| Excerpts
Although now largely
forgotten, the prerequisite cases were at the center of
racial debates in the United States for the fifty years
following the Civil War, when immigration and nativism were
both running high. Naturalization laws figured prominently
in the furor over the appropriate status of the newcomers
and were heatedly discussed not only by the most respected
public figures of the day, but also in the swirl of popular
politics. . . .
The principal locus of the
debate, however, was in the courts. From the first
prerequisite case in 1878 until racial restrictions were
removed in 1952, fifty-two racial prerequisite cases were
reported, including two heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Framing fundamental questions about who could join the
citizenry in terms of who was White. . . .
Though the courts offered
many different rationales to justify the various racial
divisions they advanced, two predominated: common knowledge
and scientific evidence. . . . Under a common
knowledge approach, courts justified the assignment of
petitioners to one race or another by reference to common
beliefs about race.
The common knowledge
rationale contrasts with reasoning based on supposedly
objective, technical, and specialized knowledge. Such
"scientific evidence" rationales justified racial
divisions by reference to the naturalistic studies of
humankind. . . .
. . . . These rationales,
one appealing to common knowledge and the other to
scientific evidence, were the two core approaches used by
courts to explain their determinations of whether
individuals belonged to the "white" race.
. . . . the courts deciding
racial prerequisite cases initially relied on both
rationales to justify their decisions. However, beginning in
1909 a schism appeared among the courts over whether common
knowledge or scientific evidence was the appropriate
standard. Thereafter, the lower courts divided almost evenly
on the proper test for Whiteness: six courts relied on
common knowledge, while seven others based their racial
determinations on scientific evidence. No court used both
rationales. Over the course of two cases, heard in 1922 and
1923, the Supreme Court broke the impasse in favor of common
knowledge. Though the courts did not see their decisions in
this light, the early congruence of and subsequent
contradiction between common knowledge and scientific
evidence set the terms of a debate about whether race is a
social construction or a natural occurrence. In these terms,
the Supreme Court's elevation of common knowledge as the
legal meter of race convincingly demonstrates that racial
categorization finds its origins in social practices.
. . . . by 1909 changes in
immigrant demographics and in anthropological thinking
combined to create contradiction between science and common
knowledge. These contradictions surfaced most directly in
cases concerning immigrants from western and southern Asia,
such as Syrians and Asian Indians, dark-skinned peoples who
were nevertheless uniformly classified as Caucasians by the
leading anthropologists of the times. Science's inability to
confirm through empirical evidence the popular racial
beliefs that held Syrians and Asian Indians to be non-Whites
should have led the courts to question whether race was a
natural phenomenon. So deeply held was this belief, however,
that instead of re-examining the nature of race, the courts
began to disparage science.
Over the course of two
decisions, the Supreme Court resolved the conflict between
common knowledge and scientific evidence in favor of the
former, but not without some initial confusion. In Ozawa
v. United States, the Court relied on both rationales to
exclude a Japanese petitioner, holding that he was not of
the type "popularly known as the Caucasian race,"
thereby invoking both common knowledge ("popularly
known") and science ("the Caucasian race").
Here, as in the earliest prerequisite cases, science and
popular knowledge worked hand in hand to exclude the
applicant from citizenship. Within a few months of its
decision in Ozawa, however, the Court heard a case
brought by an Asian Indian, Bhagat Singh Thind, who relied
on the Court's earlier linkage of "Caucasian" with
"white" to argue for his own naturalization. In United
States v. Thind, science and common knowledge diverged,
complicating a case that should have been easy under Ozawa's
straightforward rule of racial specification. Reversing
course, the Court repudiated its earlier equation and
rejected any role for science in racial assignments. The
Court decried the "scientific manipulation" it
believed had ignored racial differences by including as
Caucasian "far more [people] than the unscientific mind
suspects," even some persons the Court described as
ranging "in color ... from brown to black."
"We venture to think," the Court said, "that
the average well informed white American would learn with
some degree of astonishment that the race to which he
belongs is made up of such heterogenous elements." The
Court held instead that "the words 'free white persons'
are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance
with the understanding of the common man." In the
Court's opinion, science had failed as an arbiter of human
difference, and common knowledge was made into the
touchstone of racial division.
In elevating common
knowledge, the Court no doubt remained convinced that racial
divisions followed from real, natural, physical differences.
The Court upheld common knowledge in the belief that people
are accomplished amateur naturalists, capable of accurately
discerning differences in the physical world. This explains
the Court's frustration with science, which to the Court's
mind was curiously and suspiciously unable to identify and
quantify those racial differences so readily apparent in the
petitioners who came before them. This frustration is
understandable, given early anthropology's promise to
establish a definitive catalogue of racial differences, and
from these differences to give scientific justification to a
racial hierarchy that placed Whites at the top. This,
however, was a promise science could not keep. Despite their
strained efforts, students of race could not plot the
boundaries of Whiteness because such boundaries are socially
fashioned and cannot be measured, or found, in nature. The
Court resented the failure of science to fulfil an
impossible vow; it might better have resented that science
ever undertook such an enterprise. The early congruence
between scientific evidence and common knowledge did not
reflect the accuracy of popular understandings of race, but
rather the social embeddedness of scientific inquiry.
Neither common knowledge nor the science of the day measured
human variation. Both merely reported social beliefs about
races.
The earlier reliance on
scientific evidence to justify racial assignments implied
that races exist as physical fact, humanly knowable but not
dependent on human knowledge or human relations. The Court's
ultimate reliance on common knowledge says otherwise: it
demonstrates that racial taxonomies devolve upon social
demarcations. That common knowledge emerged as the only
workable racial test shows that race is something which must
be measured in terms of what people believe, that it is a
socially mediated idea. The social construction of the White
race is manifest in the Court's repudiation of science and
its installation of common knowledge as the appropriate
racial meter of Whiteness. |
