During a revealing period in the history of American citizenship, with South Asians entering the fray, the line between white and non-white blurred. Now, 100 years later, America has yet to emerge from the dilemma over whether Indian-Americans and other South Asians are to be classified as Caucasians, or White, or Asian.

Consider the following:

Today, in the city of San Marcos, California, for employment purposes, the city identifies the following ethnic groups: white, Black, Hispanic, Asian Pacific Islander (API), and American Indian. Here, Indians, Pakistanis and API are considered to belong to the white category.

Similarly in Santa Ana, in the County of Orange, where job applicants are advised to choose their ethnic origin, 'White' includes Indo-European, Indian, and Pakistani; 'Asian or Pacific Islander' Includes Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese; and 'Black' includes African, Jamaican, Trinidadian, and West Indian. Other ethnic groups include Filipino, Hispanic and American Indian or Alaskan Native.

Nevertheless, in the 20th century, it was particularly difficult for people of Indian origin to fit on the ever-changing prism of race in America. Ian Haney Lopez, author of 'White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race' acknowledges that in the US courts the confusion was even more problematic as the US Department of Justice offered different rationales to justify the various ethnic and racial divisions.

According to Lopez, these rationales, one appealing to common knowledge and the other to scientific evidence, were the two core approaches used by courts to explain their determinations of whether South Asian individuals belonged to the "white" race.

However, by 1909, a schism appeared among the courts over whether common knowledge or scientific evidence was the appropriate standard. The Supreme Court broke the impasse in favor of common knowledge, thus elevating it as the legal meter of race. But the contradictions surfaced most directly in cases concerning immigrants from southern Asia who were nevertheless uniformly classified as Caucasians by the leading anthropologists of the times.

Science's inability to confirm through empirical evidence the popular racial beliefs that held South Asians to be non-Whites should have led the courts to question whether race was a natural phenomenon. So deeply held was this belief, however, that instead of re-examining the nature of race, the courts began to disparage science.

Meanwhile, changes in immigrant demographics and in anthropological thinking conspired to create contradiction between science and common knowledge.

From 1910 to 1920, anthropologists deemed Indians as Caucasian and several courts deemed Indians as white and a few as not white. However, starting from 1923, the official judicial stance was to classify Indians as Asian. In some cases, racial classification changed over time: from 1920 to 1940 Asian Indians were classified as Hindu by "race", but from 1950 to 1970 were coded with Whites.

Marking a lack of unity between certain governmental organizations, the U.S. Census Bureau has changed over the years its own classification of Indians. In 1930 and 1940, Indian Americans were a separate category, Hindu, and in 1950 and 1960, they were classified as Other Race, and in 1970, they were classified as White. Since 1980, Indian Americans have been classified as Asian Indian, a subcategory under the Asian category.

WHITE BY LAW

Back in 1910 the US Department of Justice had two cases involving South Asians who applied for citizenship: Bhicaji F. Balsara and Abdullah Dolla.

According to researcher Kersi B. Shroff, Attorney, Balsara arrived in the US in 1900, settled and later married in New York. Though he applied for citizenship in 1906, he was only granted the status after he fought his case before two courts, the Circuit Court in New York and the federal Court of Appeal.

Objections to Balsara's petition were based on a requirement at that time that only "Free white persons" could be admitted to citizenship. In his petition Balsara claimed that his color was white and his complexion dark.

In it’s ruling in Balsara, 171 Fed. Rep. 294 (1909), the Circuit Court had a serious objection to accepting the words "white persons" to include all branches of the race known as the Aryan, Indo-European, or Caucasian. To do so, it stated, "will bring in not only the Parsees… which is perhaps the purest Aryan type, but also Afghans, Hindus, Arabs and Berbers." The Court, however, allowed Balsara's petition noting that "he was a gentleman of high character and exceptional intelligence," but stated that a higher court should examine the issue

In the decision in United States v. Balsara, 180 Fed. Rep. 694,695 (2nd Cir. 1910), Circuit Judge Ward offered the following description: "The Parsees emigrated some 1,200 years ago from Persia into India .....They constitute a settlement by themselves of intelligent and well-to-do persons, principally engaged in commerce, and are as distinct from the Hindus as are the English who dwell in India.”

The Court stated that the term 'white person' referred to the white race as distinguished from the black, red, yellow or brown races. In the opinion of the Court, Parsees do belong to the white race and it was agreed that Mr. Balsara be properly admitted to citizenship by the Circuit Court.

Balsara's victory in the early 1900s seems that much greater in light of a later case decided by the same Court, holding another Parsee ineligible for citizenship. In the decision in Rustom Dadabhoy Wadia v. United States, 101 F. 2d 7 (2d Cir. 1939), the Court this time did not accept Wadia as being a 'white person.' It had to follow cases decided in the meantime by the US Supreme Court which declined to accept the niceties of racial origins and interpreted the relevant law as being based on the common man's understanding of the term.

Calcutta-born Abdullah Dolla was a businessman who applied for US citizenship in 1909. Dolla had arrived in New York 15 years earlier, and had lived in Georgia for 12 years selling Indian textiles and other goods. The US Attorney opposed admission on the basis that Dolla was a native of India and therefore not white and not eligible for citizenship. But Dolla argued he was accepted as a white in Georgia and even owned a cemetery plot in Savannah's white cemetery. The judge scrutinized his appearance closely then declared him white and granted his petition.

Similarly Akhay Kumar Mozumdar 107 F. 115 (E.D. Wash. 1913) and Mohan Singh 275 F. 209 (S.D. Cal. 1919) were granted the right of citizenship.

But in cases such as Kharaiti Ram Samras v. United States 125 F.2d 879 (9th Cir. 1942), Wadia v. United States 101 F.2d 7 (2nd Cir. 1939), United States v. Gokhale 26 F.2d 360 (2nd Cir. 1928), United States v. Ali 7 F.2d 728 (E.D. Mich. 1925), Sadar Bhagwab Singh 246 F. 496 (E.D. Pa. 1917) and in United States v. Akhay Kumar Mozumdar 296 F. 173 (S.D. Cal. 1923), the courts decided that Indians are not White and denied them citizenship.

The legal precedent for the above decisions came as the Supreme Court resolved the conflict between common knowledge and scientific evidence in favor of the former, but not without some initial confusion. In Ozawa v. United States, the Court relied on both rationales to exclude a Japanese petitioner, holding that he was not of the type "popularly known as the Caucasian race," thereby invoking both common knowledge and science.

Within a few months of its decision in Ozawa, however, the Court heard a case brought by Indian-American Bhagat Singh Thind, who relied on the Court's earlier linkage of "Caucasian" with "white" to argue for his own naturalization.

In United States v. Thind, science and common knowledge diverged, complicating a case that should have been easy under Ozawa's straightforward rule of racial specification. Reversing course, the Court repudiated its earlier equation and rejected any role for science in racial assignments. The Court decried the "scientific manipulation" it believed had ignored racial differences by including as Caucasian "far more [people] than the unscientific mind suspects," even some persons the Court described as ranging "in color ... from brown to black." "We venture to think," the Court said, "that the average well informed white American would learn with some degree of astonishment that the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous elements."

The Court held instead that "the words 'free white persons' are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man." In the Court's opinion, science had failed as an arbiter of human difference, and common knowledge was made into the touchstone of racial division.

The court firmly established that Japanese and Asian Indians were not allowed to naturalize due to the “free white persons” restriction, and further defined what it meant to be “white.” While in Ozawa the court stated that white meant Caucasian, in Thind, the court further narrowed the definition by declaring that based on common knowledge, Caucasian meant of European descent.

It was this crucial 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that created the official stance to classify Indians as non-white, which at the time retroactively stripped Indians of citizenship and land rights.

That common knowledge emerged as the only workable racial test shows that race is something which must be measured in terms of what people believe, that it is a socially mediated idea. The social construction of the White race is manifest in the Court's repudiation of science and its installation of common knowledge as the appropriate racial meter of Whiteness.

But, while judicial racial categorization of Indians has stayed the same since 1923, anthropology has advanced. In the past, it was determined merely visually that the South Asian was “Caucasian” while people from the Far East and Southeast Asia were visually determined to be “Mongoloid”. Even today, despite the emergence of the new genetics with its absence of distinct racial categories, the legacy of racial categorization continues to pervade.

ASIANS AND WHITENESS

That’s why in her thesis 'Citizenship Colored Asian American Immigration and the Legal Constructions of White National Identity,' Sue-Yun Ahn of New York University argues that the racialization of Asians, undertaken through the succession of restrictive legislation and the judicial decisions affirming them, was critical in situating Asians as inassimilable to mainstream America. "The process presupposed a conception of America which Asians could never become a part," writes Ahn.

Ahn notes that the judiciary constructed what whiteness meant, and by 1923, it decided that it certainly did not include the Indians. "Again, like the Chinese in an earlier period, divesting the Indians of their citizenship meant stripping them of their white status, for citizenship was intimately tied to the idea of whiteness." To become naturalized was to become American, and in order to become American one had to be white.

Thus, the judicial classifications of whiteness were ultimately a decision to determine “American.” Whiteness and American identity became explicitly tied together through the racial prerequisite for citizenship, and the judiciary constructed the parameters by excluding Asians and maintaining the purity of white America.

Ahn argues that the restrictions and the discrimination that many Asian immigrants faced was a part of a larger process which attempted to construct a white American identity, creating a community of which Asians could never become a part.

Ahn observes that the experience of early Asian American immigrants to the United States has not been an easy one. While immigration is often marked by hardship and struggles for every race and every generation, the particular experiences of these immigrants were especially arduous. In addition to the economic and cultural barriers facing immigrants upon arrival to a foreign shore, Asian immigrants also faced a pervasive nativistic racism.

"Under the controlling American myth of assimilation, immigration, and the American Dream, the lives and the experiences of these immigrants have been hidden and silenced. A testimony to the falsity of the American myth, their place in the history of this nation has been withheld. For generations, these immigrants were denied membership in the national community; by denying them a voice in the nation’s history, their exclusion in the past continues to be perpetuated today."
 

(The article first appeared in IndoLink)

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