US citizenship law grounded whiteness in popular perception rather than science

Evidence

Concurrent with these decisions was U.S. v. Baghat Singh Thind, an oft-cited case in Asian American legal studies arguing that ”Hindus”-that is, all South Asians, whether Sikh, Hindu, or Muslim-were ineligible for naturalization because the right to citizenship was based on popular notions of the white race. The court acknowledged that Thind was Caucasian based on an argument purporting North Indians’ link to an Aryan race, even though common people on the street would not have viewed him as a white person (Haney López 1996; Moore 1995). The logic of popular racial consensus became the guiding precedent for cases that involved Afghans, Arabs, Persians, Syrians, and Turks- national groups that were categorized as racially other through their association with Islam. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Milgrom material on how community consensus norms substitute for formal standards, and the trustworthy-person legal logic in ‘The Social Control of Impersonal Trust’. — connects to: The US Supreme Court manufactured whiteness to permanently exclude Asians from citizenship — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 951; US courts redefined race socially to permanently exclude Asians from whiteness and citizenship — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 966; No American can actually prove they are white because whiteness is a fiction — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 63