The under-acknowledged LEGAL HISTORY OF THE COLOR LINE: THE RISE AND TRIUMPH OF THE ONE-DROP RULE by Frank W. Sweet is full of stories about the inconsistency of both legal definitions of “white” and social practice. What some scholars call “performing whiteness” was often more important in establishing one’s whiteness in a community than any “drops” of the feared “Negro blood.” He concludes that the “one drop rule” was created to keep the white population in line and punish anyone who got too cozy with the blacks.

Daniel J. Sharfstein’s far more publicized THE INVISIBLE LINE: THREE AMERICAN FAMILIES AND THE SECRET JOURNEY FROM BLACK TO WHITE shows that is was really quite easy for mixed-race people of predominately white ancestry to claim white status. That’s probably why there is so much propaganda a la “Imitation of Life” trying to persuade Americans that the line can’t or shouldn’t be crossed. He also concluded that a more lenient definition of whiteness IN PRACTICE (as opposed the official stand of white racial purity) actually provided a measure of security to whites who knew that the caste system couldn’t survive if state governments were actually foolish enough to try to push every “tar-brushed” white into the “Negro race.”

The first time I noticed that the “one drop rule” was a game dependent on self-policing and a gentlemen’s agreement of silence was long before the multiracial movement started. I met Hispanics (including Mexicans) and Arabs who looked almost as “dark mulatto as Barack Obama – yet they referred to themselves as “white” and the U.S. government directed institutions to call them that. I met Italians who said they were constantly taken for “black.” If the “one drop rule” is true, I thought, shouldn’t these people be in jail for obviously “defiling” the “pure white race”? That’s when I first realized that the “one drop” rule” was all a big con game.