"An Invisible Design": Asian Americans and the Making of Whiteness in the Early Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. immigration and naturalization policies functioned as an ideology that imagined America as a racially homogeneous space and Americans as white. And such a project of imagining the nation required an orientalist discourse that constituted Asian Americans as the undesirable "Other" in America. This essay undertakes an analysis of such a language of race embedded in the immigration and naturalization policies in such a way as to demonstrate the historical nature of whiteness. These policies, often devised not in a vacuum but in the unsymmetrical geopolitics, made paranoid efforts to keep America's "normalcy," while always suspecting its own "purity." It thus reveals the schizophrenic dimension of whiteness. By examining the Supreme Court cases (Takao Ozawa v. United States in 1922 and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923), this essay also argues that the meaning of whiteness was unstable and there was no external referent to determine its meaning. This essay maintains that whiteness was a discursive reality because its meaning was structured by the systems of difference from Asian Americans. Although Asian Americans were the undesirable "Other" in the early twentieth century, this essay suggests that they were a "constitutive outside" that was required as part of the necessary conditions for the making of whiteness.