Legal one-drop rules marked even distant African ancestry as black

Evidence

The one-drop rule was created to keep anyone remotely black out of sharing the privilege of whiteness. That’s why Homer Plessy was determined to be “black” under the law even though neither his parents nor his grandparents were black, only a single great-grandparent. Having one African ancestor denied him the benefit of riding in the whites-only section of the train. That also explains how the Sicilians in Louisiana were “raced” other than white. That is what makes eligibility issues so difficult: The law constructed arbitrary rules around race that led to black Americans’ stigma, discrimination, and exploitation. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 537

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Lex Oppia/immodesty framing — law constructing social categories with real material consequences; connects to the dressing-moral-panics article’s theme of law reifying group identities. — connects to: Mixed-race individuals are classified as black under the hypodescent rule — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 721