Many residents in East Jackson were raised to identify as black. But what dictates race: where you live, your DNA, the history you’re taught?

By Khushbu Shah

The town functions as a microcosm of what African Americans have had to deal with in America, says Dr Barbara Ellen Smith, a professor emerita who has spent much of her career focused on inequality in Appalachia. Alongside the rise of anti-slavery laws was a parallel rise of what historians and scholars call “black laws” including the one-drop rule – that one drop of “black blood” disqualified an individual from having the legal status of whites – which became a widely accepted social attitude in Ohio beginning in the 1860s.

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