The 'one-drop rule' determines a person's ethnicity.

• A. It depends
• B. False
• C. True
• D. It has historical basis

Answer: (B)

The concept here is the difference between race and ethnicity and how historical rules were used to classify people. The one-drop rule was a historical policy that defined a person’s race by ancestry, specifically labeling anyone with any African ancestry as Black. Ethnicity, on the other hand, involves cultural affiliation, language, nationality, and self-identification, and it isn’t determined by a single ancestor or by legal criteria. So saying the one-drop rule determines a person’s ethnicity is not accurate. It does have a historical basis as a practice in racial classification, but that pertains to race, not to ethnicity.