Talk:United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind

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Effects of Decision content was taken from http://www.iacfpa.org/iahist.htm. Approval from iacfpa pending.

  • Fixed. Content rewritten, doesn't infringe on iacfpa now.

I'm Removing 2 out of 3 rule

The Supreme Court determined that to be part of the White Race a region needed to be 2 out of 3 things: white-skinned, Caucasian, and from the West. The Indian Subcontinent was determined to neither be white-skinned nor from the West, being only Caucasian, so they were determined to not be part of the White Race. Similarly, the Far East was determined to be neither Caucasian nor from the West, only being white-skinned, so they were determined to not be part of the White Race. Therefore, people from the Indian Subcontinent are Asian because they’re Asian “from the East”.

I cannot find any evidence backing the above stance from the 1922 supreme court cases. All articles I show that Sutherland found Thind ineligible on the basis of the "common man's understanding of 'white'" and not an any objective quantitative metric.


If that is true, I find it interesting that they would determine one has to only fit 2 of those criteria. There are actually quite a few light skinned people from India. Inforazer 16:35, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Economic competition

The article currently says nothing about the major motivation to define and exclude Asians: because they were seen as plentiful cheap labor successfully competing with and displacing white labor. Tall, Caucasian-appearing Punjabi Sikhs were defined as nonwhite and excluded because they were seen as part of this threat, they were at the time and place (early 20th century rural California) where this anxiety was at a maximum, and did not have any constituency or preexisting community in the US. Middle Easterners of similar appearance were not excluded because they were not perceived as as much of a threat to white dominance.

Without this background, Wikipedians keep puzzling over the contradictions in the scientific evidence cited in these cases, which was not the logic really driving Asian exclusion. --JWB 01:31, 22 July 2007 (UTC)