When law does magic on reality

 Isabel Wilkerson says that, as part of its caste system, Texas had an “association clause” tied to its marriages.

Those were the days when it was illegal for Blacks and whites to marry. Race is not a scientific concept, but in the primitive days of the law it was treated as if it were. A person was either one race or another.

A concept that has no scientific basis must have imaginative “tests,” and one of the tests of race was association. You were Black if you associated with Black people, and white if you associated with white people.

I ran across this idea years ago when reading about history of The Settlement in Texas City. The community was established by Black cowboys who earned their stakes on the cattle drives. They bought homesteads, and two of the men married immigrant women from Europe. The women were imprisoned. When they were released, they were, through the magic of the association clause, Black. 

Some people, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, for example, seem to think there is something magic — in the sense of being magically “correct” or “right” — about legal concepts that date from more primitive times. In this case, the better adjectives are “tragic” and “idiotic.”

• Source: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; New York: Random House, 2020.