Racial classification criteria vary wildly by culture and era

Evidence

Nevertheless, the second approach has rejected the “natural race” view in favor of the argument that racial categories are always socially constructed (Harding, 1993). Reflection on the World War II atrocities committed in the name of maintaining “racial purity” decreased the attractiveness of continuing to search for biological determinants of racial differences. Moreover, the “social race” defenders pointed out the immense cultural variation in systems of racial classification. The US had had a complex system of classifying people of African descent as quadroons, octoroons, and those legally counted as black because their ancestry gave them 1/32 “black blood.” In parts of the Caribbean class has shaped racial classification so that the richer one is, the whiter one is perceived to be. South Africa, Japan, and other cultures have their own systems of racial classification. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1564

Categorization

• XREF: The Caribbean ‘richer equals whiter’ and US 1/32 blood-quantum examples are concrete, vault-friendly evidence for the cross-cultural variability of racial classification that grounding definitions rely on. — connects to: Who counts as mixed varies situationally, not by phenotype alone — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1164; Official Colored category absorbed anyone failing crisp racial classification — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 563
• CANDY: The 1/32 black blood legal threshold is a compact, surprising detail worth retelling.
• SHARE: The ‘US 1/32 black blood vs Caribbean class-makes-whiter’ contrast is exactly the sort of tight comparative that this reader’s reference notes on racialization would benefit from carrying.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1564