Sorry, Biff Usually, but "The One Drop Rule" is only a negative ideal (like "liberty and justice for all" is a positive ideal). It is not cherished or enforced by most whites but mainly by the black elite and white gatekeepers who want to please blacks (as long as it costs them nothing). This is easy to prove.

Let's start with the question you dared not answer:

Nearly all Latinos have some black ancestry. The same can be said for Arabs. Why aren't they labeled "black" when they come to the United States? How do you explain this discrepancy?

I may be misinterpreting mischling2nd's reply, but he (she?) seems to think that my comments are "promoting" something. He definitely states that they are incorrect.

Quotes from law are fine, as far as they go. Quotes from Thomas Jefferson are fine, as far as they go. I was remarking on the reality of how people think and act and react. The key word is functionally, "functionally it is completely incorrect."

I know how people have reacted in the past, both from my study of history, and from my knowledge of my own family history. I know how people react in the present, from what I see every day in the school where I work, and in the community that surrounds the school.

I commend mischling2nd on his scholarship and research. But surely he doesn't believe that codifying something into law automatically changes people's perceptions. Especially when those perceptions are informed by misbegotten notions of impurity and racial superiority.

I am certainly not promoting the "one drop rule". I am not promoting anything, I am merely reporting what I have observed.

I am adamantly against racism. I only list myself as "caucasian" because that is my primary ancestry, and that is how others perceive me. Any time I have the option I list myself as "mixed".

And by the way, I have never, ever, claimed to be a "liberal".

"abetterfuture" says:

"It seems we now only have two wings of the Democratic Party, the newish wing of F. Roosevelt and Clinton and the traditional party of Andrew Jackson and Strom Thurmond whose successors have taken over the Republican party.

I was raised in the party of Lincoln, Grant, T. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller and that party now seems dead."

I'm sorry, but

A. nobody alive today was raised on the party of Lincoln and Grant.

And,

B. you are wrong, frankly, to conflate FDR with Clinton. Clinton was a fairly typical moderate Southern Democrat, the protestations of the right-wing media notwithstanding.

Associating Bill Clinton, who said "the era of big government is over" with FDR is absurd. If anything, Clinton helped give licence to the breakup of the New Deal and the Great Society, with the deregulation of telecom and big media, which may well be why you seem to get your fuzzy-headed ideas about politics from the History Channel.

My last letter was a reply to "Biff Usually " and his historically incorrect "editor's choice" letter.

Nearly all Latinos have some black ancestry. The same can be said for Arabs. Why aren't they labeled "black" when they come to the United States? How do you explain this discrepancy?

As for Anglo-American history, consider the following:

What Separates the "Mulatto" from the "White"? Can Slaves Be "White"? Can "Whites" Have "Negro blood"?

The status of children born of white fathers and black or mulatto slave mothers was a pressing issue. The English Common Law said that a child follows the status of the father. However, that would mean that the issue of a female slave was not her master's property - in the way that the issue of female livestock were his property. In 1662 the Southern colony of Virginia was the first to pass legislation which attempted to regulate interracial fornication and marriage as well as the status of the mixed-blood children of slave mothers. Going back into classical Roman history, it confirmed the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, which held that the child follows the status of the mother. This early legal precedent had far reaching effects.

"Negro blood" by itself did not make anyone a slave. It was the maternal descent of the partus rule that enslaved a person - if the maternal slave line was unbroken by legal manumission. A slaveholder could, legally, have more "negro blood" than his slave. A legal "white" man could have more Negro blood than a so-called "light mulatto" who would be legally "white" if he were manumitted. The latter was possible because the general Southern rule was to establish one-eighth or less Negro blood as the dividing line between "white" and "mulatto". Even this could be modified by such things as reputation, acceptance by the local "white" community, property ownership, etc. Hard as it may be for persons raised on "one drop" mythology to believe, a person classified as a "mulatto slave" would, if manumitted and one-eighth or less "black," legally become a free "white" person rather than a "free colored." As Thomas Jefferson, himself the reputed father of "white slaves," states:

"Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem being adopted here."

http://www.interracialvoice.com/powell9.html

http://www.interracialvoice.com/powell8.html

White Racial Identity, Racial Mixture, and the "One Drop Rule"

http://multiracial.com/content/view/417/27/

White Southerners are increasingly acknowledging their racially mixed ancestry, but they are NOT identifying as "black":

http://www.melungeon.org

http://backintyme.com/Ad222.htm

One irony of the Republicans today using illegal wiretaps is that the convictions will tend to be thrown out, as with The Weathermen. I get the feeling that doesn't really matter to them. Did the Republicans going after the KKK use extra-legal means in the 1870s?

Much as I admire Eric Foner, I can give only qualified agreement to the final premise of the article. Today's radical Republicans (not to be confused with the fine men of the Reconstruction) are hard at work trashing our Constitution. Should we let them, because the Framers left us nothing of value?