“A blood mixture which experience has shown furnishes the very highest grade of citizen-material”: Selective Assimilation in a Polynesian Case of Naturalization to U.S. Citzenship |
American Studies (ISSN: ISSN 0026-3079)
Volume 45, Number 3 (Fall 2004)
pages 33-48
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology
Wesleyan University
On the 11th of July, 1928, the front page of the Honolulu Pacific Advertiser read: “75 per cent white blood satisfies U.S.” The article reported what seems to be the landmark decision of U.S. District Court Judge William Lymer to allow a racially mixed Pacific Islander—Alfred Milner Stephen—to naturalize to U.S. citizenship. While the discussion focused on naturalization and citizenship, in Stephen’s case, blood racialization also played a key role. By blood quantum logic, Stephen was identified as three-quarters English and one-quarter Polynesian, the latter inherited from his mother, who was referred to as “half English and half Polynesian.” Judge Lymer argued that Stephen’s “predominance” of “white blood” qualified him for citizenship.
In 1790, when Congress passed a law to establish a uniform standard for naturalization—the Nationality Act—it was limited to “all free white persons.” Although Congress amended the Nationality Act in 1870, it did so only to conform to the intent of the Reconstruction amendments by expanding eligibility for naturalization only to “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” (Ancheta 1998, 23). Judge Lymer, who made clear that he was determining whether Stephen was a “white person” within the meaning of the 1870 nationality law, made him, in the words of Ian Haney Lopez, “white by law” (1996)…
…However, the justifications for racial prerequisites changed. For over thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries courts assumed that scientific evidence and common knowledge were consistent in defining who was “white.” But, as contradictions between scientific evidence and common knowledge became more pronounced (e.g. as when anthropologists classified some dark-skinned people as Caucasians), courts increasingly came to rely on common knowledge justifications alone (Lopez 1996, 7).
The Stephen case revealed the confusion surrounding the “scientific” and “common knowledge” definitions of whiteness. In petitioning for naturalization, Stephen was challenging longstanding legal precedent based on “scientific evidence” and “common knowledge,” but, as courts increasingly relied on the latter, it became apparent that the two definitions could no longer be reconciled. Judge Lymer reflected this problem when he remarked that the Stephen case was the first time a federal court had considered status of a person with “more than half white blood” and “less than one half Polynesian, Malay, or Oriental blood.” The Stephen case reveals the complicated intersections of race and nation in early twentieth-century American culture.
This essay discusses the rationales that guided the judge’s decision. It was the “predominance” of whiteness mixed with Stephen’s “Polynesian blood” that made the difference in the court’s decision. But that factor alone did not motivate Judge Lymer’s decision. Pervasive notions about the potential for Hawaiians to assimilate and to fulfill the requirements of American citizenship were also crucial in this ruling. Although the court recognized Stephen as Polynesian, it deemed him white enough to become American. Stephen could be de-racialized as a legal subject in the courtroom because of racial logic that assumed the easy assimilation of Polynesians based on the historical treatment of racially mixed Hawaiians. Hawaiians and some other Pacific Islanders—in this case Stephen was identified as a Polynesian who came from “Neuru Island”—were inconsistently incorporated into whiteness through a process of selective assimilation. That is, they were selectively incorporated as whites when racially mixed (depending on degree), where white “blood”—in relation to indigenous “blood”—has been figured as a solvent…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: American Studies, J. Kehaulani Kauanui