Hypodescent
Encyclopedia
In societies that regard some races of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent is the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group. The opposite practice is hyperdescent
, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
Parallel practices include agnatic descent, matrilineality
and cognatic descent
, which assign race according to the father, mother, or some combination, without regard to the race of the other parent. Since either parent (or both) might be of mixed-race, hypo- and hyper-descent can operate in tandem with, or separately from, a system of agnatic or cognatic racial assignment.
. States followed this with more stringent laws classifying more persons as black based on traceable or any ancestry. For example, in 1822 Virginia, a person was considered legally white with up to one-fourth African ancestry (equivalent to one grandparent). Under its Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Virginia defined as black a person with any known African ancestry, no matter how many generations in the past. It also established a binary classification system for vital records, assigning persons to white or black categories (the latter was essentially all other, into which Native Americans were included.)
Because southern states made slavery an inherited caste, with children taking on the status of the mother, the slave states freed white fathers from economic and social responsibility and kept control of mixed-race unions. They were typically the children of white planters, or their sons or overseers, who had relationships with or had raped and impregnated, enslaved women. By the 18th century in Virginia, travelers already noted the high rate of mixed-race people, and many shades of color found among slaves. There were traveler reports of "white slaves", meaning those who looked white and had only a small part of African ancestry. Among the notable examples of wealthy white planters who took longtime slave companions after becoming widowers, were reportedly John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, and Thomas Jefferson
. Each was said to have several children in the relationships. Both Wayles and Jefferson were said to have had a relationship with a slave woman of mixed race. Their children were majority white by ancestry; Jefferson's alleged children by Sally Hemings
were seven-eighths white.
The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie of the Civil War
-era about the hypocrisy of a woman's recognizing white men's children among the slaves in every household but her own. Fanny Kemble
, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men used slave women and left their mixed-race children enslaved.
Sometimes the white fathers freed the children and/or their mothers, or provided education or apprenticeship, or settled property on them in a significant transfer of social capital. Notable antebellum
examples were the fathers of Charles Henry Langston
and John Mercer Langston
, and the father of the Healy family of Georgia
. Other mixed-race children were left enslaved; some were sold away by their fathers.
Research by historians and genealogists has shown that unlike the above examples, most African Americans free in Virginia and nearby states in the colonial period were descended from relationships between white women, indentured servant or free, and African or African-American men, indentured servant, free or slave. This reflected the fluid nature of relationships among the working classes before slave rules were made strict. Because the mothers were white, the children were free born. By the turn of the nineteenth century, many free African Americans, along with European-American neighbors, migrated to frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and then further west. Such families sometimes settled in insular groups and were the origin of some isolated settlements, which have long claimed or were said to be of American Indian or Portuguese
ancestry.
In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent was the basis of the "one drop rule", meaning that if a individual had any black ancestry, the person was classified as black. New laws were passed in southern states and others long after the end of slavery to define white and black, under associated laws for segregation. Tennessee
adopted such a "one-drop" statute in 1910, and Louisiana
soon followed. Then Texas
and Arkansas
in 1911, Mississippi
in 1917, North Carolina
in 1923, Virginia
in 1924, Alabama
and Georgia
in 1927, and Oklahoma
in 1931. During this same period, Florida
, Indiana
, Kentucky
, Maryland
, Missouri
, Nebraska
, North Dakota
, and Utah
retained their old "blood fraction" statutes de jure
, but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirtysecond) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto
.
By 1924 there would have been many "white" people in Virginia who would have had some African and/or Native American ancestry. At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing to overturn segregation and regain civil rights lost to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement of the majority of the black community. Established in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) took the lead in filing lawsuits to overturn such provisions.
, seven states (Alabama
, Arizona
, Georgia
, Montana
, Oklahoma
, Texas
, and Virginia
) had adopted the one-drop theory for rules prohibiting interracial marriage
s. This was part of a continuing social hardening of racial lines after the turn of the century, when southern states imposed legal segregation and disfranchised African Americans.
Other states applied the hypodescent rule without carrying it to the "one-drop" extreme, using instead a blood quantum standard. For example, Utah
's anti-miscegenation law prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a negro
, mulatto
, quadroon
, octoroon, Mongolian, or member of "the Malay race
" (here referring to Filipinos
). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people who were not "white persons". The law was repealed in 1963.
In the US, people less consistently apply hypodescent in intermarriage between whites and other ethnic groups, such as Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
, in The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and Great Britain, societies have developed something like "genetic dominance" in our use of language to identify children from mixed race unions. He notes first, that people seem to be eager to embrace racial classification, even when talking about people of obviously mixed parentage; and second, that we tend not to describe people as of mixed race. Mixed-race children of European-African unions tend to be identified as "black", in what Dawkins calls a "cultural or memetic dominant." He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to recognize and differentiate among minor superficial differences, in contrast to what we share in our "unusually high level of genetic uniformity in the human species." It is difficult to say what evolutionary purpose such differentiation served; perhaps it contributed to group solidarity when groups lived further apart in different regions and were divided by many cultural factors. He suggests that such differentiation may be an "information-rich way to classify people."
Hyperdescent
Hyperdescent is the practice of classifying a child of mixed race ancestry in the more socially dominant of the parents' races.Hyperdescent is the opposite of hypodescent...
, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
Parallel practices include agnatic descent, matrilineality
Matrilineality
Matrilineality is a system in which descent is traced through the mother and maternal ancestors. Matrilineality is also a societal system in which one belongs to one's matriline or mother's lineage, which can involve the inheritance of property and/or titles.A matriline is a line of descent from a...
and cognatic descent
Cognatic
Cognatic kinship is a mode of descent calculated from an ancestor or ancestress counted through any combination of male and female links, or a system of bilateral kinship where relations are traced through both a father and mother....
, which assign race according to the father, mother, or some combination, without regard to the race of the other parent. Since either parent (or both) might be of mixed-race, hypo- and hyper-descent can operate in tandem with, or separately from, a system of agnatic or cognatic racial assignment.
History
The American practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began its development in the colonies, as slavery was established. But, it developed in its most strict legal definitions and application after the end of slavery in the early 20th century. After the Reconstruction era, white Democrats regained power in southern states and reasserted white political supremacy through the passage of disfranchising legislation and constitutional amendments, as well as Jim Crow laws, including racial segregationRacial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
. States followed this with more stringent laws classifying more persons as black based on traceable or any ancestry. For example, in 1822 Virginia, a person was considered legally white with up to one-fourth African ancestry (equivalent to one grandparent). Under its Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Virginia defined as black a person with any known African ancestry, no matter how many generations in the past. It also established a binary classification system for vital records, assigning persons to white or black categories (the latter was essentially all other, into which Native Americans were included.)
Because southern states made slavery an inherited caste, with children taking on the status of the mother, the slave states freed white fathers from economic and social responsibility and kept control of mixed-race unions. They were typically the children of white planters, or their sons or overseers, who had relationships with or had raped and impregnated, enslaved women. By the 18th century in Virginia, travelers already noted the high rate of mixed-race people, and many shades of color found among slaves. There were traveler reports of "white slaves", meaning those who looked white and had only a small part of African ancestry. Among the notable examples of wealthy white planters who took longtime slave companions after becoming widowers, were reportedly John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, and Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
. Each was said to have several children in the relationships. Both Wayles and Jefferson were said to have had a relationship with a slave woman of mixed race. Their children were majority white by ancestry; Jefferson's alleged children by Sally Hemings
Sally Hemings
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was a mixed-race slave owned by President Thomas Jefferson through inheritance from his wife. She was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father John Wayles...
were seven-eighths white.
The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie of the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
-era about the hypocrisy of a woman's recognizing white men's children among the slaves in every household but her own. Fanny Kemble
Fanny Kemble
Frances Anne Kemble , was a famous British actress and author in the early and mid nineteenth century.-Youth and acting career:...
, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men used slave women and left their mixed-race children enslaved.
Sometimes the white fathers freed the children and/or their mothers, or provided education or apprenticeship, or settled property on them in a significant transfer of social capital. Notable antebellum
History of the United States (1789–1849)
With the election of George Washington as the first president in 1789, the new government acted quickly to rebuild the nation's financial structure. Enacting the program of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the government assumed the Revolutionary war debts of the state and the national...
examples were the fathers of Charles Henry Langston
Charles Henry Langston
Charles Henry Langston , an American abolitionist and political activist born free in Louisa County, Virginia, was one of two men tried after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a cause célèbre in 1858 Ohio that helped gain impetus for abolition. In 1835 he was one of the first blacks admitted to...
and John Mercer Langston
John Mercer Langston
John Mercer Langston was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, and political activist. He was the first dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University. In 1888 he was the first African...
, and the father of the Healy family of Georgia
Healy family of Georgia
The Healy family of Georgia became notable in U.S. history because the siblings achieved much in the second half of the nineteenth century, most within the Catholic Church. They were born in Jones County, Georgia to Mary Eliza, a mulatto slave, and her common-law husband, Michael Morris Healy, an...
. Other mixed-race children were left enslaved; some were sold away by their fathers.
Research by historians and genealogists has shown that unlike the above examples, most African Americans free in Virginia and nearby states in the colonial period were descended from relationships between white women, indentured servant or free, and African or African-American men, indentured servant, free or slave. This reflected the fluid nature of relationships among the working classes before slave rules were made strict. Because the mothers were white, the children were free born. By the turn of the nineteenth century, many free African Americans, along with European-American neighbors, migrated to frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and then further west. Such families sometimes settled in insular groups and were the origin of some isolated settlements, which have long claimed or were said to be of American Indian or Portuguese
Portuguese people
The Portuguese are a nation and ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south-west Europe. Their language is Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion....
ancestry.
In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent was the basis of the "one drop rule", meaning that if a individual had any black ancestry, the person was classified as black. New laws were passed in southern states and others long after the end of slavery to define white and black, under associated laws for segregation. Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
adopted such a "one-drop" statute in 1910, and Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
soon followed. Then Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
and Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
in 1911, Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
in 1917, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
in 1923, Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
in 1924, Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
and Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
in 1927, and Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
in 1931. During this same period, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
, Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
, Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
, Nebraska
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....
, North Dakota
North Dakota
North Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, along the Canadian border. The state is bordered by Canada to the north, Minnesota to the east, South Dakota to the south and Montana to the west. North Dakota is the 19th-largest state by area in the U.S....
, and Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
retained their old "blood fraction" statutes de jure
De jure
De jure is an expression that means "concerning law", as contrasted with de facto, which means "concerning fact".De jure = 'Legally', De facto = 'In fact'....
, but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirtysecond) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
.
By 1924 there would have been many "white" people in Virginia who would have had some African and/or Native American ancestry. At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing to overturn segregation and regain civil rights lost to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement of the majority of the black community. Established in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP) took the lead in filing lawsuits to overturn such provisions.
Anti-miscegenation marriage laws
By the early 1940s, of the thirty U.S. states that had anti-miscegenation lawsAnti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races...
, seven states (Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
, Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
, Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, Montana
Montana
Montana is a state in the Western United States. The western third of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller, "island ranges" are found in the central third of the state, for a total of 77 named ranges of the Rocky Mountains. This geographical fact is reflected in the state's name,...
, Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
, and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
) had adopted the one-drop theory for rules prohibiting interracial marriage
Interracial marriage
Interracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry. This is a form of exogamy and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation .-Legality of interracial marriage:In the Western world certain jurisdictions have had regulations...
s. This was part of a continuing social hardening of racial lines after the turn of the century, when southern states imposed legal segregation and disfranchised African Americans.
Other states applied the hypodescent rule without carrying it to the "one-drop" extreme, using instead a blood quantum standard. For example, Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
's anti-miscegenation law prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a negro
Negro
The word Negro is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not...
, mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...
, quadroon
Quadroon
Quadroon, and the associated words octoroon and quintroon are terms that, historically, were applied to define the ancestry of people of mixed-race, generally of African and Caucasian ancestry, but also, within Australia, to those of Aboriginal and Caucasian ancestry...
, octoroon, Mongolian, or member of "the Malay race
Malay race
The concept of a Malay race was proposed by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , and classified as the brown race. Since Blumenbach, many anthropologists have rejected his theory of five races, citing the enormous complexity of classifying races...
" (here referring to Filipinos
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....
). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people who were not "white persons". The law was repealed in 1963.
Other examples of application
- In the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, hypodescent is used to define the race of children of mixed-race couples where one of the parents is classified as "black" or either is considered to have any trace of African descent. That practice seems to be diminishing; on the other hand, since the 1960s particularly and the rise of the Black PowerBlack PowerBlack Power is a political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies. It is used in the movement among people of Black African descent throughout the world, though primarily by African Americans in the United States...
movement, many members of the African-American community have insisted that all mixed-race individuals should be identified as black if they have any African-American ancestry.
In the US, people less consistently apply hypodescent in intermarriage between whites and other ethnic groups, such as Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
Evolution
Evolutionary biologist Richard DawkinsRichard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
, in The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and Great Britain, societies have developed something like "genetic dominance" in our use of language to identify children from mixed race unions. He notes first, that people seem to be eager to embrace racial classification, even when talking about people of obviously mixed parentage; and second, that we tend not to describe people as of mixed race. Mixed-race children of European-African unions tend to be identified as "black", in what Dawkins calls a "cultural or memetic dominant." He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to recognize and differentiate among minor superficial differences, in contrast to what we share in our "unusually high level of genetic uniformity in the human species." It is difficult to say what evolutionary purpose such differentiation served; perhaps it contributed to group solidarity when groups lived further apart in different regions and were divided by many cultural factors. He suggests that such differentiation may be an "information-rich way to classify people."
See also
- Race
- MiscegenationMiscegenationMiscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
- MatrilinealityMatrilinealityMatrilineality is a system in which descent is traced through the mother and maternal ancestors. Matrilineality is also a societal system in which one belongs to one's matriline or mother's lineage, which can involve the inheritance of property and/or titles.A matriline is a line of descent from a...
- PatrilinealityPatrilinealityPatrilineality is a system in which one belongs to one's father's lineage. It generally involves the inheritance of property, names or titles through the male line as well....
- Mestee
- MestizoMestizoMestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America, Philippines and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent...
- Racial segregationRacial segregationRacial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
- RacialismRacialismRacialism is an emphasis on race or racial considerations. Currently, racialism entails a belief in the existence and significance of racial categories, but not necessarily that any absolute hierarchy between the races has been demonstrated by a rigorous and comprehensive scientific process...
- RacismRacismRacism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
- Racial purity
Additional reading
- Thomas e. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke University press, 1993)
- Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NY: New York University Press: 1996)
- David A. Hollinger, "Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States," American Historical Review, Vol. 108., No. 5 (Dec. 2003): 1363-90.
- Pierre Savy, « Transmission, identité, corruption. Réflexions sur trois cas d’hypodescendance », L’homme. Revue française d’anthropologie, 182, 2007 (« Racisme, antiracisme et sociétés »), p. 53-80.