Chapter Two: Race and
Citizenship from the
1840s to the 1920s
By Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

People continue to make racial categories and give them
meaning so the idea of race remains in circulation

Describing race as a social, historical, and legal
construction helps us view this categorizing process at
work

White is a privileged category in the U.S. racialized system.
We can see this at work historically in immigration policy,
birth-right citizenship, and naturalization

We can explore how historically the boundaries of
whiteness have been contested.
Pertinent Ideas from Chapter One
Immigration policy and the laws
determining who can become citizens
drew on scientific racism.
 Scientific racism continues to influence
some present day thinkers.
 Different groupings’ histories exemplify
the trajectory of racialization through
their entry into “whiteness.”

Reasons to Examine the Immigration
History of 1840–1924
This included comparative studies to
measure human skulls from so-called
racial groups and then assumptions that
intelligence was associated with bigger
skulls.
 Scientists used flawed methods to
determine that whites were superior to
any other group

Scientific Racism Method for
Measuring Intelligence:
Craniometry
Intelligent testing
 Emerged for purposes of ranking Southern
and Eastern European groups below Northern
and Western groups
 Began by misappropriating an innocent test
that was for bettering children’s education
(Binet’s test)
 Used to determine a person’s or a group’s
finite level of intelligence—the idea that they
could not get any smarter
Scientific Racism Method for
Measuring Intelligence:
Intelligence Testing

Many different kinds of intelligences exist.

Intelligence cannot develop without
education, resources, and nurturing.

One score does not measure intelligence
accurately.

Intelligent tests can be culturally biased.
Intelligence as a Nonmeasurable
Entity
Alfred Binet, inventor
of the first practical
intelligence test.
p. 40: Copyright Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images

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
Eugenics was based on the assumption that
characteristics such as intelligence, ambition,
poverty, and law-breaking were inherited.
Therefore people were divided into fit and
unfit and actual sterilization programs were
put into place to stop those determined to
be “unfit” from having children.
Nordics were at the top of the rankings as
fit—this theory espoused by Madison Grant in
the United States was utilized by Adolph
Hitler in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Scientific Racism Method for
Measuring Intelligence: Eugenics

The Bell Curve in 1995—by Richard
Hernstein and Charles Murray

Race: The Reality of Human Difference
(2004) by Frank Miele and Vincent Sarich

Jason Richwine’s 2009 Ph.D. Dissertation,
“IQ and Immigration Policy”
Ideas about Inherent Inferiority of
Groupings of People Continues
Today

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In the early 1900s, intelligence testing was
done on Southern and Eastern immigrants to
show their “deficient” intelligence.
Madison Grant in writing The Passing of the
Great Race and being part of a congressional
committee on immigration spread his eugenic
ideas.
This lead to immigration quotas on the
entrance of Southern and Eastern Europeans
as immigrants due to their alleged “inferior”
intelligence and behaviors. They were not as
“white” as Nordic immigrants.
Scientific Racism’s Influence on
Immigration Policy

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and
renewals of this policy until 1952
◦ Certificates of Residence mandated for Chinese
and in 1928 legal identity documents required
for other immigrants
• Development of the Border Patrol

Immigration Act of 1917 expanded
barriers for people from India, Burma,
Malay States, Arabia, and Afghanistan
Earlier Exclusions in Immigration
Policies on the Basis of Race and
Class
Chinese family, ca. 1911.
p. 44: National Archives at Seattle, RS 27464, Chin Quan Chan; Seattle District,
Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, Applications to Reenter, c. 1892-1900: Chin Quan Chan
Family, Chinese Exclusion Act Case File, circa 1911

Johnson-Reed Act of 1924—Goal was to
decrease the immigration of any European
group that was not categorized as
“Nordic” through quota system. Mexican
immigration did not have quotas.
Introduced passports and visas as
mandatory.
Immigration Exclusions Continue:
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
Based quotas on the U.S. population, but
sent a message about who did not belong
to the nation by not including four groups
as part of the population numbers:
1. Immigrants from the Western
Hemisphere
2. Asians
3. Descendants of slaves
4. Native Peoples in the U.S.
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
In 1790 only whites born in the United
States benefited from birth-right
citizenship (birth in the U.S. automatically
transferred citizenship rights)
 The 14th Amendment to Constitution
expanded it to blacks and whites in 1866
 United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)
added the right of citizenship to children
born to non-citizens

Birthright Citizenship: Racialized
History
Between 1907 and 1931 women who
married non-citizens and who could not
naturalize or become citizens through a
bureaucratic process lost their citizenship
 1924 Native Americans gained birthright
citizenship
 Nationality Act of 1940 anyone born in the
U.S. was granted citizenship

Birthright Citizenship: Racialized
History
Individuals from multiple groups
petitioned the court for citizenship from
1878 to 1952: Native American, Chinese,
Hawaiian, Burmese, Japanese, Indian,
Syrian, Armenian, Filipino, Arabian,
Mexican, and mixed racial background
 They petitioned on the basis that they
should be considered white.

Naturalization: Racialized History

Two cases exemplify the way whiteness is
a social and legal construct:
Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922)
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923)
Naturalization: Racialized History

Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922)—
Disposition of the case determined that
white skin did not make Ozawa, born in
Japan, white because race science and
common knowledge of the time
determined that Ozawa was not white.
Naturalization: Racialized History

United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
(1923)
This case contradicted the way race
science was used in Ozawa. Despite race
science categorizations, Thind was not
considered white by the courts because
this idea did not match up with common
ideas of who was white at the time.
Naturalization: Racialized History
Today we acknowledge Irish, Italians, and
Jews as white, but when large groupings
of these ethnicities arrived they were not
considered or thought of themselves as
white
 Over time, through aligning themselves
with white identities and not intervening
but joining in on the oppression of blacks,
they embraced white identities.

Group Categorization Change:
Irish, Italians, and Jews become
White
Bhagat Singh Thind.
p. 49: Courtesy of David Thind and the South
Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
After Emancipation and following the
1868 14th Amendment, a window of high
levels of participation in government office
characterized the African American
community in the southern United States.
 Following this short window, a series of
laws and terror organizations were
established to disenfranchise African
Americans.

Struggle for Citizenship: African
Americans and Native Americans
from 1840–1940
Figure 2-1.
Immigration to the United States,
1820–1940
Source: Office of Immigration
Statistics, Department of Homeland Security.
Figure 2-1: Office of Immigration Statistics, Department of Homeland Security
African Americans faced
 Lynchings
 Terror by secret organizations like the Ku
Klux Klan
 Poll taxes before being permitted to vote
 Representations as not being smart, but
as good at manual labor
Struggle for Citizenship: African
Americans and Native Americans from
1840–1940
Native Americans faced:
 Land taken
 Removal to reservations
 Reservation land allotted and the loss of
two-thirds of reservation land base
 Forced boarding schools for children
 Assimilation policies
Struggle for Citizenship: African
Americans and Native Americans from
1840–1940
Cross burning at a
Klan members’ meeting,
circa 1900.
p. 56: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Lynching scene in Texas,
1905: A black man,
accused of having
attacked a white woman,
is hanged immediately
after the charge is made.
p. 57: UIG via Getty Images
Whiteness permeates the history of
immigration, citizenship, and
naturalization
 White racial categorization has changed
across time in social and legal settings
 Communities identified as “non-white”
have historically struggled with legalized
inequality and inequity

Summary