All bunched up

Hispanics may think they are white, as Bhagat Singh Thind also did, but the American census is obviously as dismissive of their pretensions as the American supreme court was of Thind’s fantasy. Otherwise, there would have been no talk of whites being reduced to a minority by 2042, when they will account for 46 per cent of the American population, since Hispanics are expected to account for another 30 per cent. Not just Britain, as The Times, London, once lamented, but the world is headed for the saving grace of “a coffee-coloured” future.

Colour and race are moveable feasts. We know from E.M. Forster that whites “are really pinko-grey” and from Julian Huxley that race is a pseudo-scientific term. How pseudo is evident in Singapore where Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans are lumped as Indian. My efforts to enter Indo-Aryan for “Race” were brushed aside: I had to choose one of 15 categories of Indian. A Filipino friend’s self-description of Malay was also unacceptable. He was Christian and everyone knew Malays are Muslim. He pleaded that His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip II of Spain had given the Philippines its name but not fathered 91 million Filipinos. In vain. Filipino, like Indian, is a race for Singapore’s national registration department.

Colour is another conundrum. Forster’s Fielding gave great offence with his pinko-grey comment because if white referred only to skin, pallid Parsis and rosy-cheeked Kashmiris would steal a march over sunburnt sahibs. White stood for superior. Black for inferior. Both the warring Whites (Fascists, so called after White Russians) and Reds (Bolsheviks) in Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious novel, Scoop, were Negroes.

Aware of the pitfalls of a too literal interpretation, the Americans invented a legal variant of what New Orleans streetcar conductors called the floating Mason-Dixon line. The original Mason-Dixon line separated the slave states from the rest, but the one I saw was a loose board separating the black rear from the white front of the carriage. It was moved up to accommodate more passengers when the track ran through black areas, and shifted back when whites were expected to predominate. The young conductor I chatted with talked gleefully of the fun they used to have suddenly moving the board behind a solitary black passenger.

American law was equally capricious. The supreme court turned down Takao Ozawa’s citizenship application in 1922 on the grounds that though light-skinned, Japanese were not Caucasians. Possibly encouraged by that argument, Thind, who went to the United States of America in 1913 and fought with the American forces in World War I, claimed citizenship as “a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and therefore) white”. But it was damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The court ruled that while the Amritsar-born Thind may have had “purity of Aryan blood” and would be “classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race” he was not white as used in “common speech” or in “the understanding of the common man”.

Eleven years earlier, another judge had similarly rejected Akhay Kumar Mozumdar’s application because he did not “look like” a North European Caucasian. Mozumdar, a respected religious teacher who travelled to Palestine, China and Japan before reaching the US in 1903, argued in his appeal that high-caste Hindus “consider themselves to be members of the Aryan race” and call India “Aryavarta which means land of the Aryans”. Whether or not Hitler would have been impressed, his casteist elitist plea won over the appeal judge and Mozumdar became the father of today’s bustling Indian-American community.

Alas, Thind’s failure led to Mozumdar’s citizenship being revoked. A stroke of the judicial pen changed his colour. As Associate Justice George Sutherland found in Thind’s case, Aryans, even of the highest castes in “the extreme northwestern districts of India” where one might expect genetic purity, suffer from an “intermixture of blood” with the “dark-skinned Dravidian” races. Presumably this explained the resolution passed that year by Allahabad’s municipal board, chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru, deploring the treatment of Indians in the US. Seeing themselves as white, like Mozumdar and Thind, though destined to lead non-whites against white domination, Indian politicians resented the rebuff on grounds of colour.

Sutherland’s ruling boasted a legal basis. The US is the only country in the world to observe the “one drop rule”, meaning that no one with even a trace of non-white ancestry (however small or invisible) can be considered white. Calcutta’s own Queenie of the eponymous novel got away despite whispered sniggers but the rule led to confusion over the singer, Mariah Carey, who was accused of being “another white girl trying to sing black”. Carey told Larry King that despite looking white and having been raised mainly by her white mother, she did not feel she was white because of the one drop rule. There’s a poser there for Barack Obama.

But laws are made by men, not men by laws. Even if the supreme court ruled in 1923 that Indians were not “free white men” — the Immigration Act’s qualification for naturalization — the census decided that Indians are white. South Africa’s expedient of treating the Japanese as “honorary white” had already underlined the merit of gainful flexibility. The restaurant manager at Houston airport who showed G.L. Mehta, India’s ambassador, and his secretary to a separate room because she took them for Negroes, retorted when pressure mounted that she recognized them as VIPs who could not eat with the common herd.

Four decades later, poor P.V. Narasimha Rao was the victim of American race blinkers. Fearing Khalistani, Kashmiri or Tamil Tiger rebels, his security chief asked his Boston hotel not to allow any south Asian near him. One non-white being the same as another to the management, “no African-American could carry his bags, no Asian could clean his room, no Latinos could serve him food,” shrieked the New York Times. He “had to be served by whites only, American or European”. The prime minister was accused of “fostering racial discrimination” when two African-American hotel employees, a night bellman and a porter, said they had been shifted to other duties. Though Narasimha Rao was blissfully unaware of the row, it looked as if he also nursed the self-image of Mozumdar and Thind.

Scientists claim that at least a third of American blacks have white DNA. Similarly, Britain’s white population has absorbed the black pages who were fashionable in the 18th century. Nor can Sukarno’s claim that Bandung ushered in a “century of the awakening of the coloured peoples” have pleased participants who reportedly spent their nights straightening crinkly hair and daubing themselves with lightening cream. As for Hispanics, Nehru noted that they always ranked fairly low in the international pecking order. Britain was followed, after a long gap, by the white population of the old dominions and by Anglo-Saxon Americans (“not dagoes, wops, etc.”). Then came Western Europeans, the rest of Europe, Latin South Americans, and, after another long gap, “the brown, yellow and black races of Asia and Africa, all bunched up more or less together”.

Now, we might at last be witnessing the beginnings of a reversal of the effects of the great trek out of Africa that in the course of many millennia transformed migrant humanity by adjusting pigmentation to the environment. Only this time, the process will be speeded by what the language of apartheid called miscegenation. The market for wheat-complexioned brides might slump. Bad news, too, for those whose skin whiteners are regularly advertised on TV. The café au lait future might also deal its death blow to varna, caste, the world’s oldest colour bar, on which Mozumdar and Thind relied.