[As stated in Part I of this article, to maximize the hidden takeaways underlying this article, readers are strongly encouraged to invest themselves in reading the full content of the referenced footnotes (for better context around the noted entries)].
Politically and economically, then (between 200-400 years ago), the focus was to preserve the Germanic European White Anglo Saxon Protestant elitists as a unique, census-recognized race at the expense and detriment of all other races! Neat and tidy, wouldn’t you say? Yet when mixed-race marriages were legalized (in our more recent past, in the Loving versus Virginia, case of 1968) the potential such mixed-race marriages had – through their offspring – began to make the WASP’s nightmare of impure blood come to hasty fruition, resulting in the erasure of wealth alongside the erasure of the physical traits of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant elites – the tangible and the esoteric “things” that WASP individuals believed was their aristocratic birthright[i].
[i] The Death Of WASP Culture: NPR
This unconscionably unthinkable threat to the economic boon of established slave trade and the obscene wealth that issued forth from it into the pockets of Colonial whites who profited on greatly from the ill-gotten gains of human trafficking during the middle passage was well on its self-induced downward spiral with a quick and predictable finite end. [The trainwreck -or, the unintended backfire on white supremacy!]
Politically and economically, when one’s wealth, caste and socio-economic status are in peril, one’s survival instincts kick-in and thus the One-Drop Rule’s quick implementation! In our 20‑20 hindsight (we have now…in retrospect), the One-Drop Rule only slowed down the feared train wreck. It neither successfully prevented the erasure of white (WASP) blood purity nor did it prevent the demise of wealth held by the factions who were once in power. As “protectors of wealth”, politicians then re-strategized and came up with additional egregious ideas and actions: Reconstruction, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and states’ written laws that marriages between the races were illegal and, as such, forbidden! [These would be the additional, analogous, boxcars that were put on the train so the wreckage /carnage would be more recognizable!]
[Side note: The forbidden fruit was long-ago proven the most irresistible of which to partake! Our human-ness has been repeatedly tested on this topic ever since Eve offered Adam a bite of the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden, thus ushering in humans’ free will to: (a) resist, or (b) succumb to the temptation!]
To understand the political and economic ramifications of the One-Drop Rule more deeply, one must look no further than the Black Codes put forth following Reconstruction… and closely thereafter, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation issued to proclaim slaves as “forever free” (in southern states only [i.e., the Civil War area referenced in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation], as enslaved people in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri remained enslaved under Union control, per the Proclamation’s wording!). The old, hidden-in-the-Emancipation-Proclamation-excluding-language: “This is for everyone but you…” has been an effective political and economic practice in America for going on 400 years! The Black Codes[i] took away many of the alleged “guaranteed” rights that had been granted to Blacks through the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution.
[i] Black Codes | Definition, U.S. History, & Examples | Britannica
The 13th Amendment, in 1865 ended Slavery throughout the US and banned it forever, reading:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted (this specific wording sham underlies “why” America’s penitentiaries are disproportionately filled with Black men today), shall exist within the United States[i].” It was the 13th Amendment (not the Emancipation Proclamation, as many mistakenly believe) that put an end to Slavery in the entire Union.
[i] Essay: The End of Slavery and the Reconstruction Amendments | Bill of Rights Institute
Yet, it was Congress’s aim (in 1868) to make the protection of Blacks’ civil rights permanent via the 14th Amendment – an alteration of federalism (the division and sharing of power between national and state governments[i]), which dramatically limited the powers of states, with Section 1 of the 14th Amendment stating: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws[ii]….” despite that we see this play out differently before our very eyes, over and over again, throughout America.
[i] what is federalism in the constitution – Google Search
[ii] Essay: The End of Slavery and the Reconstruction Amendments | Bill of Rights Institute
Of the three identified Amendments, the 15th Amendment (of 1870) protected Blacks’ rights to vote, reading: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude[i].” Again, we see this play out differently over and over again, specifically as it relates to Black voters! Dare I state that the 2024 presidential election promises not to disappoint with additional displays of Black voter suppression efforts?!
[i] Ibid.
These Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, throughout the history of this country, have been repeatedly challenged all the way to the Supreme Court (a federal/federalist entity because states continue to stomp on Black and Brown individuals’ civil rights and more often than not states “get it wrong”). If states got it right, there would be no need for a Supreme Court that reviews the glaring inconsistencies in the application of the nation’s laws (as in the recent Breonna Taylor verdict that her boyfriend is now the person responsible for her untimely death[i], but I digress. SMH).
[i] Kentucky judge dismisses core charges against two former officers connected to Breonna Taylor’s death (nbcnews.com)
Likewise, it is probably not surprising that, as we dig through the annals of American history, this divisive practice of pigeon-holing, and therefore separating, individuals was begun in the socially misguided region of the eastern United States – the known epicenter of slave trade where skin color determined one’s socio-economic (caste) destiny and mattered significantly. As is pointed out by one of the most honored U.S. historians of the second half of the twentieth century, Winthrop Jordan, the One-Drop Rule existed and “…described the high degree of social and sexual mixing that occurred in the early centuries between Africans and Europeans in what later became the United States….[i]”
[i] Microsoft Word – 6_Jordan_Spickard_JCMRS_2014_Issue1.doc (escholarship.org)
This is important because the One-Drop Rule is only recognized in the United States as a “thing”! We can likely agree that a quick Google search of the “One-Drop Rule” will result in a plethora of articles ‑ from its first use[i], to the more recent examinations of its far-reaching social impacts, to why America is the only country that continues to focus upon and exploit the underlying concomitant behaviors that perpetually cement this maladaptive concept into its social, political and economic discourses.
[i] A far more complex facet of the Rule concerns the apparently simple matter of dating its beginnings. Here we run into serious difficulties, primarily because extant references to its existence are uncommon and appear in few widely scattered sources. (Jordan; Edited by Paul Spickard: Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States; Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies I (1)[2014])
At a theoretical level, the Rule unsteadily perches on a rigid and arbitrary dividing line between the social and the biological sciences. Personally and professionally, I find this dichotomy of interest because, as a [business] psychologist, my academic mentor (a renowned clinical psychologist) and I go ‘round and ‘round about the differences and lack of provable theories or even of a recognizable overlap between the soft sciences, like sociology and psychology in contrast to the more rule-based governing requirements of the hard sciences like biology and chemistry. More to the point, on a concrete level, the Rule is absurd in its pretense and its pervasive reliance within the United States, particularly in light of America’s founding premise as a “melting pot”!
To move forward into our collective future, I posit that we “talk others off the cliff” of their fear-based beliefs organically, yet very intentionally, by having discussions about and pointing out the societal shifts that are currently underway – shifts such as the transparent embrace of businesses that courageously yet resolutely stand unsupported, politically, to demonstrate the value of inclusion of diverse ethnicities, races, languages, cultures, sexualities, identities, abilities, beliefs…and, most importantly, skin hues.
Many progressive corporate marketing departments in 2024 are openly pandering to Mixed-Ethnic couples and People of Color in their external-facing advertising campaigns. Why?, you might ask. Because, we are literally on the brink of that societal shift where, thanks in very large part to genetic testing like Ancestry®, 23andMe®, and others, individuals are beginning to realize that their blood is not “pure” one race or “pure” another race, but is more commonly a mixture of several races – each ethnicity identified by the respective variable [potential] percentages contained within their One-Drop of blood (e.g., 9% Greek; 15% African American; 19% Russian; 20% Irish; 37% Jewish). Thus, the underlying “reason” that the U.S. census and U.S. employers now permit individuals to self-identify as “two or more races” – because now that the white supremacy train wreck has publicly been revealed through DNA testing, “two or more races” IS the new normal! [These are the additional boxcars that have now piled atop the unexpected/unintended train wreck, fully demonstrating how the One-Drop Rule of Miscegenation totally and unexpectedly backfired on white supremacy!]
Mattel® (toy company) may have been one of the earliest adopters of the significance of forward-facing inclusion via its creation of the Black Barbie doll. Truthfully, Mattel pioneered this marketing shift as one of the first major American corporate entities to expand its market niche in 1980, well before most American companies were aware of or interested in exploring ethnically-diverse income streams and certainly well before any American business entities knew or implemented corporate parity initiatives of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion! Not only did Mattel® “get it “, its Black Barbie dolls were included in early self-worth, identity and belonging psychology studies that examined young African American girls’ perceptions and values on representation(a word of monumentally-powerful importance in today’s professional fields of mental health, psychiatry, psychology and sociology, in a modicum [hopefully more and greater] reversal of the emotional, psychological and physical traumas that fragile white Colonialism has wrongly foisted upon Black Americans).
Band-Aid’s OurTone® bandages are another ‑ more recent ‑ market expansion into the corporate Black economic niche, which patented various shades of Black and Brown bandages in 2021 that more closely match the skin tones of various Persons of Color throughout the United States and around the globe. Comparably, Band-Aid®, through its OurTone® sales, incorporated a program that helps level the playing field in the nursing industry by partnering with and donating a portion of bandage sales proceeds to the National Black Nurses Association and National Students’ Nurses Association, thereby financially sustaining representation in the nursing niche for Black professionals.
These efforts point to the previous societal “norms” shift towards new societal norms! This is specifically important socially, economically, and politically, as it feeds directly into the topic of The Overton Window.
Political shifts are typically noted through a theory called The Overton Window. The Overton Window is an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptable government policies. It says politicians can act only within the acceptable range (the “window”). Shifting the Overton window involves proponents of policies outside the window who persuade the public to expand the window (think: Mattel® and Band-Aid®). Shifting the Overton window involves what I call “the collective” (or, as my colleague, Kim Palermo, calls it: “the aggregate” – the human race working together to change, shift, move society [and, consequently, move or shift the Window] towards more equitable life, liberty and justice for yesterday’s and today’s marginalized and oppressed).
Stated differently, the Overton Window is a model for understanding how societal ideas change over time and influence politics. The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support — they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options[i].
[i] ModelThinkers – Overton Window
Which means, we have input and influence about what is acceptable or unacceptable within our society… because WE…are the Window!
For example, women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery ‑ and more recently – an enlarging acceptance of In Vitro Fertilization are notable examples of the historical shift in the Overton Window. Some say more contemporary examples of the Overton Window would be America’s focus on issues like animal welfare, gay marriage, body art (tattoos/piercings), and universal healthcare. Issues that were taboo a century ago have become more readily accepted today – through the Window’s shift.
The Overton Window describes policies and political positions considered acceptable by the mainstream population at a given moment.
The Overton Window necessitates shifts along social beliefs and attitudes and is impacted, and therefore influenced, by economic cycles (as with Mattel® and Band-Aid®), civil or political demonstrations (such as Black Lives Matter rallies which resulted from George Floyd’s murder-generated public support outpouring), moderate and radical movements/events, all of which are identified (and adjusted for) in The Overton Window as the “politics of change.”
As such, society collectively wields great power to shift The Window favorably; we only need to:
- Be comfortably uncomfortable (there is no growth or change in comfort or complacency);
- Realize we are all more alike than different (coordinate a block party/community clean-up; get familiar with your hood; help one another);
- Know your audience (engage with surveys, polls and inputs [anecdotal information] and leverage outputs that transform statistical results into power); and
- Lastly, remember that the Window is not static (it shifts/slides during the “long-game”, thus making fortitude and resilience absolutely imperative).
The one “thing” white supremacists never envisioned would happen has happened: Their fear-based, caste-manipulative, legally-foisted, culture-divisive belief that their dirty little secrets – their white blood purity laws and designs – would remain cloistered, undiscovered, unrecognized, and unrevealed. Those dirty little white supremacy secrets, through easy-to-get and much-less-easy-to-refute DNA tests, have finally been fully exposed to the entire world – a world that is openly and unapologetically shifting away from purity and towards fully-integrated, unstoppable, unchangeable, unerasable hyperdescent!
Take heart: We’re FINALLY winning! The One-Drop Rule has backfired on white supremacy! There is no turning back!
Written and shared in #melaninsolidarity!
©2024TracyAlexisPhD, reprinted with express permission.
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