My greatgrandmother hid the fact she was colored. It destroyed her marriage, and she had good reason to fear being labeled as a “negro”.
She looked white. Born in Memphis, TN, in 1874, she worked as a waitress for an Italian-Swiss family of emigrants from Switzerland. Later she would claim their surname and heritage to protect herself.
She married a man from Massachusetts, a pony soldier, but in Ohio someone outed her. Her son, my grandfather, with light sandy hair and pale gray eyes, was taken from her and stashed in a New England boarding house among strangers while his Dad was fighting the Indians.
If you choose not to know about laws forbidding marriage between whites with other races, then I feel pity for you.
Maybe I misunderstood your post, but you seemed to say there should be no civil marriage because those laws were originally intended to keep the races seperate. Which is absolutely false and ridiculous. That’s because you wrote “the laws” instead of, say, “some laws,” or something similar. Now you act as if I’ve never heard of miscegenation laws, which is absurd.
If all you were saying is there were laws against miscegenation, well, obviously. But that’s not any good reason why there shouldn’t be such a thing as civil marriage. Not if there’s a legitimate state interest in family law, which I believe there is. Any state power could and probably has been used against this or that race, or in the interest if white purity, but that doesn’t mean they are forever and in every situation illegitimate, unless you’re an anarchist. It’s interesting to learn, for instance, advocates of abortion and other forms of “planned parenthood” argued on the basis of controlling the lesser races. Does that mean diaphrams are racist? No, and neither is marriage. That’s just a footnote.
I’m not saying it’s imperative we have state sponsored marriage. More that racism somewhere in its history does not forever taint it. Kinda like hiw whites marrying blacks doesn’t taint either race. It could be like any other contract. That’s put all kinds of couples on an even field. But there’s still be men and women having babies, and we’d still wanna encourage them to be bound together, for a while anyway, so as to have less feral youth accosting us.