Virginia’s racial classification system was explicitly designed to maintain white supremacy.

Evidence

Where does this thinking come from? As the justices unanimously found in their Loving decision, the 1924 Racial Integrity Act originated as “an incident to slavery” and its racial classifications served as nothing more than “measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.” The chief promoter of that act, Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia’s state registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946, was a doctor with deep ties to both eugenicists and white supremacists. Plecker turned his office into the state’s most powerful tool for implementing the belief in an innate racial hierarchy. Plecker wrote in his preface to the Racial Integrity Act that the state must use “radical measures” to prevent the “intermarriage of the white race with mixed stock.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 201

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘An incident to slavery’ is the framers’ own designation — the origin dating moves the racial system from natural fact to a device.
• XREF: Plecker the doctor-eugenicist ties to the reader’s broader interest in how expertise gets weaponized as infrastructure.