by unscientific men

Ridiculing the claim thatlanguage could serve as an accurate proxy for race, the Court retortedthat “history has witnessed the adoption of the English tongue by mil-lions of Negroes, whose descendants can never be classified racially withthe descendants of white persons notwithstanding both may speak a com-mon root language.

repudiated

ven whileinsisting on their separation in the popular imagination

Addressing Thind’s two-part argument, the Court did not dispute hisfirst assertion, that, as an Asian Indian, he was a “Caucasian.” The Courtconceded this point, albeit tangentially and without grace, writing: “Itmay be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have acommon ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average manknows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differ-ences between them today.”31

eat divisionsdo not exist; instead of lines one sees only clines,

skin color does not correlate well with racialidentity

Ozawa argued that to reject his petition would be “to exclude aJapanese who is ‘white’ in color

I do not have any connection with any Japanese churches or schools, orany Japanese organizations here or elsewhere

General Benedict Arnold

The Court’s eventualembrace of common knowledge confirms the falsity of natural notions ofrace, exposing race instead as a social product measurable only in termsof what people believe

common knowledge.