How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act belongs to a settler colonial tradition extending back to the early 1600s. Some white Virginians, though, weren’t satisfied. They worried about a loophole in the law that would dilute the purity of white “blood.” Leading white supremacists had wanted the Racial Integrity Act to solidify Virginia’s black-white racial binary. To do so, they called for the Act to erase the presence of Native people. Some used the Act to do just this, engaging in a form of “bureaucratic genocide” to re-cast Native people as Black, rendering them less visible in the historical record.

United States of America