The Supreme Court could have said to him, don't bring those ugly arguments in here, right? If this were the Jeffersonian, all men are created equal country. They rejected him for entirely other reasons, namely that he wasn't white or white enough. You know, that rhetoric of the law is powerful. And it says a lot again about sort of where we were less than a hundred years ago.
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.