Meaning of one-drop rule | Babel Free

Definitions

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

US

Examples

“[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.”

CEFR level