A Less than Perfect Union: Race, Gender, and the Lack of "Perfect Plaintiffs" in Naim v. Naim

Restriction of interracial marriage was one of the longest surviving forms of statutory racial segregation in the United States, spanning from 1662 until 1967. Over a decade prior to Loving v. Virginia—the case which decided the unconstitutionality of anti-miscegenation statutes—the Court was faced with a similar case: Naim v. Naim. The appellant of this case, Han Say Naim, was a Chinese immigrant who had married a white woman and had his marriage voided under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Political pressures—specifically fear of interrupting school integration after Brown v. Board of Education—kept the Justices from ruling on interracial marriage in 1955. This paper seeks to go further by looking at the historical background of Asian exclusion to demonstrate how Naim exposes a legal preference for litigants that align closest to monogamous, patriarchal, and white American values, delaying resolution of the interracial marriage question despite favorable equal protection jurisprudence at the time of the case.