The same Parsi fact justified opposite rulings on Iranian whiteness

Evidence

Although neither court directly assigned a racial category to Persians or Iranians as “white” or “non-white,” both Balsara and Wadia, as plaintiffs, used Parsi identity as a historical claim to a white racial identity with origins in Persia. In this way, Parsee/Parsi operated as racial shorthand. For the Balsara court, the continued existence of a coherently differentiated Parsi community in India was evidence of the community’s whiteness, and by extension, Iranian whiteness. In Wadia, it was exactly this same continued presence of Parsis in the Indian subcontinent that served as evidence of their ineligibility for whiteness. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 74

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The identical evidence — Parsi presence in India — licensing directly opposite racial verdicts exposes the arbitrariness at the core of racial adjudication; courts consecrated whatever served the binary.
• XREF: Mirrors how other courts used ‘common knowledge’ to rule on race — echoes the Ozawa decision and the malleable use of scientific vs. popular races in prerequisite cases.

Related

• Courts framed Parsi migration as white people moving to a brown place (similarity 0.82)