A religious identity once legally determined South Asian eligibility for whiteness.

Evidence

Haney Lopez documents several legal cases where South Asian Indians were determined to be white by the courts. For example, in the early twentieth century, the courts used “common knowledge” and “scientific evidence” to argue about whether Asian Indians were white or not white (Lopez 2006). Common knowledge referred to popularly held notions about race, while scientific knowledge relied on naturalistic studies of humans. In the United States v. Dolla (1910) and United States v. Balsara (1910), the courts ruled Asian Indians were white based on scientific evidence. But in 1923’s United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Bhagat Thind, an Indian immigrant, was denied citizenship because Hindus were seen as ineligible for naturalization—one that held even though Thind was actually Sikh. This ruling was based on common knowledge and set legal precedent for the cases that would follow by determining that Asian Indians who were Hindus could not become naturalized citizens because Hindus were not considered white. This case uncovered that a religious identity, being Hindu, distanced Asian Indians from whiteness. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 93

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the court distinction between common knowledge and scientific evidence for racial classification — the precise machinery of how a faith gets racialized.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s guiding question on how religion becomes race; Thind (a Sikh denied citizenship because ‘Hindu’) is the historical setup for current Muslim racialization. — connects to: Non-white South Asian immigrants could obtain citizenship by passing as Black; Religious identity alone distanced Asian Indians from whiteness in naturalization law. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 118
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does being misidentified as Hindu/Sikh despite actual Sikh identity echo today’s post-9/11 profiling of Sikhs mistaken for Muslims?