Now, this gives the chance to revisit race as a socio-historical construction because in the process, the Supreme Court gave us an idea as to how was race defined in American law and how was it perceived and interpreted. We forgot the questions of citizenship, particular around those persons or those groups that could become naturalized as American citizens. In several cases involving race and naturalized citizenship, the U.S. Supreme Court, wittingly or unwittingly, ruled that the most fundamental factors used to define race, and that is skin color, ancestry, and science, are mere pretexts for an underlying ideology of white power, and dominance and privilege. In the case of Ozawa, the United States Supreme Court rejected the idea that race is a matter of skin color, which everybody seemed to think that it is. And at the time, I think most people held to the conventional wisdom that they could determine what race you belonged to simply by looking mainly at your skin color. Supreme Court rejected the notion that skin color is a basis for determining race. In fact, it said that the mere fact or the mere color of a skin, was impractical because even within the so called same race, as the court said, for instance in the white race there is a fair blonde and the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter persons in other races. So the court were saying that are people who are white and yet they could be darker than someone in another race that is ruled by the Court as not being white. In the same case, the court also rejected ancestry as a means to categorize people into distinct races. Now recall in that in the 1910 case, the same court, the U.S. Supreme Court, had ruled that Asian Indians were Caucasian. They were of the same race as white people, and therefore it was interchangeable with white and could be naturalized as citizens of the United States. And then they made a complete reversal in the Thind case. So in the Thind case, they rejected the notion that ancestry could be a means to categorize people and to distinct races. In fact, the Court still recognized that the blonde Scandinavian and the Hindu had a common ancestry. But they did not agree that they were members of the same race and therefore rejected ancestry as a means to place people into different race categories. The court finally, after rejecting scientific notions, I mean ancestry and skin color, the court also rejected the scientific notions of race and ruled that the framers of the 1790 Naturalization Act did not intend to use science. In fact, they were not even keenly aware of scientific definitions of race. And so, it said specifically that the court would not employ scientific terminology in determining individuals' or groups' racial membership. So, it brings us back to a question. If the Supreme Court denied that ancestry was a basis for race, and also denied that skin color was a basis for race, and also denied that science could not be used to determine what race people belong to, then what did the court see as adequate or appropriate to classify human beings into different race and how did the court think that race could be defined and interpreted? And I think this is important because it not only affects issues of citizenship but it affects so many aspects of race in American society. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the phrase, free white person, in the 1790 Naturalization Act, that the intention was to confer privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the founding fathers knew as white and denied to all others who could not be so classified. Now the court accepted the meaning of white as understood by the common speech of the late 19th century. I mean, 18th century. That is, how it was used in 1790. The court argued that when the framers of the constitution used the term white in 1790, that it was a matter of common speech both for the framers as well as for the common person. And so, the only way that one could actually define race and interpret the meaning of race in the Naturalization Act and as it applied to issues of citizenship, as well as to all other aspects of American society, the court said the only way to do it was to try to understand what it meant in the common speech of people in the 1790s. Now this definition, or this ruling, on the meaning of race really said that the dominant group and the way in which they actually considered race in their common speech was the only way in which the Supreme Court was willing to define and interpret race. And so, if the framers of the constitution and if in the speech of a common man of 1790 they did not intended to include Asians, or Asian Indians,or Africans or Native Americans. They did not intend to include them in the concept or in the term free white persons, then they could not be so classified or ever to be considered to be white irrespective of ancestry, irrespective of skin color, irrespective of the emerging scientific definitions of race membership.
