Regimes beyond the One-Drop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity

Abstract

The racial classification of mixed-race people has often been presumed to follow hypo- or hyperdescent rules, where they were assigned to either their lower- or higher-status monoracial ancestor group. This simple framework, however, does not capture actual patterns of self-identification in contemporary societies with multiple racialized groups and numerous mixed-race combinations. Elaborating on previous concepts of multiracial classification regimes, we argue that two other theoretical models must be incorporated to describe and understand mixed-race identification today. One is “co-descent”, where multiracial individuals need not align with one single race or another, but rather be identified with or demonstrate characteristics that are a blend of their parental or ancestral races. The other is the “dominance” framework, a modern extension of the “one-drop” notion that posits that monoracial ancestries fall along a spectrum where some—the “supercessive”—are more likely to dominate mixed-race categorization, and others—the “recessive”—are likely to be dominated. Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s 2015 Survey of Multiracial Adults, we find declining evidence of hypo- and hyperdescent at work in the United States today, some support for a dominance structure that upends conventional expectations about a Black one-drop rule, and a rising regime of co-descent. In addition, we explore how regimes of mixed-race classification vary by racial ancestry combination, gender, generation of multiraciality, and the time period in which multiracial respondents or their mixed-race ancestors were born. These findings show that younger, first-generation multiracial Americans, especially those of partial Asian or Hispanic descent, have left hypo- and hyperdescent regimes behind—unlike other young people today whose mixed-race ancestry stems from further back in their family tree.

Is it Antislavic racism, or how to speak about liminality, stigma, and racism in Europe

“…This racial epistemology sees Blackness as equal to Africanity, and pervasively relies on the supposed visual evidentiality rooted in the so‐called hypodescent rule (Blay, 2021; Davis, 1991). From this perspective, the experience of phenotypical Blacks is exceptional, for their categorization to the subordinate group “sticks” across generations, irrespective of their individual efforts and investments (Iverson et al., 2022). However, as Hollinger (2003) outlines, hypodescent is not only a matter of seeing people as Black but also includes the effects of perceptions of colour on social positions across generations.…”

Differences in the Risk of Grade Retention for Biracial and Monoracial Students in the United States, 2010 to 2019

“…Hypodescent and hyperdescent are observed in two specific historical cases involving Black ancestry and American Indian ancestry, respectively. As Iverson et al (2022) note, these two cases could just as parsimoniously be explained by a "dominance" model that ranks ancestries by their tendencies to be supercessive or recessive in determining identification and classification.…”

“…The development of particular norms may also reflect the historical regime in which they were developed (Gullickson and Morning 2011;Iverson et al 2022). In this case, neither the hypodescent/hyperdescent nor the dominance paradigm may help us to fully understand the experiences of those of Latino and Asian ancestry due to more recent processes of racialization.…”