This paper returns to United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind to take a closer look at the rhetorical logics within the case to understand how race-making discourses solidify the place of South Asian Americans within racial hierarchies. The author contends, an engagement with the rhetorical racialization of Bhagat Singh Thind throughout his trial provides an opportunity to unravel the racial dimensions of the question “Where are you from?”—a kind of historical origin story and illumination of the work of a phrase endemic to the Asian American experience. The question is deployed as a synecdochal framework for capturing the configuration of ocular and geographic ways Thind, and Asian Americans generally, are racialized. This essay argues, through a rhetorical criticism of Thind’s brief, Justice George Sutherland’s majority opinion, and the US brief against Thind, the Supreme Court deployed spatial and temporal discourses as rhetorical mechanisms that racially sutured Thind to a particular spacetime beyond the ostensible boundaries of whiteness. Tracing these discourses illuminates how Thind’s brownness became a coded index of white supremacist conceptions of origin, contributing to a conceptual collapse between the ocular, spatial, and temporal. The paper also argues, the oft-cited phrase “Where are you from?” functions as a rhetorical process of producing race that rests upon spatiotemporal assumptions. The question operates as a racial-ontological query to locate the primacy of whiteness and dislocate “questionably ethnic” people. Interrogating the racial and rhetorical labors of “Where are you from?” shifts the query from the status of a microaggression to a powerful practice of racialization.
Exhibit A of Bhagat Singh Thind’s legal brief, appealing the Bureau of Naturalization’s revocation of his citizenship status, offers a “Statement Regarding His Race.” Thind tries to access citizenship by defending an ancestral connection between Punjabi Northern Indians and Aryans, the presumed descendants of white Europeans, through a personal letter addressing the Supreme Court. He proposes two pointed questions: (1) “If the term ‘white person’ refers to race rather than color, or absence of color, then what is the ‘white’ race and of what peoples is it composed?” and (2) “[It is to be wondered] if, after reading the naturalization act, the courts have halted and pondered over [the meaning of whiteness] and then declared it to be ambiguous, unintelligible and difficult to construe and apply?”1 Thind’s remarks draw attention to the politics of whiteness in the early twentieth century. Indeed, defining whiteness, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, “has been a fairly untidy affair” across US history.2 In a historic moment of cultural and social tumult, as Asian applicants began seeking status as US citizens, the Supreme Court opted to find creative ways to preserve the often stated and unstated whiteness of legal citizenship. Thind’s questions take direct aim at the rhetorical tricks of the Supreme Court in early prerequisite cases and the inconsistency of the argumentative threshold to determine who qualified under the legal definition of naturalization, at the time defined by being either White or Black. In the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) case, Thind’s inquiry reveals his understanding of the poorly defined boundaries of whiteness and the argumentative steps he took to try and create some ontological stability for an ill-defined racial category.3 Despite his best efforts, the Court staved off Thind’s violation of white citizenship by resorting to ocular, spatial, and temporal logics to codify Thind as a definably Brown “Asiatic,” never meant to access the privileges of citizenship.
During an era of intense anti-Asian exclusion, Justice George Sutherland’s decision in the US v Thind case carried transnational and colonial inflections. Thind’s involvement in the Ghadar Party, a radical anti-colonial Indian independence organization, was well known, and likely as well known as Sutherland’s British roots and desire to preserve imperialism abroad.4 Sutherland needed to racially discipline Thind to secure the boundaries of whiteness and legally codify the racial category of the “Asiatic” as ineligible for citizenship. Based on Thind’s arguments, he admitted that Thind, a South Asian Indian Sikh man, was Caucasian according to racial science, but stated, “It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in the country commonly recognized as white.”5 Thind was denied citizenship because the “common man” can clearly see Thind is not White—Thind’s exclusion was as obvious as his Brown skin.6 In turn, the Court axiomatically determined Thind could never access White citizenship because they could see he was not from the places where such privilege is granted.7 White, Western citizenship was meant for only those places it was intended: North America and Europe. Those who wrote the naturalization statute at the heart of the case, the Court argued, “offered citizenship to men of the kind they knew and hoped and expected would come.”8 The Court responded to Thind’s arguments by creating a racialized geopolitical connection between Thind’s brownness and his place of birth.9 What the Court could see became an argument about where whiteness belonged. Spatiotemporal discourses melded with one another to racialize Thind as ineluctably Other and gave momentary solidity to the meaning of whiteness.10
The Court’s reliance on exclusionary logics of observation and origin bear similarities to a phrase often asked of Asian Americans, but also of what I would term “questionably ethnic” Brown people, such as Thind: “Where are you from?”11 The question functions to aid the asker (often White) in resolving a sense of racial ambiguity—the purported origin place of the questionably ethnic person will tell the asker all they need to know about where they fit into the dominant racial field. Geography and ocularity converge to rationalize and make real the phenotypical markers of the Brown person as from anywhere but “here.” The question feeds into the racialization of Asian Americans as “perpetual ‘outsiders,’ as aliens ineligible for citizenship,” while simultaneously reinforcing the power of the asker to police belonging.12 In other words, as Frank H. Wu contends, the question is “a roundabout means” of asking “What race are you?”13
While the phrase circulates widely in contemporary usage, the core logics of the question share resonances with the US v. Thind case. Considering the volatility of the ontological boundaries of whiteness during the early twentieth century, and the unstable racial position of Asian Americans, the Court was required to conjure a racial position for Thind; a definable moment when the Court reveals how, according to Lisa Lowe, “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally.”14 The racial inscrutability of Asian bodies provokes interrogation and is made possible by racial scripts of the model minority, forever foreigners, and racial peril. Such diverse logics reveal how Asian Americans are constantly calibrated to serve the interests of the White settler power structure. In light of the racial flexibility of Asian Americans, trapped in a racial purgatory of contingent belonging, or assumed foreignness, I conceive of the question “Where are you from?” as a uniquely Asian American method to elucidate how the Court racialized Thind as a Brown other. Asian American racialization is trafficked through circuits of ocularity, spatiality, mobility, and discourse, articulated and arranged in relationship with one another to make race appear knowable and obvious. In the face of the seeming illegibility of Asian bodies, the question functions as both a practice of racial interrogation, suspending Asian bodies as outside the racial field, and through the process of inquiry, seeks to stabilize the hegemonic racial order by emplacing Asians within it.
The early twentieth century is a moment in Asian American history marked by the continual disciplining of the interstitial racial status of Asian immigrants.15 I take a close look at the logics throughout US v. Thind to understand the race-making discourses deployed to solidify the place of South Asian Americans within a racial hierarchy.16 Ian Haney López argues, “Law constructs race.”17 Legal rhetoric functions as a regime of truth and mode of power.18 Especially at the turn of the century, legal discourse proved crucial to defining the hierarchies fundamental to white supremacy.19 US v. Thind provides a window into a significant moment of South Asian American racialization, allowing one to peer into the specific rhetorics of persuasion used to racialize Thind as a Brown other in opposition to whiteness. I define rhetoric as a communicative technology of power and racialization—the constitutive method through which realities of race are produced and maintained.20 Raciolinguists also demonstrate how “race is created out of continuous and repeated discourses emerging from individuals and institutions within political economic systems and everyday interactions.”21 Public discourse is a valuable entry point to configure the nuances of how an emergent vocabulary and set of logics surface to contest the presence of South Asians, ultimately telling a story of South Asian American racialization. Considering the ocular, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the arguments within US v. Thind, I contend, an engagement with the rhetorical racialization present within the case affords an opportunity to unravel the racial dimensions of the question “Where are you from?”—a kind of historical origin story and illumination of the work of a phrase endemic to the Asian American experience.
Articulating “Where are you from?” as a rhetorical technology of racialization contributes to scholarship on the ambivalent racial position of Asian Americans.22 I bring rhetorical studies and Asian American studies in contact with one to disclose how Asian American racialization, and “Where are you from?,” produce, maintain, and revise racial systems of power through discursive practices.23 Colleen Lye contends that Asian Americans are “racial, racialized, but lacking the certainty of a racial formation.”24 The racial liminality of Asians necessitates diverse, and at times paradoxical, discourses to preserve the existing racial order.25 Implementing a rhetorical perspective to bear upon how Asian bodies become racialized and excluded from the US nation-state focuses attention on how discourse reinforces and produces conceptions of race as “real” and “knowable.” I forward “Where are you from?,” as both a conceptual framework and mode of race-craft attuned to moments when bodies are racially disciplined through discursive scrutiny, to pinpoint the rhetorical architecture of Asian American racism, in relation to more common optics of labor and capital.26 A discursive framework accounts for contradictions within racial systems of meaning, a necessity given the inconsistency of the racial rhetorics of the Court, while providing room to grapple with the ways white supremacist structures rely on rhetoric as a nimble means to resolve illogicalities.
To build on discussions of US v. Thind in Asian American studies, I revisit the rhetorics used by the Court to not only construct the boundaries of whiteness, but also conjure a particular spacetime of brownness.27 Given, as Nayan Shah argues, the “calibration” of whiteness carried out through US v. Thind and other naturalization cases conjured the category of “non-White” through “solely their geographic origin,” orienting toward the discursive techniques used to racialize “origin” provides a window into the intricate rhetorics deployed to secure a novel racial ontology for South Asian brownness.28 Mae M. Ngai furthers that “Asian naturalization cases,” of which US v. Thind is considered the final ruling, “completed the legal construction of ‘Asiatic’ as a racial category. The ‘national origins’ of Asians had become thoroughly racialized.”29 I am interested in how the discourses deployed in the case reveal the contours of a particular kind of rhetorical racialization. The Court discursively disciplined Thind’s brownness as an argument for his incompatibility with the origins of whiteness.30 Brownness and origin collapse into one another as a complex sign of obvious unbelonging. In order to ensure Thind could not access whiteness, Sutherland and the Court made use of “racialized chronotopes,” which Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores define as “space-time narratives linking particular models of personhood and language practices to particular temporal and geographical contexts.”31 Ocular, corporeal, spatial, and temporal tropes proved crucial to the Court as an argumentative resource to construct a racial position for Thind removed from any relationship with whiteness.
I deploy the question “Where are you from?” as a synecdochal framework for capturing the configuration of ocular and geographic ways Thind, and Asian Americans generally, are racialized. Thind’s brownness became a coded index of white supremacist conceptions of origin, contributing to a conceptual collapse between the ocular, spatial, and temporal. The racializing tactics undertaken by the Court provide a historical basis to understand the rhetorical labors of the question “Where are you from?” as a mode of containment leveraged against South Asian Indians in particular, and Asian Americans broadly.32 I also argue that the oft-cited phrase “Where are you from?” functions as a rhetorical process of producing race that rests upon spatiotemporal assumptions—disciplining racially marked bodies in order to preserve the ontological basis of whiteness. I draw on a rhetorical criticism of the US v. Thind trial to articulate how “Where are you from?” functions as a mode of racialization through discursive antagonism. The posing of the question demands an exchange where Brown people are catechized about their racial subjectivity, required to prove their legibility within the racial field, but ultimately the power stays with the interrogator to decide how one fits into the white supremacist hierarchy. The question works as a racial-ontological query with no regard for where “questionably ethnic” people are genuinely located, but instead, marks an aberration from whiteness. Thind tried to answer the question to access citizenship, but in the end, exposed the power dynamics upon which the question is premised.
This paper unfolds across three sections. To begin, I conduct a rhetorical criticism of Sutherland’s majority opinion of the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind Supreme Court case, and the legal briefs Thind and the US Bureau of Naturalization submitted as their arguments. I then turn to elucidating the contours of “Where are you from?” as a rhetorical process of race-making, grounded in my criticism of the US v. Thind case. I conclude by reflecting on the spatialized dimensions of South Asian American racialization.
Thind’s Persuasive Appeal: The Rhetorical Economy of Settler Whiteness
Bhagat Singh Thind relied on a shrewd use of the logics of whiteness, through a racial geography of India as a rhetoric of persuasion, to dispute the US government’s appeal of his citizenship. In this section, I contextualize the Court’s racialization of Thind by outlining the discursive nuances of how he presented his arguments. Thind’s brief heavily relied on the precedent set in US v. Ozawa, by Justice George Sutherland, that suggested the category of “Caucasian” was synonymous with the legal definition of “free white persons.”33 Hence, most of Thind’s arguments rested upon providing historical anthropological and ethnological evidence of a “Caucasian” and “Indo-Aryan” connection. The persuasive force of the brief submitted by Thind’s lawyer, Thomas Mannix, drew upon the rhetorical and political economy of whiteness to craft a Brown settler narrative that sought to buttress a connection to a distant White past through discourses of caste purity, invasion, and settlement. This is supplemented by using sources exclusively from acclaimed White European scientists and academics to verify a historical relationship between Punjabi Indians and Europeans.34 Mannix also provided a litany of previous court cases that ruled South Asian Indians and West Asians such as Syrians are Caucasian and thus “White” and able to be granted citizenship.35 I argue Thind catalyzed what Nadine Ehlers calls a “racial crisis,” or “a decisive point where the supposed ontology of race must be reaffirmed in response to a risk that renders this ‘truth’ unstable,” often occurring when a “subject is seen to have failed to announce racial truth.”36 For the Court, this involved a Brown Indian Sikh man using scientific evidence to prove he is theoretically “White.”
The case hinged on the legal threshold of naturalization law, which granted citizenship to “aliens being free white persons and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.”37 The bulk of Thind’s arguments before the Court rested on proving the claim: “the descendants of the Aryans of India belong to the Caucasian Race.”38 While South Asian studies scholars attend to the racist, casteist, and anti-Black undercurrents to such an assertion, I build on these critiques by drawing attention to the rhetorical force of Thind’s reliance on the argument Northern Indians are “Caucasian” and Aryan.39 Hadi Khoshneviss argues that cases such as US v. Thind demonstrate how “these immigrants’ fight for citizenship by claiming whiteness, in an era that limited eligibility for citizenship to free white people or people with African ancestry, reveals how effectively the dominant discourse of white eligibility and superiority influenced some immigrant communities and their efforts for recognition and inclusion.”40 Turning to Thind’s appeal as a set of rhetorical arguments provides insight into the complexities of both how Thind sought to utilize transnational racial geographies as a claim for whiteness and the rhetorical consequences it generated for the Court.
Discourses of settlement, invasion, and conquering feature prominently in the sources used to fortify an “Indo-Aryan” argument in Thind’s brief, a kind of mythico-history, that connects a shared origin for Aryans to the history of Punjabi Indians.41 Neda Maghbouleh reveals, in racial prerequisite cases, “nearly every applicant for naturalization from Hindustan identified himself as Parsee, Caucasian, or Aryan and proffered Iran as both the historic cradle of White civilization and indigenous point of origin for his ancestral migration.”42 This is on display in Thind’s brief when it is argued, citing German geographer Oscar Peschels’ Races of Men, “the Aryans spread themselves over the Punjab (home of Bhagat Singh Thind) and the plain of the Ganges at the expense of a barbarian aboriginal population.”43 This cartographic claim was a racial project that, Maghbouleh furthers, combined “the Aryan myth from Iran with the logic of the caste system in India” to make “the case that high-caste Indians” were a “racial group unto themselves,” “pure, dislocated whites from Persia,” who never married and mixed with the “dark races of India.”44 The brief even goes to blatantly state that “the Aryans of India are probably the most settled and civilized of all Asiatic races. This type is found in its purest form in the north and northwest.”45 The language of “spread,” “settled,” and “civilized” are caught up in a transnational circuit of racializations that Thind deploys to create an argument about his shared ancestry with whiteness. A citation from ethnologist Augustus Henry Keane makes the following claim: “These wonderful proto-Aryan conquerors burst at last, probably through the Kabul river gorges, on to the plains of India and thereby added another world to the Caucasian domain.”46 Using such evidence draws on discourses of settlement and constructs a lineage for Thind to a history of conquering. In the quest to rhetorically create a shared Brown and White past, Thind’s brief utilizes transnational logics of mobility, origin, and settlement to persuasively prove he has an unbroken ancestral connection to whiteness.
Finally, the brief rhetorically transforms caste into a racialized technology of purity. His lawyers argue that “the caste system has proven a most effective barrier to prevent a mixture of the Aryan with the dark races of India.”47 Another citation from James Drummond Anderson argues the “homogenous and handsome population of the Punjab…represents the almost pure descendants of Aryan settlers.”48 This retooling of caste transforms the social system into a mechanism that protects against sullied racial bloodlines. The claim is augmented by an anti-Black sentiment. The brief goes on to state the following: “It would be just as disgraceful for a high-class Hindu to marry a member of one of the lower caste as it would be for an American gentleman to marry a member of the negro race, and obviously the offspring is subject to the same social degradation.”49 Deploying discourses of purity is a profound way Thind’s brief feigns the language of settler white supremacy during a historic moment when the purity of whiteness is a source of socio-cultural anxiety. Coding caste as a safeguard for racial cleanliness retools what was often dismissed as an example of Indian inferiority into a resonate racial technology in defense of authenticity. While Sucheta Mazumdar’s work proves the racist limitations of these arguments, reflecting on the rhetorical construction of the narrative reveals Thind’s cognizance that whiteness was in a state of sociopolitical flux.50 Using the ideological structure of whiteness presented a powerful challenge to the Court.
Conceptually, the question “Where are you from?” nuances our understanding of Thind’s racial crisis. The evidence offered in his brief seeks to directly resolve any geographic confusion by using White anthropological theories to name Punjab a region of whiteness, which relied on a history of the movement of Aryans coming to India from Iran. Persianness and Aryanness get caught up in a racialized web to support Thind’s arguments. Deploying a theory of Indo-Aryanness, which Romila Thapar terms “a nineteenth century myth,” was a distinct transnational racial project that sought to construct racial geographies across South Asia, especially India.51 Relying on dominant definitions of the “White race” to demonstrate those same logics include South Asian Indians, a Brown settler narrative, disrupted the seemingly stable ontological grounds of whiteness. “Whiteness was brought to crisis not by challenges to its legitimacy as a prerequisite to citizenship,” Susan Koshy argues, “but by the attempts of diverse appellants to be included within it.”52
The Space-Times of Brownness
In response to Thind’s use of the scientific logics of whiteness, the Court’s brief against Thind and Sutherland’s majority opinion implemented spatiotemporal logics to locate Thind as unassimilable to whiteness. These documents are, as Sanford Levinson contends, rich “rhetorical performances.”53 In this section, I employ “Where are you from?” as a framework to draw out the confluence of ocular, spatial, and temporal discourses used to suture Thind’s brownness to a spacetime beyond the boundaries of White citizenship.54 The Court had to answer the question: “Is a high-caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born at Amrit Sar, Punjab, India, a white person within the meaning of Section 2169 Revised Statutes?”55 Caste, blood, religion, and race all collapse into origin.56 The arguments presented by the Court and Sutherland’s opinion are deeply concerned about the relationship between whiteness and location. Sutherland asserts, “The eligibility of this applicant for citizenship is based on the sole fact that he is of high-caste Hindu stock, born in Punjab, one of the extreme northwestern districts of India.”57 The phrasing turns on an interrogation of location, and how where Thind was from, includes or excludes him from the club of whiteness. The Court undertook desperate discursive moves to preserve the boundaries of the White nation, disciplining Thind’s unruly Brown body by coding what they could see as an argument for where and when whiteness originates.
First, the Court had to address Thind’s reliance on US v. Ozawa and prove Thind was not a “free white person.” The entanglement of US v. Ozawa and US v. Thind reveal the constant rhetorical flexibility of the Supreme Court when proffering a judicial definition of whiteness.58 The Court cites Justice George Sutherland’s opinion in US v. Ozawa, where he states, defining “that the words ‘white person’ means a Caucasian is not to establish a line of demarcation…but rather a zone of more or less debatable ground,” marking “those clearly eligible” and “those clearly ineligible for citizenship.”59 This enables the Court to state in their brief against Thind: “the decision in the Ozawa case” left room for “individual cases to be determined as they arose.”60 Sutherland was clever enough to leave an argumentative backdoor open to ensure even while speaking a concrete legal definition of whiteness out of one side of his mouth, he left room to adapt that same definition when it best suited the Court.61 Sutherland also deployed the language of “popular” in his majority opinion to adapt the judicial boundary of whiteness by arguing that “the term ‘white persons’ is a popular and not a scientific term, and must be given its popular meaning.”62 The adaptability and diversity of discourses required for the Court to maintain the boundaries of whiteness reinforces Nadine Ehlers’ arguments that race is constantly in crisis—in continual need to be affirmed through discourse. Thind represents how judicial rhetoric in the early twentieth century remained agile and flexible to ensure the limitations of citizenship could mutate to maintain exclusion and bolster the nation as a staunchly white supremacist endeavor. In turn, Sutherland and the Court utilized a complex assemblage of ocular, spatial, and temporal discourses to keep citizenship firmly within the realm of white supremacy.
The “whereness” of Thind’s Brown body became a central component of the Court’s arguments by collapsing corporeality and geography into one another. Sutherland reasons that the framers of the 1790 statute considered White people to come “almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come.”63 The “privilege of American citizenship” is for “their kind”—“bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.”64 The court’s biopolitical defense of whiteness relies on a constitutive geopolitical boundary. Stanley Thangaraj furthers, “The court affirmed white men as the evaluators of citizenship, thereby reinforcing white homosociality as the basis of racial citizenship.”65 Using a White man as the judge of whiteness enabled the Court, and Sutherland, to maintain the persistence of flexible arguments defining the boundaries of citizenship as a racial and gendered project of the nation. Where and when whiteness belonged is authoritatively determined by White men, the only legitimate citizens.
Thus, when Sutherland claims that “it is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white,” he is producing race through spatial logics that exclude Thind because of where he is from.66 The tautological nature of Thind’s racialization emerges—race is recognized by place and place is recognized by race. It was the rhetorical backdoor Sutherland left open that allowed the Court to resort to defining whiteness based on the “common man,” “popular” meaning, and “the minds of those in 1790,” similar to how Judge Henry Smith adjudicated Faras Shahid’s case for citizenship, a Christian Lebanese from Zahle.67 Sutherland invokes a defense of the category of Man as a definably White, cis-heterosexual male from Europe and the United States.68 These complex discourses conjure whiteness as a gendered cartographic project while simultaneously marking Thind as an aberration from whiteness through a parallel project of spatial otherness.
The construction of “where” relied on a particular enthymematic imagination of the locations of whiteness and brownness that rhetorically adheres particular meaning to those places. Sutherland blatantly claims, it’s possible “the blond Scandinavian and the Brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.”69 The difference between “blond” and “brown,” inscriptions of race on Thind’s skin, correspond to “unmistakable” and “profound difference.” Scandinavia, the United States, and India stand in for a set of citizenship logics by creating a set of affinities between geographical locales and the spacetime of people from “there.” Sutherland furthers, “we venture to think that the average well-informed White American would learn with some degree of astonishment” that Thind would be classified as White.70 The Court conjures an “average man” as the threshold to prove Thind cannot be White. Thind’s body operates as a geographic and corporeal foil to a “white American” imagined belonging to the United States.71 This type of racialized gendering demonstrates how bodies are called upon as experts when deciding the “realness” of race. White people can see where Thind is from, and that is proof he does not belong to the mantle of whiteness; or as Cheree A. Carlson argues, the (phenotypical) verification of race proves that you “know it when you see it.”72 The supposed “realness” of Thind’s racial position is given away by his body. An “average white American” is the authority since the common person knows, and can see, a Brown person does not belong.
Announcing Thind’s brownness served as evidence to demonstrate his inability to belong to the spaces of the category of Man. Sutherland adds, European people “quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin.” “Hindus,” born in this country, “would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry.”73 The observability of his brownness is a phenotypical reminder of his Indianness, forever marking him as an aberration from whiteness and citizenship, an example of what Lisa Flores calls “the body logics of race,” or how race can be clearly seen on and in the body.74 Based on the central question of the case, the Court articulates race, religion, caste, and origin as entangled markers of racial difference. When the Court refers to Thind through the homogenizing term “Hindu,” they draw on a religious and racialized pejorative term that marks Thind’s otherness through a collapse between phenotype and religion. Despite Thind being Sikh, Hindu functions as a stand-in for deviant brownness that is also non-Christian.75 Thind’s bodily comportment, with a beard, Turban, and Brown skin, become “an assemblage of contagions,” as Jasbir K. Puar contends, that threaten the purity and sanctity of White citizenship.76 The “evidence” of “ancestry” rhetorically proffers a visceral form of anti-South Asian racialization that rhetorically adheres impossible difference, and consequently a sense of threat and fear, to such bodily characteristics as violations of White humanity and symbols of how far out of reach India is to Western civilization. Marshaling the impossible entanglement between body, origin, and race ensures the Court has evidence to prove unassimilablity. Geography and body fold into one another and are secured through public ocular suspicion.
India itself was racialized as a barrier to belonging—a Brown “where” wholly different from the “whereness” of whiteness. The framers of the naturalization laws claimed to offer citizenship to men of their likeness.77 There is a particular welcomed geographic genesis for whiteness, and it did not include India, for “they did not know and did not expect [Indians] to come.”78 The Court additionally drew on imagery to racialize India as an undesirable location. A citation from the Encyclopedia Britannica, used in the US legal brief, states the country “is inhabited by congeries of different races…[with] a population of over 294,000,000.” The sheer number of people in the country, it is argued, makes it incredibly difficult to assume anyone has maintained “distinct blood or distinct language.”79 In this way, “it is not easy to determine what is a ‘Hindu of full Indian blood.’”80 The number of Indians, the Court argues, casts doubt on the racial purity of Thind’s ancestry, which functions as a rhetorical move to sully his connection to an imagined Caucasian past.
There is also little value in India, beyond being “regarded merely as a profitable field for commercial exploitation, a source of untold wealth”—a place for colonialist extraction.81 Where Thind comes from is thus not a place for citizenship or civilization, but a pawn to feed the hunger of colonial power. In drawing on Edmund Burke, the Court claims, Indians “are, of all nations, the most unalliable to any other part of mankind.”82 The courts’ arguments racialize India as an uncivilized place that indisputably marks Thind’s “whereness” as “alien.” As a result, the Court relies on what Matthew Pratt Guterl terms “racial sight,” or “the trust in the eye to see and discern race,” to preserve the ontological security of whiteness through a rhetorical deflection aptly indexed by “Where are you from?”83 It can be clearly seen that Thind is Brown, and thus not from the places marked as the birth of whiteness, which served as grounds to maintain his exclusion. The reliance on spatial and ocular authority comes together to buttress the propriety of whiteness and the exclusion of brownness.
The Court did not solely rely on spatial logics to exclude Thind. “Where” Thind came from was equally a temporal question of “when” he came from. The Court reasoned, “While the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity were being preached in Europe and America, there is no reason to believe that any one seriously extended their applications to the people of India, or believed that those people were of the kind to be assimilated in citizenship in Western civilization.”84 Civilization is deployed as a loaded temporal frame to mark the flow of Western time as one that could never include India. The place of India is rhetorically constructed as “behind” the civilizational progress of Western ideals. The Court goes as far to say, “Even the unselfish interest of the missionaries was rather in the welfare of souls in the life to come, than in political and social fellowship in this life.”85 Missionaries worked to give India a future that could involve taking communion with Western civilization—a future unrealized. The presence of missionaries in the country is evidence they are not evangelizing to create fraternity, but rather, as charity to “bring” India into rhythm with the development of the West, which would never occur “in this life,” but in a world beyond. The Court even argues, missionaries “superciliously looked upon” Indians “as ‘heathen.’”86 Using “heathen” functions as a religious and racial slur to demonize Thind as temporally locked away in a distant past, engaged in habits and practices that determine his impossible relationship with whiteness.87 Legal arguments outlined by the Court positioned India in a parallel, but never intersecting, temporal relationship. Thus, according to the Court, “the people of India were a subject-race,” it was improbable to assume that the “ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity,” in fact, had any potential of taking form in India.88
Coming from India meant Thind, and Indians altogether, were never imagined to “catch-up” with Western intelligence and progress. The original framers of the naturalization laws regarded Indians “as people wholly alien to Western civilization and utterly incapable of assimilation to Western habits and customs, mode of life, political and social institutions.”89 India’s march of civilization was not moving at a pace familiar to white supremacy. Indeed, the Court affirms, “though they may have kept their blood pure for centuries, nevertheless, the centuries have removed them far from political fellowship with the white men of the Western World.”90 “Political fellowship” should be read as temporal fellowship. Indians cannot belong to the flow of Western time. Brownness is out of sync with White progress. Sutherland and the Court forward what Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek term “white temporal rhetorics,” that construct India as an unassimilable and undeniably alien place, a type of temporal “closure to achieve ideological and political ends,” evidently inscribed into the brownness of Thind’s appearance.91 State structures, such as the law, “are temporally oriented toward [a] suffocating sense of time.”92 The reliance on a complex scopic regime that saw Thind, and his motherland of India, as racialized sites of otherness, reveal the pernicious logics of race deployed to avoid the racial crisis of Thind’s brief, and maintain whiteness as a protected category. When and where come together in a formidable conceptual pair to exclude Indians and construct whiteness as the place to be—a place Indians can never belong. The Court deployed spatiotemporal discourses to suture Thind’s body to a civilization unfulfilled.
The complex interplay between the ocular, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the Court’s discursive racialization of Thind’s unruly Brown body affirms Sylvia Shin Huey Chong’s contention that “to be called out as Asian in a white-dominated society, then, is to be separated from the liberal community of citizens whose raceless equality to one another is what guarantees their rights and liberties.”93 The variety of logics wielded by the Court acted as mechanisms to contain and discipline Thind. Despite the internal contradictions of how Thind was racialized, an attunement to the discursive pivots undertaken by the Court to make “real” Thind’s ineluctable difference highlights the value of a rhetorical approach within Asian American historical contexts.
The Racial and Rhetorical Labors of “Where are you from?”
Ambiguous Brown bodies provoke interrogation. It is common for South Asian Indians, alongside other Asian American groups, to be asked “Where are you from?” A loaded race-making query caught up in an assemblage of the ocular, spatial, and even temporal. Asking the question is a way to locate bodies and emplace them within the dominant racial hierarchy. In this section, I build on my engagement with the spatiotemporal logics at work in the court’s racialization of Thind to articulate the question “Where are you from?” as a rhetorical process of producing race. Unpacking the racial and discursive labors of the seemingly innocuous question shifts the demand from the status of simply a microaggression to a powerful practice of racialization. US v. Thind provides a historical basis to examine an inquest that circulates in contemporary usage and proliferates the Asian American experience. Cheryl Harris argues, in her foundational text “Whiteness as Property,” the conceptual nucleus of whiteness is the “right to exclude.”94 The Court offers a profound space to understand how whiteness is conditioned to antagonize and inquire about racial otherness to make itself knowable and concrete. For Thind, the racial ambiguity of Asian Americans during the early twentieth century drove the need to find stable footing for whiteness. “Where are you from?” is one such metaphorical lens to understand the rhetorical strategies used by the Court to defend the exclusiveness of whiteness made possible by the disciplining of Asian bodies marked as racial deviations. The question “Where are you from?” never shows up in the US v. Thind case itself. However, the discourses present within the case demonstrate a historical pattern whereby White actors take up the racial ambiguity of Asian Americans through modes of rhetorical antagonism. Origin is one such route to resolve racial equivocality. I begin by defining the exigencies of the phrase and then outline three dimensions of “Where are you from?” as a rhetorical theory of racialization.
“Where are you from?” is a discursive mode of race-making animated by the abstruse racial position of Asian Americans. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when whiteness was forming more definable contours, the growing number of Asian migrants opened new quandaries over their place within the maturing white supremacist racial order.95 “Racial interstitiality,” Leslie Bow contends, is one such conceptual way to articulate the “in-betweenness” of Asian Americans who exist in a state of continual upheaval, tossed around the racial field to suit the context.96 If moments when the interstitial subject position of Asian Americans are made legible (like legal arenas) can “represent the physical manifestation of the law’s instability, its epistemological limit,” I contend “Where are you from?” is a strategy meant to resolve and contain the excesses of Asians’ racial subjectivity.97 Situating “Where are you from?” as a rhetorical process of racialization meets the liminal dilemma of Asian and South Asian American racialization.98 The question functions as a discursive technology activated by the compulsion for whiteness to temporarily discipline inscrutable Asian bodies in defense of strengthening white supremacy.
The phrase operates on discursive, ocular, and spatiotemporal registers to aid in the maintenance of racial hierarchies. First, “Where are you from?” secures race through discursive examination. Performative theories of race contend discourse does the work of racialization, or as Stuart Hall contends, “race is a discourse.”99 Racial categories, Nadine Ehlers elucidates, possess no “ontological grounding” because “the ‘truths’ of racial categorization…exist only in their ‘retelling.’”100 Discourse, as a modality of racialization, centers how racial categories are produced, contested, and maintained, rather than attending solely to the effects. In turn, I see “Where are you from?” and its attentive logics as a reiterative process of fortifying race. The question is a part of the “epistemological loop” of whiteness that makes itself known through the naming of its constitutive outside.101 It is the “repeatable materiality” of racial discourse, and phrases such as “Where are you from?,” that give race a felt sense of stability.102 Through the discursive repetition of race, subjects are taught and instructed “to read by it,” which aids in the construction of social and cultural worlds of difference.103
The security of racial meaning is made possible by the capacity for discourse to make race appear real. I draw on rhetorical studies scholar Lisa Flores’s theory of racial recognition to clarify the racio-discursive dimensions of “Where are you from?” “The alleged ‘realness’ of race,” Flores expounds, invites suspicious and even antagonistic requests such as “Where are you from?” and “What are you?”104 The never-ending quest to establish the ontological security of race—to see it with one’s own eyes—reveals how “the retelling of race in language produces the seeing of race as real.”105 Justice George Sutherland sought to make Thind’s racial otherness real by discursively reinforcing citizenship was “intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white.”106 Whiteness stood for “men representative of a composite type, a combination of color, race, and social institutions.”107 This racial and gendered “type of man” did not include “the brown and yellow races of Asia.”108 The Court constructed Thind, and “the people of India,” as a “subject-race,” never meant to attain or access Western civilization.109 Thind’s brownness became rhetorically deployed as an argument for his exclusion from the boundaries of whiteness and the proof needed to deny him citizenship. Bodies are deemed racial and “out of place” through an announcement and interrogation questioning why someone is “here,” a discursive reinforcement of unbelonging.
The space of the Court functioned as an expanded register where Thind was required to prove himself before a White adjudicator. It was in the discursive exchange the alien “Asiatic” was codified. Similar to how the refrain “Where are you from?” invites a give-and-take, the US v. Thind case aids in unpacking how the Court relied on discursive antagonism to place Thind within the racial hierarchy. For example, the Court argues, the White men who wrote the original 1790 statute defining citizenship for “free white persons,” “did not intend to provide for the naturalization of people from India.”110 These moments of discursive discipline make real the privileges of whiteness and the abjectness of brownness. It is through the consistent discursive citation of impossible difference that Thind is made into a racial other. The White self and Asian other are made material, as Karen Shimakawa argues, because “it is through abjection that stable borders/subjects are constituted.”111 Thind’s appeal provided an opportunity for the Court to momentarily secure whiteness in opposition to brownness. In this way, I argue “Where are you from?” runs parallel to how Flores understands the process of racial recognition. When someone approaches a “questionably ethnic” person to inquire about their location of origin, a “collapse between the seeing and knowing” of race occurs, the body in question is suspended as a “presumed racial essence.”112 “Where are you from?” rests upon the twofold presumption of the raciality of bodies and the power of whiteness to maintain that raciality. The spatiotemporal logics that manifest whenever the question “Where are you from?” is evoked function as a retelling of race, rhetorically tethering bodies to racialized cartographic locales conjured by the whiteness of policing bodies. Within the discursive raciological loop, “Where are you from?” fortifies an otherwise persistently vulnerable scheme of racial meaning.
Second, through a process of concretizing race, “Where are you from?” discursively etches race upon bodies through ocular disciplining. In the often-cited passage, Franz Fanon offers a theory of epidermalization, where the gaze of a White child inscribes blackness onto Fanon through the phrase “Look, a Negro!”113 While not the same, the axiom is a race-making practice that shares similarities to the refrain “Where are you from?”114 Both exclamations turn on seeing racial bodies and, as Stuart Hall contends, involve the literal “inscription of race on the skin.”115 Such utterances contribute to what Junaid Rana describes as a process of racialization where bodies are never quite complete but always in a state of “racial becoming” through a complex sightly form of racism.116 The White gaze fixates upon racial bodies and uses the body within their purview to name the racial structure. This is not unlike how the Court fixated upon Thind’s body, in which he was variously described through language such as “brown race,” “brown Hindu,” “unmistakable and profound differences,” “physical group characteristics,” “readily distinguishable,” and “clear evidence of their ancestry.” Brownness is not, as Anjana Mudambi contends, “inherent or fixed.”117 In other words, Thind became a Brown other through the rhetorical discipline from Sutherland and the Court. These discursive markers reveal what Simone Browne terms an “epidermal racial schema” produced by “the white gaze,” that seeks to dislocate bodies “overdetermined from the outside.”118 “Where are you from?” pinpoints how racially suspicious Brown Asian bodies become ontologically secured as props to uphold whiteness.119
Thind’s case illuminates the complexities of how bodies become the currency and substance of race. Continually naming Thind as Brown was a central dimension of how the Court racialized Thind out of citizenship. The US brief states, “Neither in popular speech nor in literature has the term ‘white man’ ever been used as appropriate to describe the Hindu. On the contrary, they are popularly classified as the ‘brown’ race.”120 “Hindu” and “brown” collapse into one another to make Thind’s Brown body into a racial other. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, building on Fanon and Louis Althusser through the frame of “Look, an Asian!,” contends “being-looked-at-racially reminds us that we do not control the conditions of our social existence and meaning.”121 Thind’s brownness becomes a simultaneously stated and unstated racial fact through the reference of Thind’s corporeality as a representation of his spatial and temporal otherness. For the Court, “to call him a white man would be to give a judicial interpretation contrary to the universal acceptation of the term.”122 Sutherland also speculates, “It cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry.”123 The brownness of Thind’s body functions as rhetorical fodder to demonstrate the impossibility he could take up the mantle of citizenship. The Court engaged in an epidermal process of doubt by fixating on questions of geopolitical belongingness to collapse color and origin, discursively articulating Thind as a “body out of place.”124 Adhering spatial and temporal otherness to Thind’s Brown body became a persuasive argument to exclude him from the whiteness of citizenship.
Finally, instantiations of “Where are you from?” rhetorically contain raced bodies by binding them to a particular time and place of race removed from whiteness. Lisa Flores contends, racialized bodies move “in ways that signal them as excessive and chaotic—bodies to be disciplined.”125 Containment occurs through geographically situating racial bodies so they can never escape. The practice of “Where are you from?” displaces ambiguous brown bodies as intrusive violations of an assumed White “here”—locating whiteness and dislocating brownness. “Where are you from?” reinforces “perpetual foreigner syndrome” racial scripts that skeptically cast Asian American bodies as always from “over there.”126 The way the Court discursively tethered Thind’s body to India as an incompatible space with the privilege of White citizenship reinforces the power of rhetorical racialization to deploy spacetime scripts that make otherness seemingly concrete. Bhagat Singh Thind stood in for India and his origin came with consequences. The Court furthers, “While the population of Europe comprised many racial families…its civilization was that which had been developed by the race of white-men and differed from the civilization of Asia in almost every distinguishing peculiarity.”127 In turn, according to the Court, members of the “Western civilization, sometimes denominated the European civilization,” thought “the Far East, including India,” “was not regarded by them as part of such civilization. To them, naturalization of the Far East Asiatics was unthinkable.”128 The Court sought to spatialize whiteness across the United States and the West. Space makes race; race makes space.129 Thind belonging to India meant he could never belong to the places and times of whiteness. Reflecting on the case demonstrates how “Where are you from?,” as a process of inquiry into origin, functions as a racial cartographic project of surveilling racial bodies to contain brownness and establish the primacy of whiteness. Seeing race is simultaneously about where and when race exists.
“Where are you from?” is often remarked as a microaggression, a seemingly mundane interpersonal moment of racism that does not rise to the level of racial violence. The question relies on a contradictory process of inquiry where race-making seems to not already be fulfilled prior to an encounter, given the question is posed assuming one’s race is not obvious, and simultaneously rests on the supposed legibility of race, that a racial other can be spotted and questioned. Ruminating on the racial and rhetorical labors of the query combats the tendency to dismiss innocuous moments of racial discourse within a spectrum of racist actions. Articulating the question as a deeply rhetorical process of sedimenting race highlights how discursive acts of antagonism are central to the preservation of white supremacist racial ideologies. Ehlers contends, “The disciplinary regulations of race within law are technologies employed in the service of attempting to ‘uncover’ racial ‘truth,’ an ‘uncovering’ that was itself a fiction which contributed to the creation of racial subjects.”130 While the internal logics of the question may seem obvious, a deep understanding of the US v. Thind case aids in providing a historical grounding to conceptualize the intricate interplay between space, time, ocularity, and discourse. It also helps to capture the “jurisprudential contortions,” Claire Jean Kim contends, offered by the Court to maintain “the boundary between Whites and Asian immigrants, regardless of how inconsistent or illogical their decisions may have appeared.”131 Thus, US v. Thind provides a rich opportunity to understand how race is discursively crafted to preserve its “essence” and discipline equivocal Asian American bodies.
A White “Here,” A Brown “There”
Reflecting on US v. Thind points to the historical and contemporary continuity of the enmeshed relationship between rhetorical exclusion and material violence. Adam Purinton shot and killed Srinivas Kuchibhotla and injured Alok Madasani at a bar in Kansas in February 2017, yelling “Get out of my country” before carrying out the violent attack.132 Such utterances are mutations of the ostensibly banal “Where are you from?” Whiteness is deputized at every level of society to police the boundaries of belonging. When paired with acts of violence, discursive moments of exclusion reinforce the ontological conditions for tropes such as the model minority and perpetual foreignness: unbelonging, out-of-placeness, otherness. The discursive and material feed off one another to rationalize and authorize the expulsion of South Asian Americans. Writer-activist Celeste Chan, in conversation with V. Jo Hsu, questions, “In some ways that’s the story of Asians and people of color in America. How do you make a home when no one wants you there, or when you’re constantly told to get out?”133 US v. Thind and the question “Where are you from?” emphasizes a historical pattern used by whiteness to consolidate power through declarations of otherness. Whether legally proclaiming Thind’s nonbelonging, asking a colleague “Where are you from?,” or violently attacking an Asian American while yelling “Go back to your country!” All these moments highlight the persistence of White discursive and material antagonism—demonstrations of exclusion to maintain the felt stability of a particular racial order.
“Where are you from?” is a racial litmus test that establishes white supremacist hierarchies through a racial cartographic project of producing a white “here” and what Sara Ahmed terms a “brown elsewhere.”134 My engagement with the US v. Thind case, through the metaphorical lens of “Where are you from?,” draws out the discursive and spatial dimensions of South Asian American racialization, reliant on the notion that seeing race is also about where race exists. Many of the brutal acts of anti-Asian violence that have occurred, and continue to occur, during the COVID-19 pandemic are accompanied by phrases such as “Get out of this country!” and “Go back to where you came from!”135 These moments of violence rely on a conceptual collapse between corporeality, virality, and geography. Asian bodies became indices of a distinct hazard to the purity of the US body politic. Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” which restricted travel for citizens from Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea, many of which are Muslim majority countries, and post-9/11 anti-Muslim and anti-South Asian racism, further reveal the spatial logics that underwrite anti-South Asian targeting and violence in the United States.136 Shereen Yousuf and Bernadette Calafell further state, “The logics that support the ban draw on recognizing Muslim bodies as ideological as well as racialized threats.”137 Brown bodies become legible, Loubna Qutami furthers, through cultural and religious racialization as “deviant, backward, barbaric, and incapable of progress and modernity” that simultaneously stand in for the “Middle East,” an Orientalist, racist, and imperial construction that authorizes the deadly and ongoing “war on terror.”138
The seemingly innocuous question “Where are you from?” lies at the heart of these diverse examples. Asian and South Asian Americans are never welcomed into the fold of “here.” Rather, they are always suspiciously representatives of a racial elsewhere. Surveilled, attacked, and excluded. White supremacy works diligently to preserve the origins of whiteness. The “forever foreigner” script takes on a new life as a complex racializing mechanism accompanied by interrogation and doubt. As a rhetoric, “Where are you from?” functions across social contexts and racial landscapes to make real racial otherness as perpetually in opposition to belonging. Reengaging with the spatiotemporal logics deployed within the US v. Thind case illuminate the complexities of anti-(South) Asian racism that is heavily informed by a conceptual collapse between space, time, and bodies.
US v. Thind remains a fascinating chapter in the history of South Asian American racialization. I have sought in this paper to reflect on the complex discourses deployed by the Supreme Court to suture Bhagat Singh Thind to a spacetime beyond White citizenship. The corporeal personification of Thind’s body—a code for India, brownness, and unassimilability—aided in distorting origin and belonging. The court’s pursuit of a racializing origin story for Thind provided a fertile historical ground to unpack the mechanisms and technologies contained within the question “Where are you from?” I rely on US v. Thind to ruminate over the rhetorical labors for a demand bound up with the Asian American experience to stabilize white supremacist racial hierarchies. Indeed, the question is a “compulsive discourse,” Flores illustrates, that seeks “to locate, fix, name, and proclaim racial truth.”139 Drawing out the intricacies of “Where are you from?” elucidates the implications of the discursive antagonism endemic to the experience of brownness within the United States that leans on a dominant racial literacy well versed in whiteness and blackness. Asian prerequisite cases, and US v. Thind in particular, demonstrate not just the mutability of whiteness, but also, the necessity for whiteness to generate foils to give itself superficial solidity. The Supreme Court needed to publicly announce Bhagat Singh Thind was from a Brown “there” to solidify the whiteness of “here.” Kumarini Silva affirms, “Brown ‘shape shifts’ as a ‘figure of crisis.’”140 This approach to the fungibility of brownness highlights how the discursive stabilization of white supremacist systems depends on the construction of racial threats; a Brown menace defines the propriety of whiteness. Brown subjects like Thind, despite the inimical character of whiteness, continue to find ways to resist and adapt to the suffocating politics of white supremacy.
Notes
United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). Respondent’s Brief. File Date: 12/30/1921, 37.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5.
I use the term “ontology” because performative scholars of race, such as Nadine Ehlers, contend: “ultimately, the crisis that race signifies has to do with the imperative of maintaining a claim to supposed ontology.” In this sense, the term “ontology” is used to highlight the discursive practices used to stabilize racial systems of meaning into a “supposed” system of “truth.” “‘Black is’ and ‘Black Ain’t’: Performative Revisions of Racial ‘Crisis,’” Culture, Theory and Critique 47, no. 2 (2006): 150.
Doug Coulson, Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), 45–88; see also Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).
Within the genealogy of Asian prerequisite cases, judges often vacillated between scientific, anthropological, and vernacular definitions of whiteness. See Hadi Khoshneviss, “Accruing Whiteness: Power and Resistance in Prerequisite Citizenship Cases of Immigrants from the ‘Middle East,’” Citizenship Studies 25, no. 5 (2021): 620–35; Sarah M.A. Gualtieri argues, cases such as US v. Thind “suggest that when science failed to reinforce popular beliefs about racial difference it was discarded but that when it confirmed them it was conveniently embraced.” Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2009), 74. The codification of socially adaptable conceptions of race granted the Court ample discursive room, in each prerequisite case, whether a Syrian, Iranian, Indian, or Japanese defendant, to give temporary grounding to whiteness as a seemingly stable category of legal citizenship.
It is worth noting that in Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), the Supreme Court similarly sought the ocular as a route to deny citizenship to Japanese man Takao Ozawa. It was argued the Court could “see” Ozawa was not White even in the face of his arguments/evidence about the literal “whiteness” of his skin. The politics of optics was a cornerstone of early prerequisite cases.
United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). Appellant’s Brief. File Date: 1/11/1923, 15.
Ian Haney Lopéz affirms: “The Court, and people generally, believed that a mere glance was enough to determine a person’s race, and furthermore, that they were observing race directly, rather than through a distorting lens of socially contingent ideas.” White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York City: NYU Press, 1997), 71.
I define temporality as particular articulations of time that circulate in and through discourse. In the sense, I align with how Stuart Hall defines articulation as the specific linkages of meaning into a totalized whole. These unique rhetorical constructions of time are contingent and emerge out of unique socio-historical conditions. Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 112–27.
While most people of color in the United States, and even around the world, are also asked this question by people who cannot, based on outward bodily markers, identify the geographic origin of a person, I focus specifically on how the question is often directed toward Asian Americans. Asian Americans are asked this question for a variety of reasons: immigration patterns, their racial ambiguity in the US racial field, and “perpetual foreigner” logics.
Jeff H. Lesser, “Always ‘Outsiders’: Asians, Naturalization, and the Supreme Court,” Amerasia Journal 12, no. 1 (1985–86): 83.
Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 80.
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 4.
For more on racial interstitiality, see Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
Doug Coulson contends, in building on the work of Ian Haney Lopéz, more scholarship is needed that engages the “unpublished judicial opinions and oral remarks that judges made during hearings,” in addition to the “discursive practices of other legal actors that appear in pleadings, briefs, trial and hearing transcripts” related to naturalization cases. I revisit Thind in this vein to dig into the archival materials that are not as widely studied when engaging the case. Race, Nation, and Refuge, xix.
López, White By Law, 7.
James Boyd White, “Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life,” The University of Chicago Law Review 52, no. 3 (1985): 684–702; Marouf Hasian, Jr., “The Aesthetics of Legal Rhetoric: The Ambiguities of Race in Adarand v. Pena and the Beginning of the End of Affirmative Action,” The Howard Journal of Communications 8, no. 1 (1997): 113–27; Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Earl Croasmun, “Rhetoric’s Revenge: The Prospect of a Critical Legal Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 29, no. 4 (1996): 384–99.
López, White By Law, 2.
My conceptualization builds on Jay Dolmage’s definition of rhetoric as “the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication.” Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2018), 2.
H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity, “The Field of Language and Race: A Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Race, Racism, and Racialization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, eds. H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2.
These scholars offer theories of Asian American racialization that specifically highlight and engage with its ambivalent, ambiguous, and contradictory dimensions. See Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society 27, no. 1 (1999): 105–138; Susan Koshy, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness,” boundary 28, no. 1 (2001): 153–94; Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 23; Bow, Partly Colored; Tamsin Kimoto, “Becoming Restive: Orientations in Asian American Feminist Theory and Praxis,” in Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics, eds. Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 143. For a communicative perspective, see Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril,” Howard Journal of Communication 16 (2005): 109–30.
Anjana Mudambi takes a similar approach in unpacking how “yellow peril” discourse works in tandem with “model minority myths” and consequently influences how South Asian communities negotiate their racial identity. “South Asian American Discourses: Engaging the Yellow Peril-Model Minority Dialectic,” Howard Journal of Communications 30, no. 3 (2019): 284–98.
Colleen Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1733.
Kandice Chuh argues, “Asianness is generally conceived of as operating between whiteness and color.” “Asians Are the New…What?,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 223.
For more on Asian American racialization through the optics of labor and settler colonial capitalism, see Day, Alien Capital and Lye, America’s Asia.
For more on how other Asian Americanists have engaged the case, see Victor Jew, “George Sutherland and American Ethnicity: A Pre-History to ‘Thind’ and ‘Ozawa,’” The Centennial Review 41, no. 3 (1997): 553; Suzanne A Kim, “Yellow Skin, White Masks: Asian American Impersonations of Whiteness and the Feminist Critique of Liberal Equality,” Asian Law Journal 8 (2001): 90; John Tehranian, “Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America,” The Yale Law Journal 109, no. 4 (2000): 820.
Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 248.
Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 87.
I aim to demonstrate how Thind’s brownness was racialized as a marker of impossible difference and a reminder of an origin story that never intersects with the origins of whiteness. Thus, I seek to craft a humble contribution to what Swati Rana terms “brownness studies,” and others have called “critical brownness studies.” Unpacking how Thind becomes rhetorically deployed as a Brown other illuminates the racial logics adhered to Thind’s body to justify his exclusion. “Reading Brownness: Richard Rodriguez, Race, and Form,” American Literary History 27, no. 2 (2015): 285–304.
Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective,” Language in Society 46, no. 5 (2017): 626.
Considerably more attention is needed to account for the complex racial dynamics of how the question “Where are you from?” solidifies race. For critical/cultural studies on “where are you from?” see Marsha Giselle Henry, “‘Where Are You Really From?’: Representation, Identity and Power in the Fieldwork Experiences of a South Asian Diasporic,” Qualitative Research 3, no. 2 (2003): 229–42; Geeta Kothari, “Where Are You From,” New England Review 15, no. 3 (1993): 80–84; Jasbir Puar, “Resituating Discourses of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Asianness’ in Northern England: Second Generation Sikh Women and Constructions of Identity,” Socialist Review 94, no. 1–2 (1994): 21–54. For social science approaches to the question see Sapna Cheryan and Benoît Monin, “Where Are You Really From?: Asian Americans and Identity Denial,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, no. 5 (2005): 717–30; Zhu Hua and Li Wei, “‘Where Are You Really From?’: Nationality and Ethnicity Talk (Net) in Everyday Interactions,” Applied Linguistics Review 7, no. 4 (2016): 440–70; Faustina M. DuCros, “‘You’re a Different Kind of Black—Where You From?’: The Qualifying Role of Place in the Construction of Black Racial and Ethnic Identities among Louisiana Creole Migrants,” Racial and Ethnic Identities 7, no. 1 (2021): 41–55.
For more on the US v. Ozawa case, see Izumi Hirobe, “Naturalization Cases of Asian Immigrants From in Re Ah Yup to United States v. Ozawa and United States v. Thind,” Pacific and American Studies 6 (2006): 119–130.
For example, Thind reveals how Johann Friedrich “Blumenbach classifies Hindus as members of the Caucasian race,” Thomas Huxley included “the Aryan races of India” in his classification of the “Melanochronic (dark whites),” and British orientalist Sir William Jones drew a connection between Sanskrit and European languages that “led to the theory of an Aryan race to which both Europeans and Asian Indians belonged.” “[James Drummond] Anderson,” from Cambridge University, determined Punjabi Indians represent “the almost pure descendants of Aryan settlers, who carried the Indo-European languages now prevailing over Northern India.” Respondent’s Brief, 9–10.
The citations of previous court cases draw on the convoluted racial dimensions of how whiteness is defined over and against West and South Asian applicants for citizenship. Thind’s brief turns to judicial interpretation of the 2169 Revised Statutes, the law that states’ citizenship is for “free white persons” and those of “African descent,” by explicitly drawing on other instances when either South Asian Indians, Hebrews, Parsee, or Syrian applicants were also considered White. Thus, Thind’s lawyer crafts a transnational argument to reveal how often previous White judges have determined defendants from diverse geographic locales across West Asia could access citizenship. Respondent’s Brief, 38–40.
Ehlers, “‘Black is’ and ‘Black Ain’t,’” 149, 152.
United States v. Thind, 339; Virtually all the racial prerequisite cases with Asian American applicants involved applying through the category of whiteness, and not through the legal category of “African descent.” As Hadi Khoshneviss’s work explains, this reflects the pervasive influence of whiteness. While there are anti-Black dimensions to this historical pattern to unpack, I do not have the room to fully engage it in this piece.
Respondent’s Brief, 8.
Sucheta Mazumdar, “Racist Responses to Racism: The Aryan Myth and South Asians in the United States,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 9, no. 1 (1989): 47–55.
Khoshneviss, “Accruing Whiteness,” 621. This does not excuse the racist arguments Thind made but rather concedes how Thind worked within the historical context he resided to survive in, through, and against white supremacy. Susan Koshy also provides a deft explanation regarding why most Asians petitioned through the route of whiteness and such maneuvers cannot be simply read as “Asians trying to be white,” but rather, should draw our attention to how white supremacist legal structures encouraged such petitions. She furthers, “The danger of analyzing these issues only in terms of the choices of the groups or of their racism is that it erases the power of the social structure to engender these conflicts by linking the distribution of resources and the allocation of rights to racial identities.” “Morphing Race into Ethnicity,” 179.
For more on mythico-history, see Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 52–104.
Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 22.
Respondent’s Brief, 15.
Neda, The Limits of Whiteness, 22–23.
Respondent’s Brief, 17.
Respondent’s Brief, 15.
Respondent’s Brief, 22.
Respondent’s Brief, 16.
Respondent’s Brief, 22.
Mazumdar, “Racist Responses to Racism.”
Romila Thapar, “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics,” Social Scientist 24, no. 1/3 (1996): 3; See also, Mona Bhan, “‘In Search of the Aryan Seed’: Race, Religion, and Sexuality in Indian-Occupied Kashmir,” in Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, eds. Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 82.
Susan Koshy, “Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions of Race and Ethnicity,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 7, no. 3 (1998): 291.
Sanford Levinson, “The Rhetoric of the Judicial Opinion,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, eds. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 187.
To be clear, the question “Where are you from?” does not appear directly in the archival materials related to the Thind case. However, I see the question as a useful framework to conceptualize the particular interplay between ocular, spatial, and temporal discourses deployed to racialize Thind. While this framework may seem tautological, reflecting on the confluence of these modes of racialization further deepens our understanding of how such discourses produce racial subjectivity and ideologies.
Appellant’s Brief, 1.
“Hindu” was a pejorative racial term used to describe all South Asians, regardless of their religion, considering Bhagat Singh Thind was Sikh. However, non-Christian religions are still racialized as deviant, threatening, and other. Thus, the inclusion of “high caste Hindu” in the question demonstrates the Court’s interest in religion and race as co-constitutive elements of how South Asians were racialized at the turn of the century.
United States v. Thind, 340.
While some scholars identify a shift from US v. Ozawa to US v. Thind, where a scientific framework is abandoned for a social one, Khoshneviss highlights the pattern of courts in racial prerequisite cases involving immigrants from the “Middle East” constantly shifting the definitional boundaries of whiteness through geographic, scientific, and performative judicial thresholds. Khoshneviss, “Accruing Whiteness.”
Appellant’s Brief, 3.
Appellant’s Brief, 4.
The flexible articulation of whiteness continually deployed by the Court rested upon a contradiction: it is obvious (“clearly”) where people fall in the hierarchy, but also up for negotiation (“debatable”).
United States v. Thind, 339.
United States v. Thind, 341.
United States v. Thind, 341.
Stanley Thangaraj, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2015), 120.
United States v. Thind, 342.
Appellant’s Brief, 4; Also, see Khoshneviss, “Accruing Whiteness.”
This aligns with Alexander G. Weheliye’s contention that racialization operates through a set of “political relations that require…the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern West.” Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3; See also Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
United States v. Thind, 339.
United States v. Thind, 340.
The Court’s turn to articulate Thind’s brownness in opposition to the whiteness of citizenship demonstrates how, as Amber Jamilla Musser argues, “brownness, through its multiple and various marginalizations, is used to consolidate a racialized implicitly white norm.” “Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, and Method,” Afterimage 49, no. 1 (2022): 46.
A. Cheree Carlson, “‘You know it when you see it’: The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 2 (1999): 111–28.
United States v. Thind, 342.
Lisa Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020), 13.
Junaid Rana’s work has been central to drawing out how religion factors into the racialization of Muslim communities. For more on the entanglement of religion, culture, and racism, see Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls 9, no. 2 (2007): 148–61; Junaid Rana, “The Racial Infrastructure of the Terror-Industrial Complex,” Social Text 129 34, no. 4 (2016): 111–38.
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 174.
Appellant’s Brief, 15.
Appellant’s Brief, 15.
Appellant’s Brief, 8.
Appellant’s Brief, 8–s9.
Appellant’s Brief, 10.
Appellant’s Brief, 11.
Matthew Pratt Guterl, Seeing Race in Modern America (Durham, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 12.
Appellant’s Brief, 10.
Appellant’s Brief, 10.
Appellant’s Brief, 9.
For more on the racial history of “heathen” in the United States, see Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).
Appellant’s Brief, 10.
Appellant’s Brief, 14.
Appellant’s Brief, 19.
Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 444.
Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times”: 445; Damien M. Sojoyner furthers, notions of time, and their association to ideological constructions such as liberty and equality reveal how temporality “is used to shore up the gaps left by inconsistencies within the Western imagination.” “Dissonance in Time: (Un)Making and (Re)Mapping of Blackness,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017), 60.
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, “‘Look, an Asian!’: The Politics of Racial Interpellation in the Wake of the Virginia Tech Shootings,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11, no. 1 (2008): 33.
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1714.
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Bow, Partly Colored, 9.
Bow, Partly Colored, 4.
Louise Cainkar and Sunaina Maira contend, “South Asian Americans are a group that does not fit neatly within the dominant racial categories of Black and White and have a racially ambiguous identity within the United States.” “Targeting Arab/Muslim/South Asian Americans: Criminalization and Cultural Citizenship,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 3 (2005): 610.
Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, edited by Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 45.
Nadine Ehlers, Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles Against Subjection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 16.
In other words, Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek echo, whiteness relies upon “strategic rhetorics” to maintain “the assumed position of an uninterrogated space.” “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 293.
Nadine Ehlers, “Retroactive Phantasies: Discourse, Discipline, and the Production of Race,” Social Identities 14, no. 3 (2008): 336.
Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 17.
Lisa Flores, “Equipped to See Race: On Excess, Collapse, and the Rhetorical Force of Racial Recognition” (105th Annual National Communication Association Conference, Baltimore, MD, November 15, 2019), 7.
Flores, “Equipped to See Race,” 8.
United States v. Thind, 341.
Appellant’s Brief, 8.
Appellant’s Brief, 7.
Appellant’s Brief, 10.
Appellant’s Brief, 15.
Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 9.
Flores, “Equipped to See Race,” 8.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 95.
The two phrases are not the same. The ontological construction of blackness carries a different racio-social and historical construction that is not in complete alignment with the development of brownness. However, I do think Fanon’s theory of epidermalization highlights the discursive modes through which racial otherness is made legible through a process of collapsing bodies into a racial essence. I draw out the similarities not to equate blackness and brownness, but rather, to highlight how epidermalization functions as a process to stabilize and make real bodies as racial.
Stuart Hall, “The After-Life of Franz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 16.
Rana, “The Racial Infrastructure”: 119.
Anjana Mudambi, “The Construction of Brownness: Latino/a and South Asian Bloggers’ Responses to SB 1070,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 1 (2015): 47.
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 98.
Brown, Dark Matters, 98.
Appellant’s Brief, 15.
Chong, “‘Look, an Asian!,’” 31.
Appellant’s Brief, 19.
United States v. Thind, 342.
Paul Gilroy describes this kind of disciplining as “epidermal thinking.” “Scales and Eyes: ‘Race’ Making Difference,” in Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue Golding (London: Routledge, 1997), 195.
Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 13.
Stacey J. Lee, Nga-Wing Anjela Wong, and Alvin N. Alvarez, “The Model Minority and the Perpetual Foreigner: Stereotypes of Asian Americans,” in Asian American Psychology: Current Perspectives, eds. Nita Tewari and Alvin N. Alvarez (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 69–84.
Appellant’s Brief, 16.
Appellant’s Brief, 21.
For more on the politics of space and place in producing power and difference, see Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 51.
Kim, “The Racial Triangulation,” 114–15.
Emanuella Grinberg, “Kansas man admits to shooting Indian tech workers in bar,” CNN, March 7, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/06/us/kansas-bar-shooting-plea/index.html (accessed March 31, 2022).
V. Jo Hsu, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2022), 5.
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 117.
Sherry C. Wang and Bianca Marie C. Santos, “‘Go Back to China With Your (Expletive) Virus’: A Revelatory Case Study of Anti-Asian Racism During COVID-19,” Asian American Journal of Psychology 13, no. 3 (2022): 220–33.
Shereen Yousuf and Bernadette Calafell, “The Imperative for Examining Anti-Muslim Racism in Rhetorical Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 312.
Yousuf and Calafell, “The Imperative for Examining,” 312–13.
Loubna Qutami, “Censusless: Arab/Muslim Interpolation into Whiteness and the War on Terror,” Journal of Asian American Studies 23, no. 2 (2020): 166. To be clear, I am not trying to collapse the distinctions and interrelations between anti-South Asian racism, anti-Muslim racism, and Islamophobia. Rather, I am trying to draw out the common spatial dimension of such forms of racialization that make bodies and spaces into collapsed examples of one another to authorize exclusionary acts of violence.
Flores, Deportable and Disposable, 28.
Kumarini Silva, “Brown: From Identity to Identification,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2014): 169.
University of California Press