The gentlemen who crafted Virginia’s 1902 Constitution set out to construct an orderly, well-managed society. Virginia would not be governed by hooligans in repurposed bedsheets, as were the benighted regions farther south. No siree, the high-minded solons who crafted the new constitution were filled with the spirit of Progressivism, armed with statistics, guided by experts, and informed by the indisputable facts of the new science of eugenics. Six years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson had made “separate, but equal” the law of the land, and the political Machine that ran Virginia spent the next two-thirds of a century defining, documenting, and separating the races. (The Machine focused much more on “separate” than it did on “equal.”)

From 1912 to 1946, the Machine made Walter Ashby Plecker, MD, their chief social engineer. They established a Bureau of Vital Statistics and made him its registrar. Plecker’s bureaucracy made genealogical research a central mission of state government. As the population swelled from 2 to 3 million, Plecker devoted his life to constructing a taxonomy of races, determining each race’s place in society, slotting each and every Virginian in one of his categories, meting out privileges and penalties on the basis of one’s race, and harnessing the police powers of the Commonwealth to sustain the whole enterprise—as he, the Machine, and God had intended. (Plecker thought God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they engaged in racial mixing).

[It’s a lengthy essay but a rich vein on the perils of racial/ethnic determinism. That is an ugly past to which we are returning in the guise of “wokeness,” so it’s best to be prepared for the taxonomies to come. — Ed]