The One Drop Rule

Scott Malcomson, a member of The New York Times editorial board and author of One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, explains the meaning behind what he calls “the essence of whiteness – the origins of a white sense of specialness.”  In a revealing interview, he says that  pre-modern written records around the world rarely contain references to light-skinned people, those we today designate as a White race, as White people.  (2513)