Courts distinguished biological whiteness from culturally acceptable whiteness for citizenship

Evidence

Because so many of the Arab litigants “looked White” after centuries of intermarriage, some judges were not persuaded by the US government’s simplistic claims that people from western Asia were not White. For example, in 1909, the US District Court in Oregon ruled in favor of granting naturalization to a Syrian Christian applicant, Tom Ellis. Although the court found Ellis to be White, the district attorney argued that he was not the right kind of White person because American citizenship was reserved for “only of the white persons who, from tradition, teaching, and environment, would be predisposed toward our form of government, and thus readily assimilable with the people of the United States.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 539

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The district attorney’s argument introduces a two-tier whiteness: phenotypically White but not the ‘right kind’ of White — a distinction still operational in modern racial discourse where whiteness is both phenotype and cultural/political disposition.
• XREF: connects to: Federal courts treated polygamous family norms as racial threats to democratic society; Early-1900s courts rejected European-descent limits on whiteness but conceded their legal basis — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 1435; The US Supreme Court manufactured whiteness to permanently exclude Asians from citizenship — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 951 (+4 more)