White Citizenship and Asian Americans’ Subalternity: Takao Ozawa, Bhagat Singh Thind, and Easurk Emsen Charr

White Citizenship and Asian Americans’ Subalternity: Takao Ozawa, Bhagat Singh Thind, and Easurk Emsen Charr

By analyzing two United States Supreme Court cases of Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), this paper highlights the power of whiteness in making of the subject of Asian Americans. Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind sought American citizenship by trying to prove that they were white. It suggests that both of them thoroughly internalized the value of whiteness. Unlike Ozawa and Thind, however, Easurk Emsen Charr oscillated between the assimilated immigrants and the permanent foreigners. By examining Charr’s autobiography The Golden Mountain: The Autobiography of a Korean Immigrant, 1895-1960, this paper emphasizes the intractability of Asian Americans, which is irreducible to whiteness, in order to identify the emergence of their subalternity within dominant discourse.