Talk:Discrimination based on skin tone

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 January 2022 and 29 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ccolan1 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Kparso11, Hannahm715, Amcgeesa.

History of Law

Perpetuating the social constructs of race and skin color means putting an emphasis on “morphological differences like the broadness of the nose, the curl of the hair and the fullness of the lips” as important characteristics in determining a person’s race. The lighter a person’s skin the likelier they are to be considered white. These skin tone variations are strongly linked with the “psychological and economic privileges attributed to whiteness” . Blackness is associated with being on the lower end of the socioeconomic hierarchy . In the US Colonial period, Miscegenation laws described the interbreeding of what were presumed to be distinct human races. Miscegenation gave white planters an economic advantage by increasing their slave holdings because the status of children followed that of their mother. Miscegenation between black slaves and poor white indentured servants caused colonists of the 1660s to decide whether children were black and slaves or white and free. The answer can be found in colonial legislature who used skin tone as a main indicator for mulattoes . In the Upper South (the area reaching south from Pennsylvania into parts of North Carolina) the initial interracial unions primarily involved White male indentured servants and Black slave women." As a result, colonial legislators in this region took the harshest stance against miscegenation and mixed-race individuals. To deter miscegenation, these legislators proclaimed that the children of Black slave women would be slaves notwithstanding the race of their fathers In 1691, the Virginia Assembly declared any “English woman who gave birth to "a bastard child by any Negro or mulatto" would be heavily fined or subject to five years of servitude and that the child would be bound into servitude until it reach”. 1705 Virginia Statute prohibited Blacks, Indians and mulattoes from holding office and from serving as witness in legal proceedings. In 1773, Virginia prohibited “free mulattoes from voting and could only possess firearms under highly restrictive circumstances” In 1785, Virginia defined a Negro as a person with a Black parent or grandparent. Over time, this definition was broadened to include persons with less than one-fourth black blood

As one scholar notes, "no matter how White looking or White acting someone of mixed ancestry [was] or how little Black- ness [was] in a person's genetic makeup, that person [was] considered Black." In effect, the one-drop rule maintained the status quo of White privilege by casting mulattoes in the same role of social outcast as unmixed blacks. 
 Ariela J. Gross, Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South, 108 YALE L.J. 109, 137-41 (1998)
 N F. HANEY LOPEZ, WHITE BY LAW: THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE 197-202 (1996) 

 Leonard M. Baynes, Who is Black Enough for You? An Analysis of Northwestern University Law School's Struggle over Minority Faculty Hiring, 2 MICH. J. RACE & L. 205, 226 (1997)

 John H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 31 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV. STUDY. 1913

 Kenneth E. Payson, Check One Box: Reconsidering Directive No. 15 and the Classification of Mixed-Race People, 84 CAL. L. REV. 1233, 1247-48 (1996).