Series What America Changed About Black History Paper Genocide: Vital Records, Racial Reclassification, and the Administrative Erasure of Black–Indigenous Lineage

This paper examines what may be described as “paper genocide”: the systematic erasure of Black and Black–Indigenous lineage through vital records, racial reclassification, census practices, and administrative documentation in the United States. Drawing on historical records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including birth certificates, census schedules, and tribal rolls—the analysis shows how identity was actively produced, revised, and dissolved through bureaucratic systems rather than merely recorded. While the primary documents originate in earlier periods, this paper prioritizes twenty-first-century Black scholarship that has reexamined these materials using historical, legal, and statistical methods, revealing how administrative erasure functioned as a form of structural violence with lasting consequences. Situating archival manipulation as an ongoing governance problem rather than a closed historical episode, the paper argues that justice efforts remain constrained so long as the records that define recognition, eligibility, and repair are treated as neutral rather than as instruments of power. Publication Note This paper is part of Series — What America Changed About Black History, a Black History Month research project examining how U.S. institutions reshaped Black lineage, visibility, and legal existence through administrative systems rather than overt violence alone. Building on prior analyses of conditional belonging and naming as governance, this paper centers historical records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while prioritizing twenty-first-century Black scholarship that reexamines those documents through statistical, legal, and archival analysis. By foregrounding contemporary interpretations of historical records, the series situates bureaucratic erasure as a modern, ongoing problem rather than a closed historical episode.