Provable anthropological whiteness was insufficient for US naturalization once race became common knowledge

Evidence

In 1923, the US Supreme Court affirmed that being Caucasian was insufficient to qualify an applicant as White. In United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Indian applicant, a Hindu, could prove he was anthropologically Caucasian, but the Court rejected his naturalization application by replacing the scientific inquiry rule with the common knowledge rule. A darkskinned Indian, even if anthropologically Caucasian, simply could not be White. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of race as legal construct rather than biology, resonant with critical race theory and work like whiteness-as-property literature. — connects to: European immigrants’ racial difference had to be intellectually manufactured — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 768