Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition / Edition 1

by F. James Davis

Overview

This volume is the Tenth Anniversary Edition of a book that was honored in 1992 as an "Outstanding Book" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States. Reprinted many times since its first publication in 1991, Who Is Black? has become a staple in college classrooms throughout the United States, helping students understand this nation’s history of miscegenation and the role that the "one-drop rule" has played in it. In this special anniversary edition, the author brings the story up to date in an epilogue. There he highlights some revealing responses to Who Is Black? and examines recent challenges to the one-drop rule, including the multiracial identity movement and a significant change in the census classification of racial and ethnic groups.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271021720
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2001
Edition description:	10th Anniversary Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

F. James Davis is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Illinois State University and the author of Society and the Law (1962), Social Problems (1970), and Minority-Dominant Relations (1978).

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
Chapter 1	The Nation's Rule	1
	The One-Drop Rule Defined	4
	Black Leaders, But Predominantly White	6
	Plessy, Phipps, and Other Challenges in the Courts	8
	Census Enumeration of Blacks	11
	Uniqueness of the One-Drop Rule	13
Chapter 2	Miscegenation and Beliefs	17
	Racial Classification and Miscegenation	19
	Racist Beliefs About Miscegenation	23
	The Judge Brady Paradox	27
	Miscegenation in Africa and Europe	28
	Race vs. Beliefs About Race	29
Chapter 3	Conflicting Rules	31
	Early Miscegenation in the Upper South: The Rule Emerges	33
	South Carolina and Louisiana: A Different Rule	34
	Miscegenation on Black Belt Plantations	38
	Reconstruction and the One-Drop Rule	42
	The Status of Free Mulattoes, North and South	46
	The Emergence and Spread of the One-Drop Rule	47
Chapter 4	The Rule Becomes Firm	51
	Creation of the Jim Crow System	52
	The One-Drop Rule Under Jim Crow	54
	Effects of the Black Renaissance of the 1920s	58
	The Rule and Myrdal's Rank Order of Discriminations	60
	Sexual Norms and the Rule: Jim Crow vs. Apartheid	66
	Effects of the Fall of Jim Crow	68
	De Facto Segregation and Miscegenation	70
	Miscegenation Since the 1960s	73
	Development of the One-Drop Rule in the Twentieth Century	77
Chapter 5	Other Places, Other Definitions	81
	Racial Hybrid Status Lower Than Both Parent Groups	82
	Status Higher Than Either Parent Group	87
	In-Between Status: South Africa and Others	90
	Highly Variable Class Status: Latin America	99
	Two Variants in the Caribbean	105
	Equality for the Racially Mixed in Hawaii	109
	Same Status as the Subordinate Group: The One-Drop Rule	113
	Status of an Assimilating Minority	117
	Contrasting Socially Constructed Rules	119
Chapter 6	Black Acceptance of the Rule	123
	Alex Haley, Lillian Smith, and Others	124
	Transracial Adoptions and the One-Drop Rule	128
	Rejection of the Rule: Garvey, American Indians, and Others	132
	Black Acceptance: Reasons and Implications	137
Chapter 7	Ambiguities, Strains, Conflicts, and Traumas
	The Death of Walter White's Father and Other Traumas	142
	Collective Anxieties About Racial Identity: Some Cases	144
	Personal Identity: Seven Modes of Adjustment	149
	Lena Horne's Struggles with Her Racial Identity	150
	Problems of Administering the One-Drop Rule	156
	Misperceptions of the Racial Identity of South Asians, Arabs, and Others	160
	Sampling Errors in Studying American Blacks	164
	Blockage of Full Assimilation of Blacks	167
	Costs of the One-Drop Rule	168
Chapter 8	Issues and Prospects	171
	A Massive Distortion? A Monstrous Myth?	172
	Clues for Change in Deviations from the Rule	175
	Clues for Change in Costs of the Rule	176
	Possible Direction: Which Alternative?	180
	Prospects for the Future	184
	Epilogue to the Tenth Anniversary Edition	189
	Works Cited	201
	Index	209

Editorial Reviews

This is a very well-written book that communicates complex ideas with clarity and interest. It is rare, in my experience, for an academic book written by a social scientist to be as interesting and exciting as a piece of fiction. This book is hard to put down because Davis’s story of how the United States as a nation came to define who is black reads like a mystery novel in which every historical event provides one more clue to the final murder of a people.”

—Aida Hurtado American Journal of Sociology

“Davis has given us a brilliant and informative history of the fateful policy commonly called the rule of hypodescent (the ‘one-drop’ rule) and the impact it has had psychologically, socially, economically, and politically on African-American history. Davis’s book is the most recent in the series of works written on this topic, but is by far the most thorough and insightful.”

—G. Reginald Daniel Contemporary Sociology

“This is an eye-opening appraisal of an issue often taken for granted in America.”

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher