Hypodescent operated pragmatically and unevenly rather than as absolute rule
Evidence
The application of hypodescent, as much socially as legally, however, is better understood as a pragmatic application of raciak regulation than as an absolute requirement of racial rule. The supremacy of whiteness, viciously presumptive as it no doubt was for many, was not without its contradictions and contestations, its ruptures and restrictions, its self-doubts and slippages, its contrary desires and choices, responses and resistances. And these faultlines required the imposition of the state to mediate and manage, minimize and mask even their most minute manifestations. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 100
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the one-drop-rule legal cases (e.g. Plessy, the various state blood-quantum statutes) and to broader critical race theory discussions of whiteness as a contested category.
- DEEPTHINKING: Recasts a supposedly rigid, impersonal legal doctrine (the one-drop rule) as a flexible, contradiction-riddled instrument of state management — the faultlines in whiteness’s supremacy required state mediation.