In the Margins

America has always had a disturbing obsession with blood.

Take, for instance, this little known story from Northampton County, Virginia.

The Gingaskin people historically known as the Accomac have been living here for thousands of years.

Then one day in 1813, their reservation was terminated by the Virginia General Assembly.

Why?

Neighboring settlers claimed that indigenous tribal members had married to many black people and were no longer indigenous.

the government agreed.

What happened to the Gingaskin tribe was no accident.

Their story is a tragic example of one of America's oldest ideologies at work racial purity.

You might associate this concept with Nazi Germany, but its supporters date back to early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson, who was obsessed with keeping white and black people separated.

And so racial pseudoscience and false narratives were woven into American society.

This was reinforced by a patchwork of laws that strictly defined a person's race, and along with that, their rights.

This is a story about who benefited from those laws, who was pitted against each other and who resisted this racial caste system that still reverberates in our country today.

Something very telling happened after the Gingaskin reservation was terminated.

The trustees, who were white people appointed by the state to manage Gingaskin Land, divided up the previously communal reservation into individual plots for tribal members, with the condition that no Black people could own the surplus land.

That land was snapped up by white settlers.

This outcome is key to understanding how race was constructed differently for Indigenous people and for Black people.

Let me explain.

For Indigenous people, white colonists came up with a system called blood quantum.

This was a way to calculate how much Native blood a person has based on their family tree.

In this system, introducing any other race into a Native person's ancestry would lower their blood quantum with each generation eventually to the point of erasure For Black people, white colonists created the concept of hypodescent, later known as the one drop rule.

This system categorized someone with any Black ancestor as Black, which under colonial law meant they could be enslaved and could not own arms or land.

Many scholars have pointed out that these systems were the exact opposite of each other, but shared a common goal.

Exploitation.

For those in power, fewer Native people meant more land to take while more Black people meant more labor.

We can see this logic being put into practice as early as 1662.

A Virginia statute was passed, making it so that whether a child was free or enslaved was determined by the mother's status.

This law intentionally flipped the precedence of inheritance, which passed down through the father.

It meant that white men could enslave their own children, essentially using sexual violence on enslaved Black women to exponentially increase their labor force and wealth.

Virginia would go on to have the largest mixed race population in the South.

Some enslaved people use this law to sue and win their freedom, if they could prove their maternal lineage was white or Native.

Sometimes, in the absence of records, juries simply relied on appearance.

By the revolutionary era, social narratives about Black and Indigenous people had been widely accepted by white society.

We can understand these views through Thomas Jefferson, one of the most powerful men of the day, who crystallized these beliefs in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia.

Jefferson also advocated for the removal of Black people to ensure their blood and traits would not mix with the white race.

Ironically, Jefferson himself fathered multiple children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved Black woman.

He enslaved more than 600 people on his plantations over his lifetime.

Jefferson framed Indigenous people in two different ways, loosely based around location, but both supported his vision of American expansion.

In his own state, He believed indigenous peoples of Virginia were more Black than Native.

Echoing the false public sentiment about the Gingaskin tribe, that intermarrying had led to the near extinction of Native people.

Native people objected to this conclusion for several reasons.

Tribal membership had historically never been decided by race, but rather kinship, meaning a person's familial, social, and cultural ties with the tribe.

Also, tribes are sovereign nations.

Meaning, like the United States, tribal nations should have the right to determine citizenship regardless of race.

Some tribes in Virginia, like the Pamunkey, fought back when white settlers attempted to terminate their reservation.

When the Pamunkey realized that a termination petition arguing that they were more Black than Native had been filed against their reservation, they launched two counter petitions.

The Pamunkey members defended themselves as hardworking farmers and provided proof that the majority of their members were Indigenous, though not all from the same nation.

They also discovered that the petitioner T.W.S.

Gregory, had forged some of the 144 signatures.

Ultimately, they beat this fraudulent attempt to take their land.

Jefferson's second take focus on Native people on the frontier.

He imagined them as eloquent, noble, and good candidates to assimilate with white people.

He told one group of Indigenous people directly, "you will become one with us."

Some tribes did try to stimulate into white society, like the so-called Five Civilized Tribes in the southeast US.

The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Muskogee developed written languages, converted to Christianity, and enslaved Black people, making up between 10 to 20% of their population.

But assimilating didn't save them.

Instead, starting in the 1830s, more than 100,000 people from these five nations, along with the people they enslaved, were removed from their ancestral land in a deadly march we now know as the Trail of Tears.

Navigating complex racial tensions, Indigenous people were both oppressed and oppressor.

By the 1920s, a new law was brewing that aimed to wipe out Virginia's Native population completely.

in 1924.

Virginia passed one of the most aggressive racial purity laws in American history.

The Racial Integrity Act, originally titled An Act to Preserve the Integrity of the White Race, in case anyone was unclear about the true aim.

The act was designed by John Powell, a white supremacist and eugenics proponent.

Now debunked as pseudoscience, eugenics was at the height of its popularity.

The theory claimed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding, and was used to justify forced sterilization programs in more than 30 states.

The law made interracial marriage illegal and officially collapsed all racial and ethnic categories down to just two: white and colored.

Post slavery, the Black Codes, then Jim Crow segregation became the new way to enforce the racial hierarchy.

These strict labels decided a person's ability to vote and access public places like schools, parks, and hospitals.

According to the law, a white person was someone, quote, who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.

End quote.

With one exception.

There were elite families in Virginia who had loudly and proudly descended from the prominent white settler John Rolfe in Pocahontas, who was Mattaponi and Pamunkey.

Named the Pocahontas Rule, it tweaked the law to allow people with 1/16th Native ancestry to still be classified as white.

The biggest cheerleader by far was a man named Walter A. Plecker, though he hated the Pocahontas exception because he thought it opened up whiteness to "contamination".

Plecker was so zealous in his enforcement, especially against indigenous people, that even Governor Elbert Lee Trinkle, who had signed the act into law, suggested he ease up.

He did not.

Officially, Plecker was the state registrar for the vital Statistics Office, handling things like birth, marriage and death certificates.

But he also harassed educators to kick out children attending white schools who might be biracial.

He circulated lists with the names of Native families who he suspected had Black ancestry.

Even when the Pamunkey tribe passed an 1887 Anti-miscegenation law banning marriage to Black people, Plecker said they had started 200 years too late.

It didn't take long for people to challenge the Racial Integrity Act.

Within a year, two couples successfully sued to get their marriage license using the Pocahontas rule.

One of these cases involved Robert Painter, a white man, and Atha Sorrels, a mixed race woman with white and Native heritage.

When ruling in their favor, the judge questioned how anyone could be certain of their ancestry dating back so many generations.

Angered by these defeats, Plecker doubled down on policing Native identity.

His main tool was editing birth records.

He constantly relabeled Native birth certificates as colored.

Native people resisted in whatever ways they could.

One Monocan midwife defiantly continued to write Indian on certificates despite the risk of jail time.

The Monacan people also defended their identity for the 1930 census, when they won a letter writing campaign to be counted as specifically Indian and not colored.

The Racial Integrity Act wasn't universally supported in Virginia, and some non-Native allies even joined the fight.

A white man named James Coates confronted Plecker in the press and led a campaign to allow Native people to be treated in white only hospitals, which often had more financial resources to provide care than Black hospitals.

Then, in 1934, a decade after the Racial Integrity Act, the federal government passed a major change in federal Indian policy.

The Indian Reorganization Act.

The act ended previous policies of assimilation and land loss through allotment schemes in favor of promoting self-government.

However, it also formally established blood quantum as the standard method to determine tribal citizenship.

Though he didn't do it alone, Plecker carried out his campaign of what one Pamunkey chief called statistical genocide against Native people for decades, up until he was killed in traffic in 1947.

By the mid 1900s, America had centuries of practice upholding its racial hierarchy.

As more immigrants came to the US, these divisive strategies were implemented on other racial groups.

Consider how the Japanese experience echoes the oppression of Black and Indigenous people.

During World War Two, the federal government forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, two thirds of whom were U.S.

citizens, into internment camps.

They left behind homes and businesses that were seized by government officials or sold at very low prices.

Colonel Karl Bendetsen, who oversaw internment, was quoted as saying, "I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to a camp".

After internment, the War Relocation Authority pressured Japanese Americans to abandon their language, culture, and ethnic enclaves and assimilate with white society.

Then, in the 1960s, government officials pointed to the Japanese community specifically to encourage the concept of Asian Americans as hardworking, obedient, successful - the so-called "model minority".

Politicians use this myth to try to discredit Black and Hispanic activists during the civil rights era, who demanded that the government address racial inequities and grant equal rights under the law.

This construct also hurt Asian Americans, by erasing the multitude of experiences and racial discrimination they continued to face.

Finally, in 1967, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act was overturned by the Supreme Court.

In the famous case of Loving vs.

Virginia, the court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

The couple who won this right were Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a Rappahannock woman who has historically been identified solely by her Black ancestry.

Loving later disavowed her Black heritage.

Like many Afro-Indigenous people, she had a complicated relationship with her racial identity.

Yet, as Loving herself told one newspaper, "If I'm blue, green, red, it doesn't matter.

I'm here."

These continuing struggles are a result of centuries of Black, Native and Afro Indigenous peoples being positioned at odds with one another, from the Gingaskin termination to the Racial Integrity Act.

After spending years untangling the damage from Plecker's tampering with birth records, the Pamunkey Indian Tribe finally got federal recognition in 2015.

Other Virginia tribes like the Monacan Tribe and five others were recognized in 2018.

Though we've come a long way, this campaign for racial purity continues to find new ways into the national debate.

According to a 2022 news report, experts found that several senatorial candidate made comments that echoed "great replacement theory", a fringe conspiracy theory that there's a plot to dilute white people's influence by replacing them with immigrants, though some of the campaigns have denied this connection.

In 2026 on the nation's 250th birthday, a group of masked white nationalists marched in the streets of Washington, D.C.

At the same time, racial disparities can still be seen in almost every aspect of American society, from health to employment, education, mass incarceration, and many more.

These are difficult American histories to confront, but it's important to interrogate or shared past and ask ourselves: When we are divided, who stands to gain?