Talk:Hypodescent

Re Beyond America:
Taking on board limited scope the following have been addressed:

[1] Short Calssical World preamble re social attitudes v legal codes added (referred to in later changes).

[2] Short section added re. modern race theory in Europe (and America) to add context to both following sections.

[3] Background for Nazi-era Nurenburg Laws codifying rights (and otherwise) purely on race.

[4] Alterations to American Colonial-era component to establish progression (regression?) from indentured worker to lifetime indenture to slave, culminating in

[5] Tweaks to main (20th century American) text to reflect above.

Apologies to all for Anglocentric bias, legalistic phrasing and bland prose: British Civil Service Drafting Standards will do that to a person.

PS

Is there anyone out there who can follow up on the French experience? I'm referring to French culture/legal experience in past/present beyond Thomas Jefferson in Paris: is there anything in colonies/sphere of influence and legal ramifications of pre-existing cultural conditions, ie anti-Jewish bias (Dreyfuss) and colour prejudice reflected in law, perhaps in North Africa?

86.152.154.186 (talk) 09:33, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Let's Get Beyond America, Please
Hypodescent, hyperdescent, and other race assignment practices are employed throughout the world, not just in the United States. This article needs to talk about a lot more than just African-American slavery.

A section on the interaction of legal definition and social reality would not go amiss, particularly in remembrance of the Rwandan Genocide. Race classification law in Rwanda provided for agnatic classification of mixed-race children. So, the children of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother were legally Hutu - but that did not save them. Legally, they were Hutu; socially, they were Tutsi, at least as far as the Hutu extremists were concerned.

Or back in America and beyond the slave question, both Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes were legally "White" in Boston. At the time they were born, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts still classified the race of children agnatically. Eartha Kitt had one Black grandparent, one Cherokee grandparent, and two White grandparents. The White grandparents were her father's parents, so he was actually White; and that made her legally White. Hughes's father was the son of a White man and a Black woman, so he was legally Black in the South and many other states but legally White in Massachusetts; and because his father was legally White in Massachusetts, Langston Hughes was legally White in Massachusetts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.4.56.26 (talk) 22:37, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

LANGUAGE
It strikes me that using language like "Socially subordinate" is a value judgement, largely about caucasians, and doesn't accurately describe whats really going on there. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.7.3.91 (talk) 03:15, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Show Boat
"In the musical Show Boat an otherwise illegal marriage is made by sharing blood between white and black."

I cannot understand what this is trying to say. Can anybody clarify this? -- 14 October 2005
 * I wondered about that, too. But today I fortuitously came across a Straightdope article that describes the scene in question: What percentage of black parentage do you need to be considered black?I've updated the article. ThePedanticPrick 16:39, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Thomas Jefferson
Whether or not Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings is a contentious enough issue that it should probably have an inline citation; to say simply that he fathered many on his slaves (plural) may well be false. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.251.216.62 (talk) 17:09, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Dawkins and the alleged biological basis for U.S.-style hypodescent

 * Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and England children with one "black" parent/grandparent/great-grandparent are consistently classified as "black" instead of "mixed race" or "white" or something else (402-403). He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to do this. See Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 401-02.

Dawkins's theory is demonstrably false. In Latin America, people of mixed race are not classified as "black" by default.

I am also skeptical about the claim that the English classify mixed race people the same way as Americans. That should be double-checked. FilipeS 12:44, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

"Although mulattos and Blasians are both half Black, only the former are generally percieved as Black, while Blasians such as Tiger Woods are not forced to self-identify as Black." - I presume this quote is talking about in the US, because mulattos in Canada are not generally perceived as black, and based on other articles, it seems this statement isn't true in Brazil either. I've added the US-globalize tag till this is fixed. Baiter 19:21, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I dont think that statement is true even in the US. As far as I can tell, Blasians are as black as black-white mixes. I have never heard of anyone of black and Asian descent not being labelled black. But its not like there are that many out there, so maybe I just havent heard it. Id like a citation for it. Annonymous Coward 16:31 JST, 17 June 2007


 * This also seems an attempt to make a big generalization back from a recent example.--Parkwells (talk) 16:49, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

If we can agree that Dawkins was wrong perhaps we should remove this section. --Adoniscik(t, c) 12:19, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Article needs inline citations for wiki format
Cites should be converted.--Parkwells (talk) 16:49, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
 * ✅ except for Lopez and Skidmore. Anybody care to delve back into the history and see what they were used to support? --Adoniscik(t, c) 12:13, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

US government policy
For generations, a fairly small percentage of whites or Euro-Americans of any evident African American or "black" ancestry were consigned to the "black" race in government policy. This is known as the one drop rule to actually declare a person who is Caucasian a "negro" or African race, thus it is to discourage further miscegenation and in many states, these laws and "black codes" penalize children or descendants of interracial marriages/unions throughout the late 19th-early 20th centuries. It is possible for a large segment of the African American community have white/European ancestry before the Jim Crow Laws were enacted and then repealed, thus creating a color-coded racial situation on how many unknown designated black and white Americans are in the opposite racial categories. + 71.102.11.193 (talk) 02:22, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

The Huge Indian Elephant In The Room
This article definitely needs to expand its scope outside the U.S. and other Western countries. In particular, there should be some mention of India, where the offspring between an upper-caste Hindu and a Dalit would be considered a Dalit. 2604:2D80:6984:3800:0:0:0:F474 (talk) 20:42, 18 July 2023 (UTC)