One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Blay, founder of the Professional Black Girl website, debuts with a wide-angled look at racial identity based on interviews with more than 50 multiracial people in the U.S. Blay traces the evolution of America’s “one-drop rule” that “a person with any trace of Black ancestry, however small or (in)visible, cannot be considered White” from the first statutory definition of race in a 1705 Virginia law banning interracial marriage, to the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling against antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Noting the “exponential” increase in America’s multiracial population since the Loving case, Blay speaks with people who identify as Black yet have had “their identity called into question because they don’t necessarily fit into the ‘Black box.’ ” These include James Scott, a self-identified “Appalachian African American” from Athens, Ohio, with a Black father and a white mother, who recounts being outed as Black by a fourth-grade classmate, and Sosena Solomon, from Ethiopia, who explains how she’s treated differently in the U.S. based on whether she wears her hair curly or straight. Each profile features a photograph of the person interviewed, providing a visual accompaniment to the book’s nuanced and forthright discussions of how racial identities are formed and expressed. The result is an appealingly direct look at one of the most complex issues in American life. Photos. (Feb.)