Definitions of whiteness in the United States
[1] According to historian David Roediger, by the 18th century, "white" had become well established as a racial term at a time when the enslavement of African Americans was widespread.
Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a "performance-based" standard, relating to religious practices, culture, education, intermarriage, and a community's role in the US.
During the period when only "white" people could become naturalized US citizens, many court decisions were required to define which ethnic groups were included in this term.
[15][citation needed] Later, as a reaction against Chinese and other East Asian immigrants as competitors of white labor, the Workingmen's Party was created in California.
In a precursor to Brown v. Board, the 1947 federal legal case Mendez v. Westminster fought to take down segregated schools for Mexican American and white students.
[24] Journalist Iris Kuo notes that in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and two employee lawsuits against Google, the anti-affirmative action faction white people aligned with like-minded Asian Americans because they were part of an overrepresented minority.
[29] Minnesota, home to a strong mining industry at the turn of the 20th century, was the stage of several politically-motivated conflicts between laborers and anti-union leaders.
[citation needed] One year after the major strike, the company's superintendent stated: "Their people [the Finns] are good laborers but trouble breeders....
"[30] Acrimony toward Finnish social radicals in Minnesota's political milieu reached a head in the case of John Svan and 15 associates.
Sweet linked the "socialistic ideology" of Finnish radicals with other collectivist East Asian philosophies to underscore his position that Finns were of an Asiatic frame of mind that was out of harmony with American thought.
[30][31][32] In the beginning of the 20th century, there was a lot resentment from the local American population toward the Finnish settlers because they were seen as having very different customs, and were slow in learning English.
According to Franklin, the only exception to this were Germans of Saxon descent, "who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.
Bernstein notes that Irish Americans were not targeted by laws against interracial marriage, were allowed to attend whites-only schools, were classified as white in the Jim Crow South, and were never subjected to anti-Irish immigration restrictions.
[40] In certain parts of the South during the Jim Crow era, Italians "occupied a racial middle ground within the otherwise unforgiving, binary caste system of white-over-black".
[43] Emigration from Italy to the United States began before Italian unification and reached its peak at a time when regional differences were still very strong and marked.
[citation needed] It was not until the 1980s after years of protest from Chicanos that the United States government created the term Hispanic to classify all peoples who come from Spanish-speaking countries.
They were allowed to acquire US citizenship upon arrival; served in all-white units during World War II; could vote and hold elected office in places such as Texas, especially San Antonio; ran the state politics and constituted most of the elite of New Mexico since colonial times; and went to segregated white schools in Central Texas and Los Angeles.
They based their strategy on a 1924 law that barred entry to immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship, and at that point, only blacks and whites, and not Asians or Native Americans, could naturalize and become US citizens.
The test case came in December 1935, when a Buffalo, New York judge rejected Jalisco native Timoteo Andrade's application for citizenship on the grounds that he was a "Mexican Indian".
Caribbean countries such as Cuba,[62][63][64] the US territory of Puerto Rico, and especially the Dominican Republic have a complex ethnic heritage since they include Indigenous and African legacies.
Africans were forcibly transported to the islands throughout the colonial period (and indeed blacks accompanied the first Spanish explorers, with more arriving to harvest sugar in the 18th century prior to the American Revolution).
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, European Jews in the United States were legally classified as white, but were frequently described as "Mongoloid" or "Asiatic" by advocates of scientific racism.
[68][69] A 1909 Census Bureau ruling related to the case of George Shishim[70] to classify Syrians as "Mongolians", thus non-white and ineligible for citizenship, caused American Jewish leaders to fear that Jews would be denied naturalization like other "Asiatic" groups.
Bernstein notes that Jews were not targeted by laws against interracial marriage, were allowed to attend whites-only schools, and were classified as white in the Jim Crow South.
[85] According to Sarah Gualtieri, Shishim's "legal battle to prove his whiteness began after he arrested the son of a prominent lawyer for disturbing the peace.
Judge Frank Hutton, who presided over the case, cited legal precedent ruling that the term "white person" included Syrians.
A US circuit court judge in Boston, ruling on a citizenship application by four Armenians, overruled government objections and found that West Asians were so mixed with Europeans that it was impossible to tell whether they were white or should be excluded as part of the "yellow race".
[94] In 1909, Bhicaji Balsara became the first Indian to gain US citizenship, as a Zoroastrian Parsi he was ruled to be "the purest of Aryan type" and "as distinct from Hindus as are the English who dwell in India".
Almost thirty years later, the same circuit court to accept Balsara ruled that Rustom Dadabhoy Wadia, another Parsi also from Bombay was not white and therefore not eligible to receive US citizenship.
[95] In 1923, the US Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of Indian descent were not "white" men, and thus not eligible for citizenship.
