In January, we’ll publish Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. The book examines a hidden history of transnational cooperation towards the freedom of the “colored world.” Below, Slate considers the role of that sort of solidarity within America’s evolving racial composition.
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Fifty years from now, the United States will no longer have a “white” majority. The significance of this demographic change will hinge on what it means to be non-white or, in an oft-repeated but ill-defined phrase, a “person of color.”
Take the case of Nikki Haley, the Indian American governor of South Carolina. In January 2011, Benjamin Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged Haley to stop flying the Confederate flag in front of the state capitol. Jealous appealed to Haley as South Carolina’s “first governor of color,” referenced the history of linkages between the civil rights movement and the Indian freedom struggle, and challenged Haley to consider, “What would Gandhi do?” His historical references might have been different if Jealous had known that Haley, when asked to identify her race on South Carolina’s official voter registration card, had checked the box for “white.”
As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, for much of American history, immigrants from India had to claim legal whiteness if they wished to become citizens. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, naturalization was expanded to those of African descent. All other ethnic groups were relegated to a gray zone in which citizenship rights depended on proof of whiteness.
Between 1908 and 1922, at least sixty-nine Indians gained United States citizenship by successfully claiming to be white. In Savannah, Georgia in 1910, Abba Dolla, a native of Calcutta, arranged for a doctor to testify to his “pure Caucasian blood.” The presiding judge described Dolla as follows: “The applicant’s complexion is dark, eyes dark, features regular and rather delicate, hair very black, wavy and very fine and soft.” Uncertain about Dolla’s racial identity, the judge asked him to pull up his shirt sleeves. Fortunately for Dolla, the judge concluded, “The skin of his arm where it had been protected from the sun and weather by his clothing was found to be several shades lighter than that of his face and hands, and was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly.” Impressed, the judge granted citizenship.
The ability of Indians to gain legal whiteness ended in 1923, when the Supreme Court ruled against granting citizenship to a U.S. Army veteran, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh American like Nikki Haley. After 1923, many Indian Americans came to connect their persecution as a racial minority to the struggles of other non-white Americans. Jagjit (J.J.) Singh, an influential Sikh businessman and the leader of the most prominent Indian American organization in the 1930s and 1940s, established close links with Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP. While Mahatma Gandhi inspired opponents of American racism, African American struggles attracted sympathy throughout India. Many Indians came to see themselves as part of a global struggle for the rights of “colored people.”
When, in 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he globalized the color line, referring not only to the “millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea” but also to “the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere.” Over the course of the twentieth century, immigration rendered Du Bois’s inclusive conception of color vital to understanding race within as well as beyond the borders of the United States. While the ethnic diversity of the United States has always exceeded the black/white dichotomy, rapid increases in the population of Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and other non-black people of color has made it especially important to understand the long history of relationships between minority groups. That history can help us understand the origin of tensions between ethnic groups. It can also remind us that inter-ethnic relations have been marked by cooperation as well as tension, cooperation inspired for many by a colored cosmopolitanism.
The racial ambiguity that marks the history of South Asian Americans also colors the history of other ethnic groups. For decades, immigrants from throughout the world struggled to prove their whiteness. Americans from as far afield as the Middle East, Mexico, and Japan marshaled notions of Caucasian identity or pointed to the bare fact of white skin. While immigrants no longer need to prove their whiteness in order to become citizens, the racial ambiguity of many immigrant communities complicates their relationships with each other and with an America struggling with persistent racial inequality and ongoing debates concerning the proper role of race in the public sphere. Will Barack Obama win the Latino vote? Should Korean Americans and Cambodian Americans be lumped together as “Asian Americans” for the purposes of affirmative action? Many of the most pressing issues regarding race in contemporary America relate to the vexed question of what it means to be a “person of color,” a question that hinges on how non-white Americans view each other. The history of colored cosmopolitanism offers hope for a solidarity between non-white Americans that is neither anti-white nor blind to racial inequality. It matters how Nikki Haley understands her racial identity. It matters what she thinks when she walks by that Confederate flag.
