Hypodescent

Hypodescent is the practice of determining the lineage of a child of ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent. Because recent history shows Caucasians being socially dominant in the Western world, mixed race children are most commonly assigned to their non-Caucasian parent. However when two non-Caucasian parents have a child, the child is typically not assigned to either race. Although s and s are both half Black, only the former are generally perceived as Black, while Blasians such as  are not forced to self-identify as Black. The opposite of hypodescent is.

The American practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began its development in the colonies in the 1600s largely in response to the American context of : a mixed-race child was likely to have a mother who was a slave and a father who was a slave master or owner. See Hickman, 1175-1176. In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent came to be a "one drop rule," meaning that if a person had one drop of black blood, he was considered to be black. See. An example was which defined as white a person with "no trace whatsoever of any blood other than ."

Anti-Miscegenation marriage laws
By the early 1940s, of the thirty U.S. states that had, seven states (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia ) had adopted the  for rules prohibiting. (Finkelman, “The Color of Law,” 955, note 96). Other states applied the hypodescent rule without carrying it to the "one-drop" extreme, using instead a standard. For example, Utah's anti-miscegenation law (first passed in 1888 as part of an anti-polygamy marriage law passed by the then non-Mormon legislature; it was repealed in 1963) prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a, , , , , or member of "the " (here referring to ). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people that were not "white persons."

Other examples of application of hypodescent & other methods of determining lineage

 * In the United States, hypodescent has been consistently used to determine the race of children of mixed race couples where one of the parents was classified as "black". That practice seems to be diminishing at least a little. Hypodescent has been applied less consistently in the United States to other "races" (such as in intermarriage between whites and Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc.).

Hypodescent and evolution
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and England children with one "black" parent/grandparent/great-grandparent are consistently classified as "black" instead of "mixed race" or "white" or something else (402-403). He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to do this. See Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 401-02.

References in culture
In the musical, a white boy in love with a woman is accused by the sheriff of violating the state's anti-miscegenation laws. The white boy promptly pricks the woman's finger with a knife, swallows a drop of blood, then tells the sheriff "I'm no white man -- I've got negro blood in me" The sheriff lets him off.

In the novel, by , the character of Roxy is deemed "Negro", even though she could. This characteristic is passed on (mistakenly) to her "son" Chambers.