one-drop rule

Definition

The notion that one drop of black blood (i.e., any African ancestry at all) makes a person black.

Example Sentences

• "[T]he notorious historian William Estabrook Chancellor […] helped assemble a controversial biographical portrait accusing President Warren Harding of covering up his family’s “colored” past. […] Under the one-drop rule of American race relations, Chancellor claimed, the country had inadvertently elected its “first Negro president.”"
• "It was the wadjelas that created the ‘one drop’ rule, that defined anybody with a single bla(c)k ancestor as black. They did that to separate people, to create a caste system, to protect the notion of whiteness, to protect whiteness from the merest ‘impurity’, from the merest influx of colour."

Related Words