“In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white. The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people ‘whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.’ There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas. So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the ‘Pocahontas exception.’ Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law. People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.

With all of the race-mixing that occurred throughout the world before Christ, is it possible for a “pure” race to exist?

Source: Carl Zimmer. “White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier.”  New York Times. December 24, 2014. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/science/23andme-genetic-ethnicity-study.html?_r=0.

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