Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Abstract: This research paper is an analysis of the historical legal construction of black racial identity of mixed black-white race individuals in America. In particular, I investigate how state legislatures in the United States constructed black racial identity through the enactment of laws and constitutional provisions. This research identifies the following two-part framework by which state legislatures historically used the language of the law to coerce mixed black-white race individuals to adopt a personal sense of collective identity with people of black African ancestry: (1) identification of mixed black-white race individuals and blacks/Negroes as constituting two separate racial groups yet speaking of them in the same blush and disadvantaging them the same, and (2) abandoning recognition of mixed black-white race individuals (mulattoes) as a distinct racial group from Negroes/blacks through the enactment of statutes that espoused the rule of hypodescent. To provide empirical support for this papers thesis, a survey of statutes across all fifty states ranging from the colonial period up to the mid-1900s is conducted.
