Just as the existence of continents is determined by political societies, within political societies racial forms of being are determined by the government. One of the major sites where the government- acting in the name of the state as a membership organization- has intervened to define the meaning of race as well as specific racial identities has been marriage law. Current governmental racial classifications all follow from the legal history of racial classifications. The state does not treat racial identity as amenable to synchronic reassessments. Rather, one's race is the race of one's ancestors, which is always what the state announces was the race of one's ancestors
Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State
This touches on something described in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but not illustrated necessarily so well: In order to perform its instrumental reason, the modern state has to invent mythological reasons for why it does what it does, which it then must necessarily start to believe.