by John Ellis
Americans love uncovering their ancestry. The popular site Ancestry.com rakes in over a billion dollars in annual revenue. People love touting on social media the various countries from which their ancestors hailed. But why are Americans so fascinated with discovering their ancestors? Like most things, there are multiple reasons, including the nearly-determinative wag of marketing tapping into our desire to define ourselves via expressive individualism (which is kind of ironic, if you think about it). Among white people, though, I believe a dominant reason is our innate, if not unconscious, lack of rootedness. Whiteness doesn’t have a heritage because whiteness is an invention.
One of the core tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the understanding that whiteness is an invented category. Whiteness is a sociological and political category, not an ontological reality. CRT scholar Victor Ray explains, “Whiteness, like race generally, is a social construction, and the root of that construction is differential access to resources. Whiteness is property [emphasis kept].”[1] In their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic helpfully add, “Whiteness, thus, was defined in opposition to nonwhiteness, an opposition that also marked a boundary between privilege and its opposite.”[2]
Like much of CRT, the concept of whiteness as an invention is greatly misunderstood and misaligned by those caught in the thralls of the deceitful anti-CRT rhetoric of Christopher Rufo, Neil Shenvi, James Lindsay, et al.. And like the rest of CRT, whiteness as an invented category derives from complex legal theories that are not easily unpacked, making it easy to strawman and misrepresent. To be clear and to manage expectations, I’m not going to attempt to provide a complete defense of the concept. I am going to hold out a Supreme Court decision that I believe will help those unsure of the concept’s validity to begin to grasp what CRT scholars are arguing.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Naturalization Act of 1906. A noxious piece of legislation in the tradition of all the noxious immigration laws in the United States of America going back to this country’s founding, it amended the Naturalization Act of 1870. Leading up to 1906, the immigration laws were largely a hodgepodge of state’s interpretations and goals. This can be helpfully illustrated by looking at California’s attitudes towards Japanese immigrants in the early 20th century.
One of the thorns in President T. Roosevelt’s side was the acrimonious rhetoric and actions by the California state legislatures directed at Japan. The state wanted to ban all immigrants from Japan. This, of course, created a toxic environment in California that bred violence, both rhetorical and physical, directed at the Japanese citizens already living in the state. Wary of a war in the Pacific with an emboldened Japan that had recently defeated Russia, Roosevelt sought ways for Japan to save face while still prohibiting the immigration of Japanese citizens.[3] He worked out a gentleman’s agreement where California would strike the prohibition from its books and tone down the official rhetoric. For their part, the Japanese government promised to quietly prevent any of their citizens from immigrating to the United States. That gentleman’s agreement was short-lived.
To be clear, the above anecdote speaks to the State of California’s desire to prevent any Japanese citizens from immigrating to America. The question of citizenship for them had already been decided: as in, Japanese immigrants weren’t eligible to become naturalized citizens of the United States of America. My point in sharing this historical anecdote is to underline the racial animosity that drove the immigration debates and policy in this country and to demonstrate how the states were acting in their own interests, regardless of how those actions affected the federal government’s interests.
The question remains, though, why were Japanese citizens ineligible to become naturalized citizens of the United States? Well, because they weren’t white.
At this point, readers skeptical of my thesis and CRT’s claims about whiteness can be forgiven for thinking that so far my historical evidence points to white as an ethnic category. I would add that it can point. And that “can” means that its pointing to white as an ethnic category is contingent. Digging deeper into America’s immigration laws reveals that contingency gives way to the reality that whiteness doesn’t point to an ethnic category but to a sociological and political category.
Returning to the Naturalization Act of 1906, the legislation codified at the federal level the previous Naturalization Act of 1870. While keeping the previous provision that white immigrants can become naturalized citizens that had originated with the first Naturalization Act of 1790 that had restricted naturalization only to free whites, the 1870 bill extended the right to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” In other words, freed enslaved Africans and their descendants who were not born in America were made eligible to become naturalized citizens.[4] The 14th Amendment had already granted citizenship to Black people born in America. Already, we can see the categorial political distinctions between white and black. The sociological/political categories enabled Jim Crow era legislation to undermine the progress made during Reconstruction. If race hadn’t been constructed and already codified, Jim Crow laws would’ve lacked teeth. Moving ahead in history to 1923, and it’s revealed that the Supreme Court not only codified whiteness as a political category but, by extension, codified race as a political category, too.
In 1923, United States versus Bhagat Singh Thind hit the high court’s docket. Ten years earlier, Bhagat arrived in America from India to further his college education. After the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was honorably discharged after serving as a sergeant in the war. Upon his return, Bhagat was granted citizenship by the State of Washington. Four days later, his citizenship was taken back. He tried again in 1920, and once again was granted citizenship by the State of Oregon. This time, though, the Bureau of Naturalization, a bureau created by the Naturalization Act of 1906, bumped up against the rulings of the lower courts. It was taken to the Supreme Court where arguments were heard in January of 1923.
Bhagat’s argument was that based on anthropological definitions, he was Caucasian. Which is true. While he was Indian, his caste has long been understood to be of Aryan descent. If the word “white” in the Naturalization Act of 1906 was an ethnic category, Bhagat’s case was airtight. For their part, SCOTUS, as articulated in Justice George Sutherland’s decision (the decision was unanimous), stated that Bhagat’s argument that he was Caucasian was correct. The Court agreed with him on that point.
But … and there’s always a “but” in these things, Justice Sutherland wrote, “‘Caucasian’ is a conventional word of much flexibility, as a study of literature dealing with racial questions will disclose, and while it and the words ‘white person’ are treated as synonymous for the purpose of that case, they are not of identical meaning.” Sutherland argued that while Indians were the same ethnicity as Caucasians, “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.”
Bhagat was declared Caucasian but was also declared as not white.
Unmistakably inserting into American jurisprudence the divorce of whiteness from ethnicity, Justice Sutherland openly admitted that the sociological and political concept of white was privileged in America. CRT argues that that privilege still exists – that it’s deeply codified culturally and legally. Even now, in 2023, lawyers and judges continue to cite as good precedence thousands of cases involving the protection of slavery.[5]
That, however, pulls us into the deep and complex world of legal theory. As stated above, my objective with this article is not to make a full-orbed argument for whiteness as a sociological and political concept. If you’re interested in learning more, I can point you to sources that make that argument. My objective has been to merely uncover a small piece of the concept to help CRT skeptics begin to see that maybe, just maybe, CRT has a point.
(Postscript: Bhagat Singh Thind became a US citizen in 1936. The State of New York made WWI veterans eligible regardless of race. Also, he’s not to be confused with the Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh who was executed in 1931 by the British colonial authorities. Bhagat Singh Thind earned his PhD and became a notable religion and philosophy scholar with many published books.)
[1] Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care (New York: Random House, 2022), 72.
[2] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 85.
[3] Ironically, Teddy R. LOVED war before becoming president and again after leaving office. While occupying the Oval Office, though, his warmongering was temporarily replaced with caution and reticent to engage. He had several opportunities to plunge this country into war, but chose diplomacy every time (sometimes secretly, which was also out of character for him). I shudder to think what would have happened if he had been elected in 1912 when he ran as a third party candidate. At that point, he viewed himself as God’s warrior chosen to fight Armageddon. His words, not mine – read his speech he delivered at the Republican National Convention in 1912.
[4] The act also required applicants for citizenship to learn English.
[5] See this article for a starting point into that discussion.
Practically Known Theology 