America and the One Drop Rule- We Didn't Make The Rule Donald!

He said I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?

Trump at the NABJ Conference 2024

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris in the 1980s.

What does that even mean. This is one of the most assinine statements a grown ass man could make. Especially one that use to be President of the United States. It’s like he doesn’t know this countries history. Or better yet how to read. It’s like he has never heard of the stupidest rule White Men in American ever made. THE ONE DROP RULE.

The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood") is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms).

The one-drop rule only applied to blacks in the United States. Not only does the one-drop rule apply to no other group than American blacks, but the rule is unique in that it is found only in the United States and not in any other nation in the world. In fact, definitions of who is black vary quite sharply from country to country, and for this reason people in other countries often express consternation about our definition.

During the Reconstruction era, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with "one drop" of known "Black blood" to be Black, regardless of appearance.

F. James Davis - Frontline

To be White one had to have perceived "pure" White ancestry. The one-drop rule or hypodescent rule refers to the convention of defining a person as racially black if he or she has any known African ancestry. This rule meant that those that were mixed race but with some discernible African ancestry were defined as black. The one-drop rule is specific to not only those with African ancestry but to the United States, making it a particularly African-American experience

Before the Civil War, free individuals of mixed race (free people of color) were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry (only in Virginia). Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry. This is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups. Hypodescent refers to the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union to the subordinate group.

The One-Drop rule was used in the South as a racial caste system and later as the hardening of segregation. Before the rule was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision of 1967, it was used to prevent interracial marriages and in general to deny rights and equal opportunities and uphold white supremacy.

 Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.

— Loving, 388 U.S. at 12

Facts:

Kamala Harris Howard University graduation photo in 1986.

VP Kamala Harris graduated in 1986 from Howard University, a historically Black institution where she was a member of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

VP Kamala Harris was elected president of the association of Black law students in her second year at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

VP Kamala Harris was the First African American woman DA in San Fransico.

VP Kamala Harris was the First African American and South Asian American Attorney General for the state of California.

VP Kamala Harris was the second Black Woman elected to the United States Senate.

VP Kamala Harris has stated “I grew up with a strong Indian culture, and I was raised in a Black community. All my friends were Black and we got together and cooked Indian food and painted henna on our hands, and I never felt uncomfortable with my cultural background.”

VP Harris wrote in a 2009 book about her childhood trips to both India and Jamaica, where, she wrote, “my father and uncles would talk to us about the complicated struggles of the people of Jamaica - the history of slavery, colonialism, and immigration.”

VP Kamala Harris wrote in the 2019 memoir about how her mother’s family instilled her and her sister Maya with “pride in our South Asian roots,” but also that “my mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

The Emhoff Family

The one trying to deny blackness is donald trump. Just because he and his family denied their own heritage doesnt mean everyone one else does.

CellyBlue - I Do Know This!