A race-neutral law can be struck down when administration shows stark racial patterns.

Evidence

There is, however, early Supreme Court precedent from 1886 that invalidates laws that penalize only racial minority groups: Yick Wo v. Hopkins. In that instance racist intent can be presumed. The city of San Francisco required all laundries in wooden buildings to get a permit from its board of supervisors before they could open. The stated reason for the law was that these businesses posed a fire risk. In practice, however, more than two hundred petitions by those of Chinese ancestry were denied, while all but one of the petitions filed by non-Chinese individuals were granted. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 553

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing of structural racism as mechanism: Yick Wo is the rare case where the mechanism (permit administration) was provable from data.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s core goal of naming provisions where facial neutrality plus unequal starting conditions produces engineered disparity — Yick Wo is the legal precedent that makes such findings plausible.