Tremendous essay. As someone else pointed out, this was back when Virginia was still an apartheid state, in the process of getting desegregation imposed on it; racial categorization was an important weapon of the state against some of its citizens, and not one they were going to give up easily in the face of some guy (correctly) declaring it nonsensical.

There's so much Seeing Like A State in the punchcard incident as well. Having invented the categories, you must be made to fit them. These days plenty of people will say "well, of course he's right, you can't jam everyone into racial/ethnicity categories, and you shouldn't" then turn around and code gender as an immutable M/F binary in their database.

My former boss has similar experience with TSA and customs. His father in law runs a farm back in his home country, and he usually goes once to visit whenever he is there. So, technically, he visited a farm which is one of the questions on most immigration forms. As a resident alien without a green card, he usually gets the 9th degree from TSA and customs. He has found, however, that if he checks this box they immediately start grilling him about the "farm" he says he stayed at. Once he explains "Oh no, it's a farmhouse. I visited my father in law for dinner one night. I didn't do any farm work or walk in the fields." they stamp his form and let him go. They never ask (or even check, as far as he can tell) anything else.

Moral: give the agent an easy problem to find, but one with a simple solution in your favor. They will never look for a 2nd problem.

From that article:

> He also remarked that they had asked him if he knew me socially and that he had answered "Yes, we just celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together". When the investigator wanted to know "What is Guy Fawkes Day?" he started to explain the gunpowder plot but thought better of it. He settled for the explanation that "It's a British holiday".

By way of context, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia would not be settled until 1967.

(but note also that these "race" questions were all over US forms well into the 1980s. By my time, however, it appears that "mongrel" answers were being routinely coded as "Decline To State")

Lagniappe: anyone curious about actual Caucasian phenotypes can find them on Youtube, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg

I never understood that obsession and unwillingless to give up that broken concept of race/ethnicity in the USA.

This one actually has a programming related lesson at the end!

> The security people apparently found it impractical to obtain the hour or two of a programmer's time that would have been needed to fix the code

I laughed so hard.

> I will probably never know.

I wonder if the author got his answer through modern DNA ancestry.

Richard Feynman had a similar anecdote involving "skin tone".