forbidden words: race and ethnicity

race²

from — Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words. (n.d.). In Dictionary.com. 

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Social definitions of race

Since the concept of race became widespread in the early United States, people of Native American heritage, African heritage, and European heritage were considered to belong to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar; a person’s appearance, their social circle (how they lived), and ancestry were all considered by society when determining someone’s race.

The motivations behind historical definitions of racial identity, especially Native American and black identities, have been the topic of much discussion in modern years. According to many anthropologists, these racial designations were a means to concentrate power, wealth, privilege and land in the hands of white people in a society of white hegemony and privilege. Racial distinctions generally had little to do with biology and more to do with the history of slavery, the systemic racism it produced, and specific forms of white supremacy that benefited from specific definitions of racial identity. For example, it has been suggested that the blood quantum laws defining Native American identity enabled whites to acquire indigenous lands during the allotment process, and the one-drop rule of black identity, enforced legally in the early 20th century, enabled them to preserve their agricultural labor force in the South.

The descendants of Native and Black Americans not only had to contend with laws defining their racial identity for the benefit of the majority, but also with a variety of social consequences depending on how they were perceived in society. Compared to other mixed Americans, the blood quantum laws made it easier for a person of mixed European and Native American ancestry to be accepted as white; after a few generations of intermarriage, the offspring of Native and White Americans would no longer legally be considered Native American. They could have treaty rights to land, but because an individual with only one native great-grandparent was no longer was classified as Native American, they lost legal claim to their land under historical allotment rules, making it easier for White Americans to acquire the land for their own development. On the other hand, the same individual who could be denied legal standing in a tribe because he was “too White” to claim property rights might still have enough visually identifiable native ancestry to be considered socially as a “half-breed” and stigmatized by both communities.

The 20th-century one-drop rule made it relatively difficult for anyone of known black ancestry to be accepted as white. The child of a black sharecropper and a white person was considered black by the local communities, and would likely become a sharecropper as well, thus adding to the landholder or employer’s labor force. Because the agricultural economy of the time benefited from using Black Americans as a labor force, it was advantageous for as many people as possible to be defined as black. Many experts on the Jim Crow period agree that the 20th century notion of invisible blackness shifted the color line in the direction of paleness, and “expanded” the labor force in response to Southern blacks’ Great Migration to the North, although others (such as the historians C. Vann Woodward, George M. Fredrickson, and Stetson Kennedy) considered the one-drop rule a consequence of the need to justify the oppression of Black Americans and define whiteness as pure.

Over the centuries, as whites wielded social and political power over people of color in the United States, they created a social order of hypodescent, in which they assigned mixed-race children to the lower-status groups. However, they were often ignorant of the systems of social classification within Native American tribes. The Omaha people, for instance, who had a patrilineal kinship system, classified all children with white fathers as “White”, and excluded them as members of the tribe unless they were formally adopted by a male member. Tribal members might care for mixed-race children of White fathers, but they were considered outside the hereditary clan and kinship fundamental to tribal society.^[44]

The social construction of hypodescent also related to the racial caste system associated with slavery. It was made explicit by Virginia and other colonies’ laws as early as 1662. Virginia incorporated the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem into slave law, saying that children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery as well. Under English common law, children’s social status was determined by the father, not the mother, but the colonists considered enslaved Africans outside the category of English subjects. Although White men were in positions of power to take sexual advantage of enslaved black women, this meant that their offspring would be considered Black and were enslaved regardless of their parentage. However, most free Black American families listed in the censuses of 1790–1810 were descended from unions between White women and African men in colonial Virginia, from the years when working classes lived and worked closely together, and before slavery had hardened as a racial caste.^[45]

In the United States, social and legal conventions developed over time by Whites classified individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories, but these were always flawed. The decennial censuses conducted since 1790, after slavery was well established in the United States, included a classification of persons by race, with the categories of “White”, “Black”, “Mulatto“, and “Indian”. The inclusion of mulatto was a rare explicit acknowledgement of mixed race people, but that status was usually simplified into one race or another in actual society. Before the Civil War, states such as Virginia had a legal definition of whiteness that classified people as white if they were no more than 1/8th black. For example, if not born into slavery, Thomas Jefferson‘s children by his slave Sally Hemings would have been classified as legally white, as they were 7/8ths White by ancestry. Three of the four surviving children entered white society as adults, and their descendants have identified as white. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, people of mixed race often migrated to frontiers where societies were more open, and they might be accepted as white if they satisfied obligations of citizenship.^[45]

The more familiar “one-drop rule” was not adopted by Virginia and other states until the 20th century, but it classified persons with any known African ancestry as black. Passage of these laws was often encouraged by white supremacists and people promoting “racial purity”, who disregarded the long history of multi-racial unions in the South.^[46] In other countries in the Americas, where mixing among groups was overtly more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid. In some cases, people may move into or out of categories on the basis of a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, ancestry, and appearance.

The term Hispanic as an ethnonym emerged in the 20th century, with the rise of migration of laborers from Spanish-speaking countries of the western hemisphere to the United States. It includes people who may have been considered racially distinct (black, white, native, or other mixed groups) in their home countries. Today, the word “Latino” is often used as a synonym for “Hispanic”. Even if such categories were earlier understood as racial categories, today they have begun to represent ethnolinguistic categories, regardless of perceived race. Similarly, the prefix “Anglo” is now used among some Hispanics to refer to non-Hispanic White Americans or European Americans, most of whom speak the English language but are not of primarily English descent. A similar phenomenon of ethnolinguistic identity can historically (and in some cases contemporarily) be seen in the case of the Louisiana Creole people, who may be of any race but share certain cultural characteristics.

from — Wikipedia contributors. (2025e, September 25). Race and ethnicity in the United States. Wikipedia. 

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ethnicity

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September 26th, 2025
Hudson Valley, New York

This is one of the words/ phrases you can’t say in the new Trump Administration. See a comprehensive list at the Forbidden Words Project.

image: rainy leaves © Holly Troy 9.2025