By F. James Davis. To be considered black in the United States not even half of one's ancestry must be African black. But will one-fourth do, or one-eighth, or less? The nation's answer to the question 'Who is black?" has long been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with slavery and later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South it became known as the "one-drop rule,'' meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person a black.

Scientists, including those who study race, like to see themselves as objectively exploring the world, above the political fray. But such views of scientific neutrality are naive, as study findings, inevitably, are influenced by the biases of the people conducting the work. Book by Ramin Skibba.

An online companion to the award-winning documentary series by California Newsreel discussing the origins, beliefs and consequences of what we call race.

The National Book Award-winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

Kim discusses how the system of indentured servitude in colonial Virginia transformed into a system of African slavery after Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion against the House of Burgesses.

The wide reputation and high value that have been accorded to the Notes on Virginia for over
one hundred years make any attempt to praise it at this day little less than a work of
supererogation. Its frequent republication is alone testimony sufficient to prove its unusual merit.
Aside from its intrinsic value, it is of interest, as Thomas Jefferson’s most serious piece of book-making,
and the one on which the larger part of his philosophical reputation was based during his
lifetime.

Frederick Douglass, “Country, Conscience, and the Anti-Slavery Cause : An Address Delivered in New York, New York, May 11, 1847.” New York Daily Tribune, 13 May 1847. Blassingame, John (et al, eds.). The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One—Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Vol. II, p. 57.

The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three-quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. From PBS' American Experience series.

Racial integrity laws were passed by the General Assembly to protect "whiteness" against what many Virginians perceived to be the negative effects of race-mixing. They included the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited interracial marriage and defined as white a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian"; the Public Assemblages Act of 1926, which required all public meeting spaces to be strictly segregated; and a third act, passed in 1930, that defined as black a person who has even a trace of African American ancestry.

A new book examines the ideologies of Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and how they perpetuated racist ideas and inequalities.
Joel Edward Goza, author of America’s Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics, in conversation with Houston Public Radio.