Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States

2. The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule

2 The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule This essay picks up from where “Amalgamation and Hypodescent” left off. Here, I explore more systematically the relationship between the hypodescent racialization of African Americans and the tendency of governmental and private agencies to treat non-black minorities according to the same rules established for black victims of white racism. I focus especially on the slowness of policy-makers and social critics to come to grips with the experience of Americans of Asian ancestry. I take the 1998 Clinton Commission’s “Initiative on Race” as an example for this slowness. I argue that the more we understand the unique invidiousness of the “one drop rule” as applied to “blacks,” the weaker the hold on us of the “one hate rule” according to which anti-discrimination remedies designed for black people are uncritically applied to non-black victims of white racism. And vice-versa. As the case for the one hate rule weakens, the unique racism of the one drop rule becomes all the more apparent. The rules have come to affect each other dialectically. I argue, further, that what we learn from historians and social scientists about the conditions that promote the overrepresentation of some demographic groups in economic and educational elites (Jewish Americans, Japanese Americans, and South Asian Americans, for example) are relevant to our debates over the sources of the underrepresentation in the same social spaces of 39 other demographic groups (including African Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians). Hence what I say here connects with Chapter Eight of this volume, “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresenation Should Be Explained rather than Mystified or Avoided.” This essay grows out of a series of workshops convened by Kenneth Prewitt, the former Director of the United States Bureau of the Census, for the purpose of debating just what the questions about race, ethnicity, and nationality should look like in the federal censuses of the future. Accordingly, I express concern about a system that by default dumps on the Census Bureau the authority to decide which particular communities of descent belong to large groups called “races” and to decide, implicitly, which descent communities carry with their category presumptive eligibility for descent-defined benefits. Among the points at issue is exactly which social distinctions matter for the purposes of public policy in the United States, and why. If it is naïve and irresponsible to suppose that the United States is one big, undivided solidarity, in which ethnoracial distinctions do not affect the destiny of individuals, so, too, is it naïve and irresponsible to suppose that all victims of white racism are identically disabled and defined by that racism, no matter what their class position , their length of time in the United States, and what may have been the historical circumstances of their descent community prior to immigration. This essay was published in Daedalus (Winter 2005): 18–28. Two portentous practices within the public discussion of “race” in the United States since the late 1960s are rarely analyzed together . One is the method by which we decide which individuals are “black.” The other is our habit of conflating the mistreatment of blacks with that of non-black minorities. Both practices compress a great range of phenomena into ostensibly manageable containers. Both function to keep the concept of race current amid mounting pressures that threaten to render it anachronistic. Both invite reassessment at the start of the twenty-first century. The prevailing criterion for deciding who is black is of course the principle of hypodescent. This “one drop rule” has meant that anyone with a visually discernable trace of African, or what 40 The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule • used to be called “Negro,” ancestry is, simply, black. Comparativists have long noted the peculiar ordinance this mixture-denying principle has exercised over the history of the United States. Although it no longer has the legal status it held in many states during the Jim Crow era, this principle was reinforced in the civil rights era as a basis for anti-discrimination remedies. Today it remains in place as a formidable convention in many settings and dominates debates about the categories appropriate for the federal census. The movement for recognition of “mixed race” identity has made some headway, including for people with a fraction of African ancestry , but most governments, private agencies, educational...