Ancestral Bloodlines: The One-Drop Rule in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

December 8, 2025

Dr. Carolyn Haliburton Carter argues that artificial intelligence systems are digitally replicating America's historic One-Drop Rule by learning and perpetuating racial biases embedded in historical data. She traces how racial classification systems from slavery—which used fractional measurements like "Mulatto" and "Octoroon" to control people through quantified ancestry—now manifest in AI technologies that categorize identity through facial recognition, DNA testing, and algorithmic decision-making. These modern systems reproduce structural racism in areas like hiring, policing, healthcare, and financial services, with facial recognition showing significantly higher error rates for darker-skinned individuals and algorithms reinforcing historical patterns of discrimination.

Who is affected

People of African descent and Black communities
Darker-skinned women (experiencing up to 35% higher error rates in facial recognition)
Black patients in medical settings
People from historically redlined neighborhoods seeking loans
Communities of color seeking ancestry information through DNA testing
Darker-skinned African Americans historically subjected to the "brown paper bag test"
Job candidates with non-white-sounding names
Residents of Black neighborhoods subject to predictive policing
Mixed-race individuals and multiracial families
Indigenous communities represented in ancestry databases

What action is being taken

Scholars like Joy Buolamwini (Algorithmic Justice League), Dr. Timnit Gebru, and Dr. Ruha Benjamin are exposing how machine learning replicates systems of oppression
A new generation of scholars and technologists is challenging algorithmic hierarchies
Genealogists are using digital tools to restore erased narratives and reconstruct the past through research and storytelling
Community-led data projects, including the Freedmen's Bureau indexing initiative and Black-owned genealogical databases, are using technology to uncover lost stories
Dr. Carter and the Storykeepers Heritage Network are bridging genealogy, history, and technology to preserve untold stories

Why it matters

This matters because AI systems that control critical life decisions—employment, criminal justice, lending, healthcare, and identity recognition—are reproducing centuries-old racial hierarchies rather than eliminating human bias. The technology transforms historical systems of racial control into digital form, with facial recognition misidentifying people of color at higher rates, predictive policing targeting over-policed communities, and ancestry algorithms reducing complex cultural identities to spreadsheet percentages. These aren't technological glitches but digital descendants of structural racism that perpetuate exclusion, deny opportunities, and cause psychological harm to communities still recovering from slavery and segregation. Without intervention, AI risks permanently encoding the logic of the One-Drop Rule into systems that increasingly shape access to resources, rights, and recognition of humanity itself.

What's next

Holding developers accountable for cultural bias
Expanding public literacy by teaching communities of color how AI works and how it can work for them
Requiring more than audits and ethics boards—incorporating storytelling, remembrance, and radical imagination
Confronting the legacy of racial bias in databases, algorithms, and assumptions
Redrawing boundaries to chart a world where identity is determined by the fullness of shared humanity rather than drops of blood or lines of code

Read full article from source: Michigan Chronicle