5fish
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I have always wonder how men that father children with the slave women and allow their biracial children to stay in slavery. I wonder why siblings would allow their fellow biracial siblings to stay in slavery. I admit this moral and ethical issue mainly fell upon the affluent southerners in the years before our civil war. Like: Robert E. Lee family history suffers this plight...
One Drop Rule... is why...
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood) is considered black (Negro in historical terms).
It goes back the 17th century....
White Virginians had long been concerned with carefully defining the legal rights of different races. Interracial relationships and thus mixed-race children were common from the earliest settlement period among whites, free blacks, and Indians, and especially under slavery, when female slaves were regularly subjected to forced relations with white men. Despite the close social connections between races, the legal system created separate racial categories in order to establish status and rights. In 1662, the General Assembly articulated the key concept that a child followed the condition of the mother no matter the status of the father, both providing incentive for slaveholders to increase their slave property by impregnating enslaved women and also contributing to the concept that whiteness would be defined by the absence of blackness.
In 1924 it was codified...
Offspring of whites and blacks ended up being categorized based on the status of the mother. All children of female slaves inherited the status of slavery, no matter what the status of the father. Children of a free black mother gained status as a free person of color. Mixed-race children with a white mother faced discrimination but were not consigned to slavery. Native Americans used different criteria, and considered a child of a Native American father or mother to be "Indian."
The existence of a category other than white or black caused great difficulty during the era of government-enforced segregation when racial status defined one's right to eat in a restaurant, sit on a bus, or attend school. In 1924, Virginia officials sought to cut through the confusion and eliminate the potential for light-skinned blacks to "pass" as whites, by categorizing any child with one drop of black ancestry as a black person.
My point is racism and slavery even greed play a role in people acting against their own flesh and blood best interest. Its sound insane but it happened the south and among their wealthiest and best-educated class...
One Drop Rule... is why...
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood) is considered black (Negro in historical terms).
It goes back the 17th century....
White Virginians had long been concerned with carefully defining the legal rights of different races. Interracial relationships and thus mixed-race children were common from the earliest settlement period among whites, free blacks, and Indians, and especially under slavery, when female slaves were regularly subjected to forced relations with white men. Despite the close social connections between races, the legal system created separate racial categories in order to establish status and rights. In 1662, the General Assembly articulated the key concept that a child followed the condition of the mother no matter the status of the father, both providing incentive for slaveholders to increase their slave property by impregnating enslaved women and also contributing to the concept that whiteness would be defined by the absence of blackness.
In 1924 it was codified...
Offspring of whites and blacks ended up being categorized based on the status of the mother. All children of female slaves inherited the status of slavery, no matter what the status of the father. Children of a free black mother gained status as a free person of color. Mixed-race children with a white mother faced discrimination but were not consigned to slavery. Native Americans used different criteria, and considered a child of a Native American father or mother to be "Indian."
The existence of a category other than white or black caused great difficulty during the era of government-enforced segregation when racial status defined one's right to eat in a restaurant, sit on a bus, or attend school. In 1924, Virginia officials sought to cut through the confusion and eliminate the potential for light-skinned blacks to "pass" as whites, by categorizing any child with one drop of black ancestry as a black person.
My point is racism and slavery even greed play a role in people acting against their own flesh and blood best interest. Its sound insane but it happened the south and among their wealthiest and best-educated class...
