Word.ws English Dictionary

reverse one-drop rule

reverse one-drop rule noun: the notion that one drop of white blood (i.e. any white ancestry at all) makes a person white.

Noun

reverse one-drop rule

  1. (US) The notion that one drop of white blood (i.e. any white ancestry at all) makes a person white.
    • The silence in American public discourse about the reverse one-drop rule as it governed Mexican Americans is significant.2008, Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race
    • For Mexican Americans, the reverse one-drop rule operated to open up white status to Mexicans, and thereby the assumption of some political rights, but it also operated to impose a contingent whiteness.2015, José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, Joe R. Feagin, How the United States Racializes Latinos

Questions about reverse one-drop rule

What does reverse one-drop rule mean?
Reverse one-drop rule means the notion that one drop of white blood (i.e. any white ancestry at all) makes a person white.
What part of speech is reverse one-drop rule?
Reverse one-drop rule is a noun.

Words near reverse one-drop rule in the dictionary

  1. reverse mermaids
  2. reverse Midas touch
  3. reverse mortgage
  4. reverse mortgages
  5. reverse of trade
  6. reverse one-drop rule
  7. reverse osmosis
  8. reverse out
  9. reverse painting
  10. reverse paintings
  11. reverse palming off

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reverse one-drop rule (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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