Even small admixtures of black blood blocked Indians’ racial advancement.

Evidence

The quaintness of the category “hold-yourself-in-midair” momentarily draws attention away from the insidious racial implications usually affiliated with animalization. An offspring 7/8 Indian and 1/8 black, “hold-yourselfin-midair” signals the floating in air betwixt and between categories, the insertion of blackness and the unknowability of the precise outcome restricting the otherwise relative hierarchical elevation and advancement that is the prospect of full-blooded Indians. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1104

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘fractional blood’ logic — where one-eighth blackness caps social ascent — is a sharp lens for an essay on how tiny ancestral inputs get treated as existential disqualifiers.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox: the ‘quaint’ name hides a precise arithmetic of exclusion where unknowability itself is the mechanism restricting advancement — the category weaponizes uncertainty.