Cultural Inversion and the One-Drop Rule: An Essay on Biology, Racial Classification, and the Rhetoric of Racial Transcendence
20 Pages Posted: 27 Oct 2013
Date Written: 2009
Abstract
This article contends that if racial caste has been upended by changes in legal rules that created a hierarchical racial structure, its demise also has been hastened by the use of symbols, a strategy of cultural inversion with respect to the meaning of race. The operative terms of a centuries-old debate have been inverted. Instead of policing racial purity with arguments about blood and biology or the modern version of them, DNA and genes, these instruments of exclusion, the tools of white supremacists and segregationists, have been used effectively, most recently by Barack Obama, to demonstrate the physical connection between groups that are still treated discursively, politically and socially, as racially distinct.
Keywords: one drop rule, racial classification, caste system, cultural inversion
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