{"id":58801,"date":"2019-08-31T20:23:37","date_gmt":"2019-08-31T20:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58801"},"modified":"2019-08-31T20:23:37","modified_gmt":"2019-08-31T20:23:37","slug":"birth-certificates-have-always-been-a-weapon-for-white-supremacists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58801","title":{"rendered":"Birth certificates have always been a weapon for white supremacists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Birth certificates have always been a weapon for white supremacists<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2018-09-11<\/p>\n

Susan Pearson<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of History
\nNorthwestern University, Evanston, Illinois<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\n(Bigstock) (ziimmytws\/Bigstock)<\/small><\/p>\n

Policing the color line through vital documents.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s decision to revive and expand<\/a> the Bush and Obama-era practice of denying U.S. passports to Latinos born in South Texas<\/a> should come as no surprise. From his assault on Barack Obama\u2019s citizenship<\/a> to his allegations that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists to his promise to institute a Muslim ban, Donald Trump<\/a> has made it abundantly clear that he believes the only true Americans are white.<\/p>\n

But long before Trump rode to prominence promoting birtherism, birth certificates were an important instrument for policing the racial boundaries of citizenship. In the Jim Crow<\/a> era, states used these seemingly innocuous public records to ensure that the rights of citizenship were accessible to white Americans \u2014 and no one else.<\/p>\n

The best example of this comes from the career of Walter Plecker<\/a>. Plecker, the state registrar of vital statistics in Virginia<\/a> from 1912 to 1946, worked with the white-supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America<\/a> to persuade the state legislature to pass the 1924 Racial Integrity Act<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Policing the color line through vital documents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,20,693],"tags":[21057,30185,30186,2875,6372,1857,2474,2581],"class_list":["post-58801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-donald-trump","tag-susan-j-pearson","tag-susan-pearson","tag-the-washington-post","tag-walter-a-plecker","tag-walter-ashby-plecker","tag-walter-plecker","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58802,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58801\/revisions\/58802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}