Virginia required marriage applicants to declare their race into the twenty-first century.

Evidence

On a summer day in 2019, Ashley Ramkishun and Samuel Sarfo thought they were making a routine trip to the clerk’s office in Arlington County, Virginia, to apply for a marriage license. They didn’t expect that the computerized Marriage Register form they were directed to fill out would include a box titled “Race,” with an asterisk indicating it was required information. Under “Race” was the instruction to “Select One,” with a drop-down list of seven categories to choose from—American Indian/Alaskan Native, African American/Black, Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic/Latino, Pacific Islander, and Other. … This would have been true in any of Virginia’s ninety-five counties, all of which required applicants to identify their race in order to obtain a marriage license. In Rockbridge County, for example, applicants were required to choose a racial identification from a list of 230 terms that includes “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” “Nubian,” and “Aryan.” And Virginia was not alone. … By that time, they had also decided to join two other couples in Virginia who had been denied marriage licenses for refusing to racially identify and filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s requirement in federal court. In late 2019, Judge Rossie D. Alston, Jr., handed down a decision: there was no compelling reason to maintain the racial-identification law, which burdened the plaintiffs’ fundamental right to marry and therefore violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. … In deciding for the plaintiffs, Judge Alston traced the racial-classifications requirement to a Virginia law passed in 1924 entitled “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.” This law required local and state registrars to keep certificates of “racial composition” for everyone born in the state and to require accurate “statements as to color of both man and woman” on applications for marriage licenses. It also strictly prohibited interracial marriages. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article on how apparently-neutral bureaucratic practices encode identity/political signaling; also fits the 1619 reframing of racial classification as infrastructural.
• CANDY: A modern couple blocked from marrying for refusing to check a race box — a vivid, concrete, easy-to-retell anecdote.