Existing comment:
1915: The Birth of a Nation:
DW Griffith's film offers a sympathetic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South. Southern whites are portrayed as virtuous defenders of American values, while the black characters are shown as either lazy or dangerous.
"After the Civil War, there was a deep fear among Southern whites about the new-found social and economic expectations of newly freed blacks. Elite whites, afraid of losing the few privileges they had left in the wake of the war, and poor whites, anxious about having to share their meager economic resources, joined forces to vilify blacks."
-- Yolanda Moses, anthropologist, University of California, Riverside
1922: Ozawa v United States:
Born in Japan and raised in the US, businessman Takao Ozawa files for US citizenship, relying on the Naturalization Act of 1906, which enables whites and those of African descent to become citizens. When his application is refused, he goes to court. The case reaches the US Supreme Court, which unanimously rules that, as a person of Japanese descent, he is not white and therefore ineligible for citizenship.
1923: United States v Thind:
The US Supreme Court rules that Bhagat Singh Thind, a religious scholar from India who served in the US Army during World War I, cannot become a citizen because US law allows only "free white persons" to become naturalized. While the court concedes that Thind is "Caucasian" because anthropologists consider Indians to belong to the same race as white Americans, it argues that Thind does not fit the common understanding of the term "white."
"It may be true that the blond Scandanavian 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."
-- Justice George Sutherland, majority opinion, 1923 |