Hypodescent

Hypo/hyperdescent in Colonial-Era North America

The North American practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began during colonial times when indentured servants and transported convicts working at the direction of the colonists and colonial authorities were joined by Africans that from 1619 on were first taken first from Spanish and then more and more from English or British slave ships. But while the freed captives were Christians, these individuals were classified as indentured workers.

Virginia formally enacted a 'slave code' in 1705. There is documentary evidence from the 1650s that some Virginia Negroes were serving lifelong terms of indenture. In the 1660s the Assembly stated that "any English servant that shall run away in company with any Negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by addition of time shall serve for the time of the said Negroes absence", indicating Negroes could not 'make satisfaction' by serving longer if recaptured. This device gave legal status to the practice of lifetime enslavement of persons of African descent; in subsequent statutes the legislature defined conditions of lifetime servitude.

But in 1655 Elizabeth Key, a mixed-race woman, fought and won the first freedom suit in Virginia. Her English father had acknowledged her as his daughter, had her baptised as Christian, and, falling ill, established a legal guardian to care for her after his death, arranging a limited-term indenture for her as a girl. But the guardian sold her indenture and left the colony, and the next master did not free her. When he died, his estate claimed her and her son as slave property.^[2]

However, following Key's victory, Virginia established the principle in law in 1662 of partus sequitur ventrem, from Roman law; that is, children born in the colonies would take the social status of their mothers. This meant that all children born to enslaved women would be born into slavery, regardless of their paternity and race. This was in contrast to English common law, by which the status of children of English subjects was determined by the father.^[2]

As slavery became a racial caste system, persons of only partial African ancestry and majority European ancestry were born into slavery. African descent became associated with slavery. By hypodescent, persons of even partial African ancestry were classified socially below whites. By the late 18th century, there were numerous families of majority-white slaves, such as the mixed-race children born to the slave Sally Hemings and her master Thomas Jefferson. She was three-quarters white and the half-sister of his late wife; their children, born into slavery, were seven-eighths white. Jefferson gave the four surviving children their freedom as adults; three assimilated into white society.

The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie, of the Civil War-era, about the hypocrisy of a man's recognizing white women's children among the slaves in every household but his own.

Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men sexually abused 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 of fathers who provided for their mixed-race children were the fathers of Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston and the father of the Healy family of Georgia. (Each had a common-law marriage with a woman of partial African descent.) Other mixed-race children were left enslaved; some were sold away by their fathers.^[3]

Research by historians and genealogists has shown that unlike the above examples, most free African Americans listed in the first two US censuses in the Upper South were descended from relationships or marriages in colonial Virginia between white women, indentured servant or free, and African or African-American men, indentured servant, free or slave. Their unions reflected the fluid nature of relationships among the working classes before slave caste was hardened, as well as the small households and farms within which many people worked. The children of white mothers were born free. If they were illegitimate and mixed race, they were apprenticed in order to avoid the community being burdened with upkeep, but such persons gained a step in freedom.^[4]

By the turn of the nineteenth century, many of these families of 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. Mixed-race people of African-European descent are believed to have been the origin of some isolated settlements, which have long claimed or were said to be of American Indian or Portuguese ancestry.^[4] As an example, a 21st-century DNA study of a group of Melungeon families in Tennessee and Kentucky, long rumored to be descendants of Turks or Native Americans, showed they were overwhelmingly of African and European ancestry.

Hypo/hyperdescent in Reconstruction, late 19th century and 20th-century United States

By the late 1870s, conservative white Democrats regained power in state legislatures across the South, even in areas where there were black majorities, largely by a process of violence and intimidation of black Republicans. The Democrats gradually imposed white supremacy in law and practice. From 1890 to 1908, beginning with Mississippi, the state legislatures passed new constitutions and laws that created barriers to voter registration by such means as the poll tax, literacy tests, record requirements and others. The number of voters on the rolls fell drastically and most blacks and many poor whites were disenfranchised for decades. The whites also passed Jim Crow laws, such as racial segregation of public facilities.

African Americans and whites established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 to fight against legal discrimination and disenfranchisement. Each time they won a court case, for instance, against the use of white primaries, white-dominated legislatures would pass new laws to exclude blacks from the political system.

In the 20th century, under influences of eugenics and racial discrimination, states enacted laws classifying persons as black who had any traceable evidence (or perception of any African ancestry). Under Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the 'One-drop' rule defined as black a person with any known African ancestry, regardless of the number of intervening generations.

The same Act established a binary classification system for vital records, classifying persons as 'white' or 'black' (Negro at the time). The latter was effectively a 'catch all' term for all people of color. Native Americans were classified as colored, l attitude to all races other than white.

In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent was the basis of the "one drop rule", meaning that if an individual had any black ancestry, the person was classified as black. Laws were passed in southern states and others in the early 20th century, 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; Louisiana; Texas; 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.^[5]

By 1924 many "white" people in Virginia would have had some African and/or Native American ancestry, given the mixing over the centuries. At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing to overturn segregation and regain civil rights, that had been lost to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement of the majority of the black community.

Other examples of application

In the United States, hypodescent has often defined children of mixed-race couples as black when one parents is classified as "black", or either is thought to have African descent. That practice seems to be diminishing.

President of the United States Barack Obama is often referred to as the first Black or African-American President. He has said as a youth that he chose to identify as black and worked in community organizing in a black community. His mother and her parents were of European descent; his father and his family are sub-Saharan African from Kenya. But, in a case exemplifying the complex racial history of the United States, Obama is believed to be descended through his maternal line from John Punch, the first African documented historically as a slave in Virginia.^[7]

The genealogical company Ancestry.com sponsored a study of his family history and documented this connection. Punch's descendants increasingly married white and are believed to have been accepted as white by the early 18th century.^[7]

Since the 1960s particularly and the rise of the Black Power movement, many members of the African-American community have emphasized that mixed-race individuals of African descent should identify as black in order to maximize their political power as a group in the United States. Leaders say they were historically discriminated against as black by whites, so should identify as black to assert their power in number.

In the US, people have historically less consistently apply hypodescent in intermarriage between whites and persons of other racial groups, such as Native Americans, and Asians. There was certainly discrimination against persons of mixed European and Native American, and European and Asian ancestry, however.

But hypodescent is not practiced only by persons of European ancestry. In Omaha, Nebraska, whites have celebrated Logan Fontenelle, a mixed-race man of the late 19th century who served as interpreter for a major treaty between the Omaha Nation and the United States that ceded most of their land before they moved to a reservation. Whites referred to Fontenell as chief of the Omaha, and he was one of the signatories of the treaty along with Omaha chiefs, perhaps because he spoke English. Whites named various places in the city of Omaha after Fontenelle.

But among the Omaha, Fontenelle was considered a "white man" because his father was white, and he was never recognized as a recognized chief. As the Omaha had a patrilineal kinship society, hereditary chieftainship and descent were passed through the male line. A person whose father was white was not considered Omaha unless he was formally adopted by a male Omaha member.^[8]