"Even one drop of African blood means you're black."

In the annals of American racism, the "one drop rule" was the idea that if a person had any African American ancestry, no matter how distant, they were to be considered black in the eyes of society and the law. Beginning with the antebellum slave codes and later institutionalized in the Jim Crow laws of the South, incarnations of the one drop rule were incorporated into various state and federal laws well into the 20th century. Although the one drop rule is no longer in force in any current legal context, the legacy of this spurious principle lives on in the American tendency to automatically identify people of mixed race, such as Halle Berry, Tiger Woods, and Colin Powell, as black if they have any amount of black blood in their ancestry.

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