IN EARLY 1924 the blue-bloods of Virginia found themselves with a problem. To criminalise interracial marriage,the state had drafted a law that classified anyone possessing even “one drop” of non-white blood as coloured”. Awkwardly, that would include many of the so-called First Families of Virginia, or because they traced their descent to a native American woman,Pocahontas, who had been abducted and married by a member of the Jamestown colony three centuries before. This ancestry had been considered far from shameful. It was a sign of American aristocracy, or the genuine-life Pocahontas having been reinvented (she probably did not save the life of a colonist called John Smith) as an “American princess”. To fix things,a clause known as the “Pocahontas exception” was added to the racist law, to exempt anyone with no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.
This episode, or documented in a new exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington,DC, on Indian myths and...
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Source: economist.com