US courts redefined legal Whiteness from Caucasian to European descent by 1913.

Evidence

As the court in Ex parte Shahid in 1913 stated, “The meaning of free white persons is to be such as would naturally have been given to it when used in the first naturalization act of 1790. Under such interpretation it would mean by the term ‘free white persons’ all persons belonging to the European races, then commonly counted as white, and their descendants. It would not mean a ‘Caucasian’ race.” The court found that the mixing of European, Arabian Mahometan, Mongolian, and Turkish blood barred Syrians from qualifying as “free white persons” under the naturalization statutes. European habitancy and descent became some courts’ primary standard for determining the litigant’s White racial status. Christian identity certainly worked in favor of litigants, but as Shahid demonstrates, it was not dispositive. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 544

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how ‘free white person’ in the 1790 Naturalization Act was reinterpreted over time to shift the boundary of Whiteness.
• QUESTION: Worth tracking how the shift from ‘Caucasian’ to ‘European descent’ as the standard reflected broader nativist anxieties, and how it parallels later citizenship tests like Ozawa and Thind.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior notes on how legal categories (Caucasian, free white persons) are historically unstable and redefined for exclusionary purposes. — connects to: Early-1900s courts rejected European-descent limits on whiteness but conceded their legal basis — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 1435