Jennifer Fuller

"The Two Drops Rule: The Refusal to See 'Black' Bodies as Hybrid"

This paper draws from a comment Tiger Woods’ father made: the younger Woods was widely described as “African-American,” despite popular knowledge that his father was black and his mother was Asian.  Amid the controversy following fellow golfer Fuzzy Zoeller’s racist jokes about Woods’ blackness, Woods announced that he considered himself “Cablinasian,” a term that summed up his Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian lineage.  Woods got a lot of press and mocking for his new term, I argue for the same reason that Zoeller’s jokes were about blackness: it is so “clear” that Woods is black.  His body is coded as “black” in such a way that despite knowing this racial mixture and his non-identification with black, he continued to be identified as such.  This continues, despite his father’s claim that “the boy has about two drops of black blood in him.” 

Woods’ father’s statement invokes the “one drop rule,” a term to describe U.S. policies that during slavery and segregation, designated people as “black” if they had even one black ancestor.  Indeed, some commentators pointed out that according to his father, Woods had twice as much black blood as he needed to be considered black. 

I am appropriating the term “two drops” in order to describe the calculus of racial (im)purity that dominates our society today.  Popular discourses about “mixed race” bodies have been celebratory for some time.  This can be seen in well-worn claims that mixed race people “are the future” and that mixed-race people are inherently attractive.  Bodies that are deemed “racially ambiguous,” especially those that could be part white, have a certain value within modeling agencies and film/TV casting, because they can signal “ethnicity” and appeal to whites at the same time. 

This paper argues that scholarship on discourses about bodies deemed “mixed race,” including the popular argument that Latino/as are inherently racially hybrid, does not grapple often enough with the ugly, exclusionary side of these discourses.  This includes the long history of colorism all over the colonized world that ranked “whiter” people of color more beautiful, intelligent and worthy than the rest.  For example, we know that African Americans are racially mixed, but as with Tiger Woods’s one drop too many, this knowledge doesn’t move us to consider “unquestionably black,” that is, bodies that are “too dark/black” as “hybrid.” 

Bodies that are coded as “white” are still safely positioned as not just the best bodies, but as representative of human dies.  Bodies coded “unquestionably” “Asian” or “black” do not have this privilege.  This hierarchical trio eerily, but not surprisingly, echoes the “three great stocks of man”: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. This anthropological discourse held sway through the sixties, and while there is much to say about “pure” whiteness or absolute Asianness within marketplaces and academic milieu privileging hybridity, my paper focuses on the fixity of bodies coded as “black.”  In this paper, I explore how bodies that are not deemed “hybrid” make it possible for there to be this slip and play for “racially ambiguous” bodies.