Fixed at Birth: Did the Introduction of Racial Identifiers on Birth Certificates Affect Marriage and Education Patterns in the Jim Crow Era?

Martin Eiermann, UW-Madison

The United States has a long history of racialized data collection (i.e., including racial identifiers on a wide range of forms and documents that are generated through routine bureaucratic processes), yet scholarly attention has focused primarily on the motivations behind racial enumeration rather than its consequences for those being counted. This paper investigates whether the introduction of racialized birth certificates had measurable effects on marriage rates and educational attainment among Americans born during the Jim Crow era, and whether such effects were concentrated among Black Americans in states with anti-miscegenation and school segregation laws. The addition of racial identifiers to American birth certificates was partly motivated by a desire to "fix" a person's race at birth and facilitate enforcement of racial integrity laws. If racial identifiers were routinely invoked during marriage licensing and school enrollment, their introduction should have produced lasting disparities in marriage and education outcomes. To test this, I combine approximately 17 million linked census records from the Census Linking Project and IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel with an original dataset of state-level birth registration legislation. Exploiting the staggered adoption of racialized birth certificates across states between 1914 and 1930, I employ a fuzzy difference-in-differences event study estimator that accounts for imperfect compliance with registration mandates.

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 Presented in Session 205. Racial Classification, Census Politics, and Jim Crow