something law school taught me is that however suspicious you are that "oh, oops this law accidentally created a loophole that allows for bigotry by accident" is a lie, you are not suspicious enough.
anyone affected by such laws could tell you as much, but it really is something to read the actual law, the legislative history, public comment, etc and see just how much it was on purpose. it really makes me lose my patience with people pretending otherwise.
"oh this silly law says your house has to be blue in this neighborhood and sometimes Black people were accidentally kept from the neighborhood because blue paint was sometimes hard to come by"
and anyone with two braincells thinks, "yeah it probably was at least somewhat on purpose"
but then you find out the town made a law that it was illegal to sell blue paint to people of color and illegally buying blue paint was punishable by life in prison and the city ordinance about blue houses is called like the Keep Our Neighborhoods White--I Mean Blue Act of 1999. and the town had a weekly newspaper issue talking about how crime had gone up in the paint district so we need more police but also all the people of color are strangely homeless and homelessness means more crime so we need more police, but the police are overwhelmed so you can sign up to be a deputy looking for paint thieves called the Slave-Catching Renaissance Ordinance
and the only proposed "solution" so far is that selling blue paint is no longer illegal.
"It takes a long time to undo all of these things" mhm, either that's also a lie or do you not find it a condemnation of how the system works that it's so easy to install these laws that are blatant on its face bigotry (most often and blatantly racism) but near impossible to get rid of them?
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