (of French and Italian descent) and Marie Diaz, (of French, Hispanic, and African descent). Her canonization had been supported by Louisiana's Creole community, including descendants of Mother Henriette's family. To the family's horror, the Church has publicized the process as the proposed canonization of the first "Black" American saint.⁷⁴

To grasp the controversy, one must understand that many if not most Creoles today reject the U.S. "race" notion (rather like Hispanics, unsurprisingly). In 1976, for instance, a historian interviewed the president of Jeunes Amis, a fraternal association for gens de couleur libre, requesting access to its historical documents. The scholar said that he wanted to expand his primary sources on Black history. "Jeunes Amis is not a black organization!" the curator was insulted. "Thommy Lafon [the organization's founder] was not black. I am not black. Thommy Lafon would rise up from his grave in sheer anger if he ever knew that you had called us black! You will have to look elsewhere to find black history!" He thereupon ejected the researcher from the premises.⁷⁵

Mother Henriette's descendants and supporters have written letters to the Vatican as well as to local Church leaders, asking that the Church's huge multimedia publicity campaign be corrected to refer to the proposed saint as "Creole," "biracial," "mixed," or some other term closer to how the woman saw herself a century and a half ago.⁷⁶ The Church has refused to change its course, suggesting that any media alteration would antagonize U.S. Blacks, the market at which the canonization is targeted. The only detailed explanation issued by the Church suggests that Mother Henriette's "current ancestry" need not be the same as her original ancestry.⁷⁷

Some Americans, Black and White, (mainly in entertainment) have increasingly come to view "race" as a voluntary mix of political affiliation and ethnicity, rather than as a biologically immutable trait. Others, Black and White, (mainly in Churches, newsmedia, and the social sciences) just as sincerely support the one-drop rule. Depending upon a choice not yet fully made by the mass of biracial Americans, this struggle could bring about either a return to colorism or the eventual transformation of the U.S. caste system from a phenotypic basis to a Hindu-like belief in invisible caste.

Future One: A Return to Colorism

The great majority of such discriminatory incidents, which Americans of both "races" call "racism," are unrelated to "race" (in the sense of one's self-label). They are incidents of colorism: prejudice or bigotry triggered by appearance.⁸¹ None of the above examples would make sense if the subject were, say, Walter White (a blonde, blue-eyed, European-looking early-twentieth-century NAACP leader) or Rashida Jones (a blonde, blue-eyed, European-looking early-twenty-first century actress on the Boston Public TV series) merely because both self-identify as Black. Color-blind racism exists, of course. It happens when a person with fractional recent African ancestry is "outed" (as in the Healy, Davis, and Delille cases described above). But such incidents are rare. Most routine discrimination nowadays is triggered by one's visible appearance, not by a self-identity questionnaire or genealogical documentation. To predict what America would look like without the one-drop rule, we must understand both colorism and allele distribution.

Colorism denotes discrimination based on the degree to which one looks African or "Negroid." It is not limited to prejudice based solely on complexion. It is easily demonstrated that an isolated view of a patch of skin of a person who looks Afro-American overall may actually be lighter that that of a well-tanned Nordic-looking person. Hair kinkiness, nose flatness, lip thickness, and other factors are also important.⁸² Physical anthropologists have tried to define such features rigorously but with little success.⁸³ One problem is that the features that Americans associate with Blackness have changed over time-the shape of the foot and jaw, for instance, were very important in antebellum times. Furthermore, colorism is not limited by the target's "race." Andaman Islanders, Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and East Indians in the United States can suffer from colorism despite having no recent African ancestry. Finally, it is not limited by the perpetrator's "race." Many exclusive Black societies restricted their membership to those with complexions lighter than a kraft paper grocery bag.⁸⁵

Allele distribution is most easily envisioned with a skin-color histogram. A complexion distribution histogram for the United States has two humps: many fair-skinned Euro-Americans, some dark Afro-Americans, but few ambiguous-looking people in between. Compared to North Africans, Hispanics, and West Indians, Anglo-Americans show very little mixing.⁸⁶ This is because of the endogamous U.S. color line. Societies with a 50-50 mix of European and African ancestry and without an endogamous color line, such as Puerto Rico, have a normal (Gaussian or bell-shaped) complexion histogram. To American eyes, about one such person in ten looks White, one in ten looks Black, and most look something in between. Societies without an endogamous color line but with an Afro-European genetic mix comparable to the U.S. (10-90), such as Argentina, Chile, or Portugal, over the generations gradually dispersed the alleles for African appearance throughout their populations via intermarriage. Few if any of their members look Black to American eyes today.

If the one-drop-rule were forgotten, the bimodal U.S. complexion distribution would remain unchanged. The dramatic difference in appearance between U.S. Blacks and Whites is a hallmark of U.S. society (again, compared to North Africa, Latin America, or the Caribbean). It is the product of phenotype-based endogamy. It is unrelated to the one-drop rule. If U.S. Black/White intermarriage were not to increase (as it has not increased since 1996), the alleles for African appearance would remain concentrated in a small fraction of the population. There would still be many White-looking Anglo-Americans, and some Black-looking Anglo-Americans, but few ambiguous-looking Anglo-Americans in between.

What would U.S. society look like if the one-drop rule were discarded? For one thing, the laws could be made more logical. The EEOC could define Hispanic as "persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of appearance [rather than of race]. Affirmative action would focus on looks, rather than on political allegiance. The only Boston firefighters to receive Affirmative Action preference would be those who looked African. Louetta Bennett, Susie Phipps, and Mary Walker would all be legally White, like it or not. The news media would write that military heroes like Davis were White men with African ancestry (as, indeed, the BBC did). And the Church would probably stop publicizing the lives of James Healy and Mother Henriette.

Such a United States would likely resemble countries where colorism rules; where European-looking elites dominate African-looking poor in systems with little or no socio-economic mobility. Whites would probably still dominate Blacks. The major change would be that, as in Brazil, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Santo Domingo, and Haiti today -- or as in South Carolina and Louisiana two centuries ago -- members of the elite would not hesitate to express pride in their tiny bit of African ancestry while affirming their Whiteness nonetheless. The numbers of Black Americans would shrink slightly in proportion since, like today's Hispanics, everyone who could switch to the White "race" (based on appearance) would do so without hesitation and without criticism from either White or Black. Politically, the loss of membership would diminish the power of Black voters. The Hobson's choice that Black political scientists face today, between gerrymandered districts yielding powerless Black representatives on the one hand, and color-blind districts yielding White representatives who court Black votes only at election time on the other, would simply get worse.⁸⁷

Future Two: A Shift to Invisible Caste

On the other hand, in 1944, Oliver Cromwell Cox, a Black sociologist born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, penned a devastating criticism of the "caste" view of "race" relations. Cox was a Marxist who had concluded that "racism" was "a product of the institutional functioning of a capitalist society."⁹⁰ He insisted that "caste" was a misleading concept to apply to U.S. race relations, which were ultimately driven by capitalist exploitation of the proletariat.⁹¹ He made three arguments that "caste" was an inappropriate paradigm. First, endogamy does not necessarily create a caste. Classes, tribes, sects, and many other groups with something to protect are endogamous. Second, the term "caste" suggests that Blacks approve of segregation and laws against intermarriage. Third, the most well-known caste system, that of the Hindus, is completely voluntary: "Caste barriers in the caste system are never challenged. They are sacred to caste and caste alike. The personalities developed in the caste system are normal for that society."⁹² Cox won the debate. By 1945, even Warner essentially admitted that Blacks were not a caste. Since then, few scholars of the "race" notion have openly compared the U.S. color line with caste systems in other countries.⁹³

The debate seems quaint today because ultimately (as suggested above in the discussion of bio-race) every scientist uses whatever paradigmatic framework is most useful. To a modern scholar, endogamy is quantitative. Groups with 40-to-50 percent intermarriage rate (like U.S. Jews or Chinese-Americans, say) are mildly endogamous but assimilate nonetheless (in the sense of acceptance into the mainstream). Groups with 0-to-5 percent intermarriage rate (like U.S. Blacks, Hindu Harijans, Japanese Burakumin, or Rwandan Tutsis) remain segregated for generation after generation. Today, the word "caste" has no implication of being voluntary -- much to the contrary. Finally, the notion that Hindu untouchables "never challenge" their fate and consider their oppression "sacred" or "normal for that society" could have been spawned only in the brain of someone who never met a Hindu untouchable.⁹⁴

The organizational scaffolding of the present paper is, in fact, that the endogamous U.S. color line created and now preserves a system with two involuntary castes. Looking at the endogamous U.S. color line as oth the manifestation of and the driving force behind a two-caste system makes it worthwhile to consider how castes in other lands unfolded over time. The United States may be following a path already trod by others. To illustrate, we shall consider the Hindus and the Rwandans.

About 3,750 years ago, speakers of Indo-European languages (who called themselves Aryans) migrated into India from the north, displacing the speakers of Dravidian languages who had inhabited the subcontinent since the Neolithic revolution. The written history of the Aryan newcomers, the Rig-veda, describes this replacement as the military conquest of savage tribes (Dravidians) by civilized peoples (Aryans). This characterization is not borne out by archaeology. Instead, the Dravidian Indus Valley civilization was apparently a highly developed urban culture with labor specialization and literature. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are the society's most advanced and well-excavated cities. Unfortunately, only the Aryan records of this conquest survive, since Dravidian script is still undecipherable whereas Aryan writing (Sanskrit) is easily read, being the ancestor of English (and German, Latin, Greek, etc.). Despite the high level of Dravidian civilization, their culture collapsed and they were conquered by the Aryans, who occupied and ruled India thenceforth.⁹⁵

Historical and archeological evidence (literature, bones, artwork) suggests that there were strong phenotypic differences between the original Aryans and Dravidians. The difference manifested in complexion and skull shape.⁹⁶ According to the Aryan Rig-veda, their god Indra blew "away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the black skin which Indra hates." They wrote how Indra "slew the flat-nosed barbarians" and decreed that the foe was to be "flayed of his black skin."⁹⁷ The Dravidians were not exterminated; they were enslaved. The Aryans introduced Hinduism and its caste system. The latter distinguished among four endogamous groups (varnas). These are: priests (Brahmana), warriors (Ksatriya), farmers and merchants (Vaisya), and menial laborers (Sudra). The top three castes were reserved for Aryans. Surviving brown-skinned Dravidian were consigned to the lowest. Later, a fifth group was added, the outcasts or untouchables (Achuta or Harijans), relegated to unclean tasks (burying the dead, unclogging latrines, slaughtering animals).⁹⁸

Although Hindu castes were (and are) strongly endogamous, a small amount of intermarriage was inevitable. For centuries, alleles for Aryan or Dravidian appearance leaked slowly across the caste boundaries, blurring the groups' distinctive phenotypes. Today, people from northern India tend to be fair-complexioned and southerners tend to be quite dark, but "A Bengali Brahman looks like other Bengalis, a Hindustani [Brahman] like other Hindustanis, a Mahratti [Brahman] like other Mahrattis, and so on...."⁹⁹ The phenotypic basis of the Hindu caste system in India has long since vanished. But the endogamous caste boundaries and their associated civil liabilities remain strong.

Five centuries ago, the cattle-herding Tutsis arrived in what is now Rwanda-Burundi, displacing the agriculturalist Hutus, just as the latter had displaced the hunting/gathering Twa pygmies ten centuries before that. The Tutsis did not completely enslave the Hutus. Instead, the two groups have been locked in combat ever since. The latest wave of Hutu-on-Tutsi genocide (800,000 deaths in 1994)¹⁰⁰ was revenge for prior Tutsi-on Hutu killings (200,000 deaths in 1972), which was revenge for prior Hutu-on-Tutsi slaughter (100,000 in 1962), and so forth into the mists of time.¹⁰¹ Needless to say, intermarriage between these groups is negligible -- almost as low as that between U.S. Blacks and Whites. And yet, slow genetic leakage has done its work in just five centuries (compared with the forty centuries of the Hindus).

First-hand records suggest that, when first contacted by Europeans, the Tutsis and Hutus were phenotypically distinct. The Hutus were of medium height, with what most Americans think of as typically West African features (broad noses, thick lips, steatopygic). The Tutsis, in contrast, were extremely tall and thin, with apparently European facial features (acquiline nose, thin lips, reduced prognathism). Nineteenth-century European explorers saw the Tutsis as the most advanced of Africans (probably because they looked like tall brown Europeans). Even today, their ritual dances are often considered the most photogenic. Although some families show the distinctive differences, most Hutus and Tutsis today are indistinguishable.¹⁰²

What would lie in store for the United States if the one-drop-rule were to be victorious in the present ideological struggle? What if social stricture were to enforce the one-drop rule as strictly as it does color-line endogamy itself, and entertainers were suddenly to discover that claiming dual heritage was a money-losing strategy? Judging by Hindu castes and those of Rwanda-Burundi (and the Japanese Burakumin and others), the bimodal U.S. complexion distribution would eventually disappear. Slow genetic leakage across the color line by the tiny intermarriage rate would gradually lighten Blacks and darken Whites. Alleles for African appearance would disperse throughout the population until America became a land of people resembling the Portuguese or Argentineans of today. Paradoxically, the color line would be stronger than ever, dividing two endogamous groups of different official genealogy but identical appearance (as in India or Rwanda-Burundi).

Again, laws could be made more logical. Affirmative action would focus on birth records, not self-labeling (as, indeed, was attempted in Boston and Los Angeles). The only Boston firefighters to receive Affirmative Action preference would be those whose genealogy checked out. Louetta Bennett, Susie Phipps, and Mary Walker would all have remained Black, whether their desired communities wanted to accept them or not. And the news media and Church would continue publicizing Healy, Davis, and Delille as famous Blacks, just as they do now.

Such a United States would resemble countries where caste systems rule, like India, Rwanda, or Japan. Properly documented elites would dominate those with tainted birth certificates, regardless of appearance. Assuming that the democratic political system could survive such a state (as it has in India and Japan despite their hereditarily oppressed castes), then the number of those defined as Black by birth records would probably increase slightly because race-switching would end. The terminology of subordination would not change, of course, any more than it has in India. The United States would still have a White-labeled elite ruling over the Black-labeled poor. The major difference is that the two castes would be visibly indistinguishable. Colorism would vanish, and "racism" in its purest form, unsullied by considerations of looks, would triumph.¹⁰³ In this scenario, perhaps a century from now, the American words "Black" and "White" would remain intact as a quaint counterfactual remnant of a past when appearance mattered.

A recent visitor to England wrote:

I even heard a member of the House of Lords in 1973 describe the differences between Irish Protestants and Catholics in terms of their "distinct and clearly definable differences of race." You mean to say that you can tell them apart?" I asked incredulously. "Of course," responded the lord. "Any Englishman can."¹⁰⁴

Biographical data about the writer

² This sentence, of course, reveals the AP staffer's own ideas about race. The 46 percent Hispanic (versus 8 percent white) is questionable because over ninety percent of those who identify themselves as "Hispanic" in the U.S. census also report themselves as "White" (or an equivalent) on the same census form. And most Americans of mixed Euro-Asian parentage (like Keanu Reeves, say) also consider themselves to be census White.

³ The term "paragidm," here, is used in the strict sense defined by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962) as a conceptual framework for experimental observations.

⁴ See the results of a survey of 365 physical anthropologists reported in Matt Cartmill, "The Status of the Race Concept in Physical Anthropology," American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (1998): 651-60.

⁵ idem. For similar rejections of the bio-race paradigm as useless, see: Michael L. Blakey, "Scientific Racism and the Biological Concept of Race," Literature and Psychology 1999, no. 1/2 (1999): 29; C. Loring Brace, "Does Race Exist?: An Antagonist's Perspective," [web page] (Nova, 2000); available from www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/brace.html; Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); and Stephen Molnar, Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002). Also, see the the American Anthropological Association's rejection of "race" as useful paradigm at http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm and their dissociation of "race" from "intelligence" at http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/race.htm.

⁶ George W. Gill, "Does Race Exist?: An Proponent's Perspective," [web page] (Nova, 2000); available from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/gill.html

⁷ James Shreeve, "Terms of Estrangement," Discover, November 1994, 56, 61.

⁸ Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, "Perishing Paradigm: Race--1931-99," American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 110-13. A following article in the same issue, by Mat Cartmill and Kaye Brown, questions the actual rate of decline but agrees that the bio-race paradigm has fallen into near-total disfavor. A third article in the same issue shows that the decline in the paradigm's usefulness has been slower in Poland than in the United States but admits that the semantic usage of "race" in Europe includes the French race, the German race, the Italian race, and so forth.

⁹ See The Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000c (1988).

¹⁰ Ibid., §§ 2000e and following (1988).

¹¹ See The Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. § 1973 (1988).

¹² See The Fair Housing Act of 1968, 42 U.S.C. §§ 3601-19 (1988).

¹³ See 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (1988).

¹⁴ Bartholet, "Where do Black Children Belong?: The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139, no. 5 (1991): 1163-1256.

¹⁵ Joel G. Brenner and Liz Spayd, "A Pattern of Bias in Mortgage Loans," Washington Post, June 6 1993, A1.

¹⁶ Naikang Tsao, "Ameliorating Environmental Racism: A Citizen's Guide to Combating the Discriminatory Siting of Toxic Waste Dumps," New York University Law Review 67, no. 2 (1992): 366.

¹⁷ Trina Jones, "Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color," Duke Law Journal 49, no. 6 (2000): 1487-1558.

¹⁸ Data downloaded from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database of the University of Minnesota Population Center at www.ipums.org. For details, see Frank W. Sweet, America's Odd Two-Caste System: Paths Not Taken, Part 1 (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2000). ¹⁹ Yearly data points from: Steve W. Rawlins, "Household and Family Characteristics: March 1993 (P20-477)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1994), 21; Steve Rawlins and Arlene Saluter, "Household and Family Characteristics: March 1994 (P20-483)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1995), 227; Ken Bryson, "Household and Family Characteristics: March 1995 (P20-488)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1996), 183; Arlene Saluter, "Household and Family Characteristics: March 1996 (P20-495)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1997), 178; Lynne M. Casper and Ken Bryson, "Household and Family Characteristics: March 1997 (P20-509)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1998), 176; Lynne M. Casper and Ken Bryson, "Household and Family Characteristics: March 1998 (P20-515)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1998), 176; Jason Fields and Lynne M. Casper, "America's Family and Living Arrangements 1999 (P20-537)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), 21; Jason Fields and Lynne M. Casper, "America's Family and Living Arrangements 2000 (P20-537)," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), 21

²⁰ Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 108.

²¹ Suzanne Model and Gene Fisher, "Unions Between Blacks and Whites: England and the U.S. Compared," Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, no. 5 (2002): 728-54.

²² Private email communications on 5/30/2003 and 6/9/2003 with the author of William Javier Nelson, "Racial Definition: Background for Divergence," Phylon 47, no. 4 (1986): 318-26.

²³ Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review 48, no. 2 (1995): 513-570, 539n176.

²⁴ Nicholas A. Jones and Amy Symens Smith, "The Two or More Races Population: 2000," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), 12, 9.

²⁵ Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review 48, no. 2 (1995): 513-570, 551.

²⁶ Also see, generally, Derrick A. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: BasicBooks, 1992).

²⁷ For surveys of this literary convention, see M. Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2001) or Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (Cambridge: Harvard university, 1997), 246-84.

²⁸ See discussion of this point in David L. Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "What Does 'Black' Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization," Critical Sociology 28, no. 1/2 (2002): 101-121, 100.

²⁹ 479 So. 2d 369; 479 U.S. 1002; 485 So. 2d 60.

³⁰ AP, "Rewriting Her Story," [LexisNexis] (The National Law Journal, September 18, 1989).

³¹ Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review 48, no. 2 (1995): 513-570, 540-41.

³² F. James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation's Definition (University Park PA: State University of Pennsylvania, 1991), 99.

³³ Melanie D. G. Kaplan, "Different Strokes," USA Weekend, June 20-22 2003, 10.

³⁴ Frank W. Sweet, "Rituals and Race-Switching," [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, July-August, 2002); available from http://www.interracialvoice.com/sweet9.html; Curt Stern, Principles of Human Genetics, 3d ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), 827-32; L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and W. F. Bodmer, The Genetics of Human Populations (Mineola NY: Dover, 1999), 788-92.

³⁵ Nicholas A. Jones and Amy Symens Smith, "The Two or More Races Population: 2000," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), 12.

³⁶ David L. Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "What Does 'Black' Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization," Critical Sociology 28, no. 1/2 (2002): 101-121, 108n7.

³⁷ Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, "Socially Embedded Identities: Theories, Typologies, and Processes of Racial Identity Among Black/White Biracials," The Sociological Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2002): 335-57, 335.

³⁸ David L. Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "What Does 'Black' Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization," Critical Sociology 28, no. 1/2 (2002): 101-121, 110.

³⁹ Pier M. Larson, "Reconsidering Trauma, Identity, and the African Diaspora: Enslavement and Historical Memory in Nineteenth-Century Highland Madagascar," William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 335-62, 336.

⁴⁰ The Malones' story can be found in newspaper articles spanning a one-year period: Peggy Hernandez, "Two Fight Firing over Disputed Claim They are Black," [LexisNexis] (The Boston Globe, September 29, 1988); Peggy Hernandez, "Firemen Who Claimed to be Black Lose Appeal," [LexisNexis] (The Boston Globe, July 26, 1989).

⁴¹ Gunnar Myrdal, Richard Mauritz Edvard Sterner, and Arnold Marshall Rose, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) 1380n26.

⁴² Related to the author by personal acquaintances who wish to remain anonymous.

⁴³ Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, Rev. and abridged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1966), 254-55.

⁴⁴ Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University, 1971), 92-93.

⁴⁵ Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (Cambridge: Harvard university, 1997), 247, 493-95.

⁴⁶ For an excellent overall survey of the multiracial movement, see G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2002). For the American Anthopological Association's plea to the Federal Government to discontinue the census "race" question once and for all, see http://www.aaanet.org/gvt/ombdraft.htm. For a brief overview of these issues, see Bijan Gilanshah, "Multiracial Minorities: Erasing the Color Line," Law and Inequality 12 (1993): 183.

⁴⁷ David L. Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "What Does 'Black' Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization," Critical Sociology 28, no. 1/2 (2002): 101-121, 112.

⁴⁸ Nicholas A. Jones and Amy Symens Smith, "The Two or More Races Population: 2000," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), 12, page 7 tables 4 and 5.

⁴⁹ F. James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation's Definition (University Park PA: State University of Pennsylvania, 1991), 74, 133; Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth- Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989), 322.

⁵⁰ Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald E. Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 39.

⁵¹ "Effi Barry Reveals: Mayor Wanted Her Skin Darkened to Protect His Image as a Black Man," Jet, July 23, 1990 as reported in Trina Jones, "Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color," Duke Law Journal 49, no. 6 (2000): 1487-1558, 1521.

⁵² Jack Kroll, "Success is the Beast Revenge," Newsweek, August 15, 1994 1994, 65; Courtland Milloy, "Black Beauty," Washington Post, September 22 1983, DC1.

⁵³ I apologize if I seem to take sides on this issue, but I write for a magazine that focuses on issues of racial identity and we get dozens of letters each year from youngsters who suffer from such bullying.

⁵⁴ Nicholas A. Jones and Amy Symens Smith, "The Two or More Races Population: 2000," (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), 12, page 7 table 5.

⁵⁵ G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2002), 8, 83, 111.

⁵⁶ David L. Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "What Does 'Black' Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization," Critical Sociology 28, no. 1/2 (2002): 101-121,114.

⁵⁷ Bijan Gilanshah, "Multiracial Minorities: Erasing the Color Line," Law and Inequality 12 (1993): 183, 190.

⁵⁸ Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1-69.

⁵⁹ 195 S.C. 1.

⁶⁰ The letter is available in the magazine's archives at http://interracialvoice.com/letter93.html, Thursday 22 May 2003, from YACTNOW@aol.com, "Response to Admixture Rates and To Televison Too." The cited (but incorrectly interpreted) journal article on polymorphisms was Esteban J. Parra and others, "Estimating African American Admixture Proportions by Use of Population-Specific Alleles," American Journal of Human Genetics 63 (1998): 1839-51.

⁶¹ Paul Finkelman, "The Color of Law," Northwestern University Law Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 937-91 937n3. For more on this point, see also Neil Gotanda, "A Critique of 'Our Constitution is Color-Blind'," Stanford Law Review 44, no. 1 (1991): 1-68.

⁶² Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review 48, no. 2 (1995): 513-570, 535.

⁶³ Employer Information Report EEO-1 and Standard Form 100, Appendix § 4, Race/Ethnic Identification, 1 Empl. Prac. Guide (CCH) § 1881, (1981), 1625.

⁶⁴ Borgna Brunner, ed. Time Almanac: The Ultimate Worldwide Fact and Information Source (Boston: Information Please LLC, 1999) 364.

⁶⁵ For detailed arguments that the term is crafted to be ambiguous, see Peter J. Aspinall, "Collective Terminology to Describe the Minority Ethnic Population: The Persistence of Confusion and Ambiguity in Usage," Sociology 36, no. 4 (2002): 803-16 and Phillip Gleason, "Minorities (Almost) All: The Minority Concept in American Social Thought," American Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1991): 392-424.

⁶⁶ 935 S.W.2d 9.

⁶⁷ A.D. Powell, "When Are Irish-Americans Not Good Enough to Be Irish-American?: 'Racial Kidnaping' and the Case of the Healy Family," November [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 1998); available from http://interracialvoice.com/powell8.html.

⁶⁸ See Black Catholics in the United States, a Vatican publicity handout for Pope John Paul II's visit to the United Nations in October, 1995 at http://shamino.quincy.edu/tolton/black.html, also available from NCCB Secretariat for African American Catholics, 3211 4th Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20017, (202) 541-3177.

⁶⁹ See Georgetown University, Rev. Patrick F. Healy, SJ Papers: Collection Description at http://gulib.lausun.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/cl57.htm.

⁷⁰ James M. O'Toole, "Racial Identity and the Case of Captain Michael Healy, USRCS," Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives & Records Administration 29, no. 3 (1997).

⁷¹ A.D. Powell, "Pissing on the Graves of Heroes," May [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 2003); available from http://interracialvoice.com/powell14.html.

⁷² James E. DeVries, Race and Kinship in a Midwestern town: The Black Experience in Monroe, Michigan, 1900-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1984), 150.

⁷³ Literally, "free people of color." In practice, the term refers to members of the Louisiana Creole community who, even today, adamantly refuse to self-identify racially. They insist that they are neither Black nor White.

⁷⁴ Marion L. Ferreira, "The Misidentification of Mother Henriette Delille," August [Electronic Magazine] (The Multiracial Activist, 2002); available from http://www.multiracial.com/readers/ferreira.html.

⁷⁵ Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University, 1986), 163.

⁷⁶ Marion L. Ferreira, "Mother Henriette Delille & The One-Drop Rule -- Alive and Well?," January 1 [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 2003); available from http://interracialvoice.com/marion.html; Susanne M.J. Heine, "To the Most Reverend Alfred C. Hughes," January 1 [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 2003); available from http://interracialvoice.com/sheine8.html; John O. Sarpy, "An Open Letter to the Leadership of the Catholic Church Regarding the Racial/Cultural Labeling of Mother Henriette Delille," [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 2003); available from http://interracialvoice.com/sarpy2.html; John O. Sarpy, "An open letter to Most Reverend Alfred C. Hughes," [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 2003); available from http://interracialvoice.com/sarpy.html.

⁷⁷ Marion L. Ferreira, "A Letter to the Pope and an Archbishop's Racist Reply," January 1 [Electronic Magazine] (Interracial Voice, 2003); available from http://interracialvoice.com/marion2.html.

⁷⁸ See the film's review at http://www.the-reel-mccoy.com/movies/2002/MenInBlackII.html.

⁷⁹ For an excellent summary of the moral dilemma faced by a cab driver who, on the one hand is not racist but who, on the other, does not want to get mugged, see Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995), 265-66.

⁸⁰ Lynne Duke, "Confronting Violence," Washington Post, January 8 1994, A10; no-byline, "A New Civil Rights Frontier," U.S. News and World Report, January 17 1994.

⁸¹ The term was first defined in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 290-91.

⁸² For studies of how American children gradually learn to identify the Black "racial" phenotype, see Lola Cosmides, John Tooby, and Robert Kurzban, "Perceptions of Race," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 4 (2003): 173-79; Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, "Can Race be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, no. 26 (2001): 15387-15392; and Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

⁸³ For a survey of nineteenth-century attempts, see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, New ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1997), 69-83.

⁸⁴ For the importance of prognathism, see William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1967), sketch on page 94 or Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), photos between pages 146 and 147 and sketch before page 243. For foot shape, see judge's instructions to the jury in 23 Ark. 50: "No one, who is familiar with the peculiar formation of the negro foot [emphasis in original], can doubt, but that an inspection of that member would ordinarily afford some indication of the race...."

⁸⁵ See, for example, the Brown Fellowship Society of Charleston in Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1973), 81-85; the Blue Vein Society of Nashville in Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald E. Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 25 or Bart Landry, The New Black middle Class (Berkeley: University of California, 1987), 34; and Jack and Jill of America, Inc. in Lawrence Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 19-44.

⁸⁶ For studies measuring the low recent African ancestry of White Americans (compared to White-looking Hispanics), see C.L. Pfaff and others, "Population Structure in Admixed Populations: Effect of Admixture Dynamics on the Parrtern of Linkage Disequilibrium," American Journal of Human Genetics 68 (2001): 198-207 and C.L. Pfaff and others, "Using Estimates of Individual Admixture to Study the Genetics of Phenotypic Traits: Skin Pigmentation in African Americans," American Journal of Human Genetics 69, no. 4 (2001): 410. For studies measuring the low recent European ancestry of Afro-Americans (compared to Black-looking Hispanics), see Esteban J. Parra and others, "Estimating African American Admixture Proportions by Use of Population-Specific Alleles," American Journal of Human Genetics 63 (1998): 1839-51 and E.J. Parra and others, "Ancestral Proportions and Admixture Dynamics in Geographically Defined African Americans Living in South Carolina," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114 (2001): 18-29.

⁸⁷ Whether such a future is desirable, of course, depends upon the reader. I suspect that most Blacks would reject it. Nevertheless, for a positive view of this possibility by a Black scholar, see Trina Jones, "Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color," Duke Law Journal 49, no. 6 (2000): 1487-1558.

⁸⁸ I believe that Park used the word is the sense of a "hereditary, endogamous, impermeable status group in which membership determines occupational roles, place of residence and legal and customary rights and duties." See Online Dictionary of Sociology - Athabasca University at web site http://datadump.icaap.org/cgi-bin/glossary/SocialDict. Note that this differs significantly in meaning from the Spanish word casta (as, indeed race differs from the Spanish raza).

⁸⁹ Allison Davis and others, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1941), 3-14.

⁹⁰ As quoted in Vernon J. Williams, From a Caste to a Minority: Changing Attitudes of American Sociologists Toward Afro-Americans, 1896-1945 (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 169. This work, incidentally, is an outstanding survey of historiographical changes in sociological thinking about "race" throughout the twentieth century.

⁹¹ The best overall exposition of his understanding of "caste" is Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1948), 3-118.

⁹² Vernon J. Williams, From a Caste to a Minority: Changing Attitudes of American Sociologists Toward Afro-Americans, 1896-1945 (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 170.

⁹³ An outstanding exception to this surrender is William Javier Nelson, "Racial Definition: Background for Divergence," Phylon 47, no. 4 (1986): 318-26.

⁹⁴ Tom O'Neill, "Untouchables," National Geographic, June 2003, 2-31.

⁹⁵ "History of the Indian Subcontinent" in University of Chicago, ed. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), 9:334-346. Incidentally, it is to be regretted that the Nazis' co-opting of a pseudo-history of India by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) to devise a mythology of an Aryan super-race, has given the term Aryan (noble in Sanskrit although derived from the word for ploughman) a bad name and has tainted all discussions of these events.

⁹⁶ "Dravidian Local Race" in University of Chicago, ed. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), iii:658; "Human Populations" in University of Chicago, ed. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), 14:846; University of Chicago, ed. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), 15:361.

⁹⁷ Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, New ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1997) 3-4.

⁹⁸ "Hinduism" in University of Chicago, ed. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), 8:903.

⁹⁹ John C. Nesfield, as quoted by Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1948), 97.

¹⁰⁰ William Dowell, "Who Should Pay For the Crimes?," Time, July 17, 2000, 18, 18.

¹⁰¹ Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 304-06. Incidentally, in their language, Kinyarwanda, a single Tutsi is called batutsi and the plural is watutsi, hence the name of the dance.

¹⁰² "Tutsi" in University of Chicago, ed. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15 ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), x:206.

¹⁰³ Again, whether such a future is desirable depends upon the reader.

¹⁰⁴ As quoted in Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California, 1990).

Also by Frank W. Sweet:

• A Brief History of the Color Line
• The Richest Woman in Florida
• Slavery and the "Race" Notion
• The Heredity of Complexion

• Yellow Fever and the AME Churches
• More than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order
• Where Did White Folks Come From?
• Sex and the Shavetail Ring-Knocker*

• Rituals and Race-Switching
• Love Child: A Genealogist's Guide to the Social History of Barbados
• Two Writers Turned Civil War Soldiers
• The "Race" Notion's Role in Ethnic Assimilation

• The End of Florida's Spanish Plantations
• Molecular Anthropology and the "Race" Notion
• The End of Slavery in England