By Nick Yi (PO ’22)
In November of 2020, Kamala Harris was elected as the first Black, Asian American vice president. Her identity raised questions not only about multiracial identity but also what it meant to be Asian American. Who counts as “Asian American,” let alone “Asian”? The label may appear misleading in its simplicity. Is the term a reflection of a shared racial, ethnic, or continental origin? What parameters mark the boundaries of an Asian American identity? In order to grapple with these questions, it’s necessary to place Asian immigration within a historical context of American racial imagination.
In 1870, the Naturalization Act was extended to encompass “aliens, being free white persons,” as well as “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” This seems, on one hand, straightforward: White and Black people were eligible to become citizens of the US under law, and anyone else was not. Yet, this left an essential question unanswered – who would count as White and Black?
White American imaginations of Blackness emerged out of a long legacy of European colonialism, exploitation, and slavery. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism argues that racial capitalism – the process of generating racial difference for the purposes of exploitation and domination – has a history that spans even further back in time, as early as the “barbarians” that threatened the Holy Roman Empire. Subsequent systems of feudal serfdom and capitalism did not abolish this dynamic, Robinson argues, but merely relocated them. Much like the creation of the “barbarian” created non-barbarians that could enslave and exploit them, a free White identity could be articulated in juxtaposition to Black chattel slavery. David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness describes the process by which White Revolutionaries were able to generate animosity for the metaphorical “political slavery” they experienced under Britain because of their physical proximity to (and racial distance from) Black slavery. They should be free because they were White, not Black; Whiteness emerged alongside a set of guarantees about rights to freedom, accumulation, and citizenship that others were denied.
This is all to emphasize that race is not a natural or biological category, but a rhetorical one. That isn’t to suggest that race does not have material, life-and-death consequences – it certainly does, with its ideological dimensions justifying its physical ramifications – but that race, as a process that ascribes meaning to perceived difference, is mutable. Perhaps most famously, Italian and Irish immigrants were not always considered White; their assimilation into the definitions of “White” should not suggest to us a rational racial teleology, but that Whiteness is a flexible, changing category that outsiders have entered, often through articulating a non-Black identity.
As a result, the qualification of “Whiteness” for naturalization was often a site for racial discourse. To prove eligibility for citizenship, immigrants tried to prove they were White – this tactic of “racial eligibility” is explored by Doug Coulson in Race, Nation, and Refuge, where Coulson examines the many cases that contested the racial classification of Armenian, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, and Parsi immigrants, among many others. In response, the Supreme Court found themselves outlining the specific “scientific” and social qualifications of Whiteness. Although they would invoke “common” understandings of Whiteness in their rulings, the reality that racial eligibility cases made it to the highest court of the United States suggested that these “common” understandings of race were far from universal.
Bookending the Supreme Court’s opinions on racial eligibility were two significant cases: Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923). In the first, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese-American man, argued that he was eligible for citizenship by virtue of his good character and, additionally, eligibility for Whiteness. Ozawa had lived in the United States for 20 years, graduated from a Berkeley high school, attended the University of California, sent his children to American schools, attended American churches, and spoke English at home. By these virtues, the court conceded, he was “well qualified by character and education for citizenship.” However, the court maintained that he was not White. Ozawa argued that the intention of the original 1790 Naturalization Act was to exclude Black and Native people, not Asians. The Court found instead that the intention of the Constitution’s framers was not to limit exclusion to Black and Native people, but to all people who were not White. “It is sufficient to ascertain whom [the framers] intended to include and having ascertained that,” the Court ruled, “it follows, as a necessary corollary, that all others are to be excluded.” Whiteness, then, was a negative category as much as it was a positive one; it generated definitions of both who was White and who was not White.
Significantly, the Court upheld that skin color was not an accurate designator of race, as it differed “greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons” and that the “swarthy brunette” could be darker than “many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races.” Thus, the Court concluded, Whiteness was synonymous with “Caucasian,” not skin color. This would become relevant in United States v. Thind, a year later.
In 1923, the Court clarified that Whiteness was defined by the “popular” definition of the Caucasian race, not the “scientific” one that would be unfamiliar to the act’s original framers. That year, the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh Indian man who had formerly been approved for citizenship, made its way to the Supreme Court. Despite previous naturalizations of Indian immigrants and Thind’s argument that he was “Caucasian,” which the Court did not dispute, it drew on the Ozawa case to determine that, like before, the absence of an explicit exclusion of Asian Indians did not mean that the framers of the Constitution intended to include them.
Thind’s argument that he was a “high-caste Hindu” (Hindu, at the time, denoting someone of Indian descent) belonging to a Caucasian or Aryan race prompted scientific speculation from the Court: acknowledging that even authorities of race science were divided on the subject of racial division, they agreed that an “intermixture of blood” had destroyed the “purity” of an Aryan blood, one that was not preserved by a caste structure. The Court reiterated that the purpose of the original act was to “exclude Asiatics generally from citizenship,” and while certain ethnographers might classify Thind as Caucasian, by popular definition, he was not White – and thus, ineligible for naturalization.
Today, the Ozawa and Thind cases remain relevant for what they might tell us about contemporary Asian American coalitionary politics. They illuminate a common ground of “Asian” as a category excluded from American civic life, a designation formed in the negative space of non-Whiteness. Despite Ozawa and Thind’s classifications as of the Japanese and Hindu “races,” respectively, they shared a common legal category as non-White, yellow and brown “Asiatics” excluded from the citizenry. These commonalities form the foundation for the possibilities of political alliance.
As we wrestle with the fragmented politics of Asian America, an incredibly diverse demographic divided by class, ethnicity, and politics, we might move away from seeking to outline an organic category of “Asian” defined by a racial, cultural, or even geographic sameness. Rather, we might seek to understand ourselves as belonging to a particular positionality shaped both by and in response to power. We might consider the material, transformative possibilities of solidarity that draws on but ultimately contests racial logics, rejecting its accumulative and dispossessing qualities while embracing its generation of unlikely, un-“natural” affinities. Solidarity, like race, does not emerge effortlessly nor inexorably – it is made, contested, and built through struggle.
