one-drop rule

English

Noun

the one-drop rule

1. (chiefly US) The notion that one drop of black blood (i.e., any African ancestry at all) makes a person black.
   • 2008 April 6, Beverly Gage, “Our First Black President?”, in New York Times, retrieved 8 January 2017:

     [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.”

   • 2021 November 7, Claire [G.] Coleman, “Not quite blak enough: ‘The people who think I am too white to be Aboriginal are all white’”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     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.

Derived terms

• reverse one-drop rule

See also

• miscegenation