In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that to be white means to really be Caucasian and clearly you are not that. Taka'o Azawa is from Japan but he'd been in the US his entire adult life. Like Thinn, Azawa realizes to get ahead in the US he needs to become a citizen. And also like Thinn, he realizes that to do this he needs to prove his whiteness.
The story of Bhagat Singh Thind, and also of Takao Ozawa – Asian immigrants who, in the 1920s, sought to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that they were white in order to gain American citizenship. Thind’s “bargain with white supremacy,” and the deeply revealing results.