Audrey Quinn: Whiteness is what the common man says it is, like what is that saying? Jan. 15, 2010 Lecture - LECTURE JAN 15 2010 Key concepts naturalization citizenship whiteness cultural assimilation Citizenship qualifications changes, Key concepts: naturalization; citizenship; whiteness; cultural assimilation, Citizenship: qualifications changes over time; conferred by birth by parental inheritance, obtained through, -modal subject: there is subject assumes by law, and by popular culture that is unmarked (modal) but has.

In both the Ozawa and Thind cases, these men didn’t challenge the discriminatory nature of the racial criteria, but instead contended that they were white, too.

In name Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart he was a traitor.

Whiteness and blackness, danger and violence, the myths and realities.

He says the argument doesn’t fit with what he knew of his father. As early as 1790, the Congress had passed a law limiting citizenship to immigrants who were "free white persons."

The court's opinion rejected the argument, holding that people from Japan were not considered to be "Caucasian," which was what the law meant by "white," and were therefore not eligible to become citizens. Audrey Quinn: The Supreme Court case didn’t just backfire on Thind. "Takao Ozawa v. U S, 260 U.S. 178 (1922)." This Oregon judge holds his ground in Thind’s favor. The Naturalization Act of 1906 declared that immigrants must make their case for citizenship before a federal court.

But this cycle of logic that American equals white, and whiteness needs to be protected, it’s not limited to the Ozawa and Thind cases. Ozawa So you accept what the racial science of the time says when it helps you exclude the Japanese man from citizenship, the idea that being white means being Caucasian, and you reject that same science when you want to exclude the guy from India.

Congress under Theodore Roosevelt decided it was time to intervene and make whiteness a federal matter.

The whole family went down, he loved the ocean. Audrey Quinn: So what’s the ultimate ruling in the Ozawa case?

I’m me, I’m an individual, you know.

[3], Author, editor, and policy researcher Raymond Leslie Buell, writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1923, said "The Japanese are now confronted with the unpalatable fact, laid down in unmistakable terms by the highest court in the land, that we consider them unfit to become Americans.

San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1997.

Teaser Photo credit: Bhagat Singh Thind in U.S. Army uniform. T akao Ozawa was born in Japan, moved to the territory of Hawaii, and later lived in California.

During the war, Japan had sided with the Allied Powers, whose victory brought Japan to the negotiating table at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Seeing Japanese the objects of discrimination upset the government of Japan just at the moment when the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–9) wanted to maintain smooth diplomatic relations with Japan.

Audrey Quinn: You can tell David really looked up to his dad. It may be true that those two races were alone thought of as being excluded, but to say that they were the only ones within the intent of the statute would be to ignore the affirmative form of the legislation. San Francisco School Board Segregation Order of 1906, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=260&invol=178, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, /api/0.1/articles/Ozawa%20v.%20United%20States/.

John Biewen: That’s implied in the title, right? Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice George Sutherland approved a line of lower court cases that held that "the words 'white person' were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race." Thind goes to college in India, he’s this budding Sikh philosophy buff.

There is nothing in the circumstances leading up to or accompanying the passage of the act which suggests that any modification of section 2169, or of its application, was contemplated. I remember this very question from my parents’ civics test as part of their naturalization process.

. Icons from Glyphicons Free, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

also seemed to support naturalization of the Issei. That they became white.

Affirmative form: The structure of a phrase denoting assent or agreement. Hughey’s a sociologist at the University of Connecticut. George Sutherland, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the opinion in. It’s like in Thind and Ozawa, where citizenship was considered a de facto white resource. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account.

Takao Ozawa v. U.S. Because when you look at the evidence, what’s up with those other 42? And then he went back to the hotel ballroom, in his turban and beard, and gave another lecture before another crowd of Oklahomans. Controversies have arisen and will no doubt arise again in respect of the proper classification of individuals in border line cases. In Ozawa v. United States, 260 U. S. 178, 43 Sup. Judicial and executive concurrence: Agreement between courts of justice and the executive branch of government. He does not affiliate himself with any kind of Japanese civic groups. Tehama Lopez Bunyasi: Assimilating, into this idea of Americanness, really, but really its whiteness in particular, is very much at the heart of his argument, of many people’s arguments. So it’s just really the impact of that over the, over a long time. US V. Thind Bhagat Singh Thind Born in indian 1892 Went to america for higher education As surgeon, served in World War I Honorably discharged in 1918 Granted citizenship then rescinded in 4 days (all in 1918) Thind’s Reasoning for Naturalization 1.

And in a lot of ways law is one of the places where things then diffuse into the culture and seem natural and normal and justified. "[4], List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 260, City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of New England.

Historical Timeline Matthew Hughey: So I think the similarities with Ozawa, Thind, and Fisher, right, are similar because they all exhibit the use of a logic that whiteness is somehow under attack, is aggrieved, and needs remedy through the court. I just want to take a second here at the top to say a big thanks to those of you who’ve said nice things to us about our ongoing series, Seeing White. [6] Thousands of people of Mexican descent were deported from Los Angeles, where local agencies conducted raids on the Mexican community and other parts of the Southwest.

Takao Ozawa is from Japan, but he had been in the US his entire adult life. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. It seemed an incredibly easy case in the spring of 1923. Matthew Hughey: So let’s, let’s take a look at the Fisher case. And this story is not comforting in that regard, at all.

What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen? Asian Americans: Opposing Viewpoints.

The act of June 29, 1906, entitled "An act to establish a Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, and to provide for a uniform rule for the naturalization of aliens throughout the United States," consists of 31 sections and deals primarily with the subject of procedure. On the first question, Ozawa's lawyers had argued that the original immigration laws referred to "free white persons" in order to distinguish them from enslaved Africans, or "black," people.

18 Citizenship, Ozawa Case and Caucasian Race In the Ozawa case of 1922, the Supreme Court had ruled that Japanese were ineligible to citizenship as it was only available for "white person." The year Abigail Fisher got rejected, the University of Texas Austin did accept forty-seven students with lower grades and achievement points than her. Ozawa …

After July 1, 1927, the limits on each nationality were determined by a more complicated formula calculated by determining what percentage of the total population was represented by each national group, then multiplying that percentage by 150,000. They rejected him for entirely other reasons, namely that he wasn’t white, or white enough. The response to the project has been really encouraging. This one question in particular made me pause and realize how significant this step was for us, ceremonially: we were officially becoming Americans now.

U.S. Immigration and Migration Reference Library.

We’ve got a number of episodes still to come and I promise, toward the end of Seeing White, we will get to those questions about how to respond, what we collectively should do in the face of what we’re learning here. The effect of the conclusion that the words "white person" means a Caucasian is not to establish a sharp line of demarcation between those who are entitled and those who are not entitled to naturalization, but rather a zone of more or less debatable ground outside of which, upon the one hand, are those clearly eligible, and outside of which, upon the other hand, are those clearly ineligiblefor citizenship. And clearly you are not that.

Individual cases falling within this zone must be determined as they arise from time to time by what this court has called, in another connection …, "the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion.".

Legislative acquiescence: Acceptance by those who make laws.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: [Laughing.]

Anglo-Saxons: Descendants of the Germanic peoples who conquered England in the fifth century c.e., in this case referring to white non-Jews. Especially his disciples. It wasn’t really a debate because I think you weren’t really…. Thanks, too, if you’ve subscribed to the show or done a rating and review that helps to increase our visibility on iTunes or other podcast apps. She’s a political science professor at George Mason University. Two years later an Oregon judge declares him a citizen again. Ichihashi, Yamato. It’s like, it’s there all the time, we have a certain national character, it’s good, it’s present, so it’s a real thing. always about cultural assimilation within the bounds of whiteness. But, you know, that path was not available to the people who were truly not considered white a hundred years ago, and more, especially of course black people. By the way, one of my grandmothers was Irish. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind: On Gaining Citizenship & Losing Identity, A Unique Opportunity: The Rappaport Fellows Program. He has his kids go to so-called American schools and American churches. Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps, U.S. Immigration and Migration Reference Library.

On the subject of what constitutes a "white" person, the opinion in essence says the court did not have time to study the issue from a scientific basis.

The court ruled that anyone who was not a "free white person" (or who was not born in Africa or of African descent) did not fall into the category of people eligible to become citizens, and that included people from Asia. They were just, in that time, in say early 20th century America, they were just the wrong kind of white. She says that it really, this kind of what she calls a toggle switch, or the whiteness toggle switch, where you’re either fully white or you’re not, that came later. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Chillin’, man. Having obtained a bachelors degree from India, he wanted to further his education at the University of California Berkeley.