Paging Dr. Freud. Paging Dr. Freud. Would Dr. Freud please pick up the "white" courtesy phone.
The one-drop rule,” which defines as black a person with as little as a single drop of “black blood.” This notion derives from a long discredited belief that each race had its own blood type, which was correlated with physical appearance and social behavior. The antebellum South promoted the rule as a way of enlarging the slave population with the children of slave holders. By the nineteen-twenties, in Jim Crow America the one- drop rule was well established as the law of the land. It still is, according to a United States Supreme Court decision as late as 1986, which refused to review a lower court’s ruling that a Louisiana woman whose great-great-great-great-grandmother had been the mistress of a French planter was black—even though that proportion of her ancestry amounted to no more than three thirty- seconds of her genetic heritage. “We are the only country in the world that applies the one-drop rule, and the only group that the one-drop rule applies to is people of African descent,”