The Role of Lineage in Identity Formation Among Black Americans.

The article focuses on the role of lineage in identity formation among Black Americans. If all of those defined racially as black in the United States have only one ancestry that is a meaningful part of their identity and that ancestry is African-American then for all intents and purposes race and ancestry are equivalent in terms of defining this population. The idea that race and ancestry are equivalent for blacks in the U.S. is made possible because the ancestral diversity among blacks has been consistently ignored in the United States in favor of a racial definition of the population, which defines individuals only in terms of their racial identities. The "one drop rule" of racial classification in the United States has operated historically to make the distinction between race and ethnicity for those defined as blacks unimportant. Thus the people defined as blacks for the most part have also been defined as only having African-American ancestries, regardless of the degree of variation in the ancestries of the individuals involved.