Institutional Racism

cents for one hundred pounds. The next year's cotton choppers' strike failed to gain its
demands amidst violence and evictions.
4. Legal definitions of ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Affirmed.
Background: How is it that a Black woman cannot have a white child but a white
woman can have a Black child? It all started with the economic imperative to reproduce
slave labor and regulate the offspring that resulted from white overseers’ sexual abuse
of Black women.
The Story: In 1984, Susie Guillory Phipps unsuccessfully sued the Louisiana Bureau of
Vital Records to change her racial classification from Black to white. The descendant of
an eighteenth-century white planter and a Black slave, Phipps was designated as
"Black" in her birth certificate in accordance with a 1970 state law which declared
anyone with at least one-thirty-second "Negro blood" to be Black.
Phipps lost her case. The highest court of the land upheld a state law that quantified
racial identity, and in so doing affirmed the legality of assigning individuals to specific
racial groupings.
Grassroots Policy Project Race, Power and Policy Page 33