Quote:
Originally posted by Ascension
Yes it was. There were plenty anti-miscegenation laws in various states citing one drop rules and other racially based laws such as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in Virginia that led to a trend of many other Southern states passing "purity" laws in following years.
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The actual "one-drop rule" wasn't a law, that was my point. Mariah said multiple times, verbatim, "we have the one drop rule in this country." We don't and never did. People that were clearly mixed race or had known black heritage were obviously treated as black, but Mariah wouldn't have been one of them. If she was walking around looking the way that she does with a white mother and nothing known about her father, do you really think she would have lived as a black woman? Do you think there was some database that listed everyone's race? Just like now, census information then relied on self-report. Have you heard of passing? People with a one black great-grandparent would technically fall under a supposed one drop rule, but they absolutely did not present themselves as black if they could help it, and no one would be able to prove otherwise. "One drop rule" doesn't sum up how race is treated then OR now. Ignoring the visual aspect of how people actually appear to society in favor of what you actually, genetically are is a very new aspect of race and ethnicity, which is why Mariah's race has always sparked this debate.