US courts redefined whiteness as common sense to exclude Asian immigrants

Evidence

In 1922, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had lived in the US for many years, went to the US Supreme Court to challenge the law that prevented Asians from becoming naturalized citizens. In Ozawa v. the United States, he argued that his skin was actually lighter than many white people’s, so if Italians and other Europeans could become US citizens, why not Asians? The Supreme Court ruled that race was an issue of blood, not skin color, and that no matter how light an Asian person’s skin, they could never be considered “white,” but would always be “foreign.” One year later in 1923, an Asian-Indian immigrant, Bhagat Singh Thind, argued that he had the right to be a US citizen because he was an upper-caste Hindu, descended from white Aryans who had settled in India. Thus, his blood was white. The Supreme Court responded in United States v. Thind that race was not a scientific category but a social one and that no matter how much white blood an Asian might have, he was still “foreign” and could never be an American. The court gave up on using expert testimony and stated that the “common” American simply knew Thind was not white. “Common speech” and “popular understanding” were to be the new tests of whiteness. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 951

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s work on how racialization and ‘foreignness’ are constructed; also resonates with the chapter’s broader claim about perpetual foreigner status being deployed against Muslims.

Related

• The US Supreme Court manufactured whiteness to permanently exclude Asians from citizenship (similarity 0.91)
• US courts redefined race socially to permanently exclude Asians from whiteness and citizenship (similarity 0.90)
• US citizenship law grounded whiteness in popular perception rather than science (similarity 0.81)
• Thind established common knowledge, not race science, as the Whiteness test. (similarity 0.79)
• Provable anthropological whiteness was insufficient for US naturalization once race became common knowledge (similarity 0.79)
• Courts distinguished biological whiteness from culturally acceptable whiteness for citizenship (similarity 0.78)
• The 1923 Supreme Court ruled all South Asians ineligible for citizenship (similarity 0.78)