While there are many places that could be used as starting points for a history of multiracial people in the US, perhaps none is better than acknowledging the fact that the presence of multiracial people in what we now call North America pre-dates the formation of the US by at least three centuries (Forbes, 1993). These diverse societies and peoples once found in what is now the US had very divergent attitudes and practices for handling racial mixture. This chapter illuminates the ways in which different cultures responded to multiracial people in what is now the US by examining: (1) the 17th-century legal decrees concerning miscegenation between Africans and Europeans and the children born to such unions in Colonial Virginia; (2) traditional practices regarding membership and identity among the Seminole in Florida and the Navajo (or Dine) in the Four Corners region of the Southwest; (3) the ambiguous status of Mestizos in 16th- to 18th- century New Spain; and (4) the intermarriage of Chinese men and Hawaiian women in the 19th century.

This chapter will describe how a dominant ideology concerning racial mixing developed in the US, beginning in the colonial period and accelerating with the founding of the nation. This ideology, based on White supremacy and racial hierarchy (Daniel, 2002), was enforced through anti-miscegenation laws and the “one-drop rule,” which was a restrictive form of hypodescent that classified everyone with African ancestry as Black (i.e., “one drop of blood”) (Davis, 1991; Jordan, 2014). Racial categorizations were a key means for enforcing this racial hierarchy. The chapter will also include a discussion of the evolution of different systems of categorization and enumeration for multiracial people, as stipulated in the US Constitution, US Census, and Supreme Court cases.

African slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, and the onedrop Rule

The history of multiracial people in the US largely follows the nation’s racialized history as a whole and parallels the history of African-Americans in particular. By the mid-1600s, the use of African slaves to provide inexpensive labor for tobacco plantations began to take root, and an elite group of wealthy European planters “created the legal and institutional structures needed to guarantee property rights regarding slaves” in colonial America (Menard, 2013: 380).