Ontology claim about the law/courts

The law assumed the crucial task of racial classification, and accepted and embraced the then-current theories of race as biological fact. This core precept of race as a physically defined reality allowed the law to fulfill an essential function - to "parcel out social standing according to race" and to facilitate systematic discrimination by articulating "seemingly precise definitions of racial group membership.' 3 1 This allocation of race and rights continued a century after the abolition of slavery. The law relied on bounded, objective, and scientific definitions of race - what Neil Gotanda has called "historical race" 133 - to construct whiteness as not merely race, but race plus privilege. By making race determinant and the product of rationality and science, dominant and subordinate positions within the racial hierarchy were disguised as the product of natural law and biology 134 rather than as naked preferences.' 35 Whiteness as racialized privilege was then legitimated by science and was embraced in legal doctrine as "objective fact." Case law that attempted to define race frequently struggled over the precise fractional amount of Black "blood" - traceable Black ancestry - that would defeat a claim to whiteness. 136 Although the courts applied varying fractional formulas in different jurisdictions to define "Black" or, in the terms of the day, "Negro" or "colored," the law uniformly accepted the rule of hypodescent 137 - racial identity was governed by blood, and white was preferred.138