The past is yet to come: Film, race, citizenship, and a century of diasporic outlaws in the United States

ABSTRACT

This essay examines some of the social contexts underlying the Supreme Court’s decision in the seminal case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Since the Court’s decision in that case established that whiteness in the U.S. was based on ‘common’ sense, this essay examines how this ‘common’ sense was created in the public sphere. This essay presents arguments on how film, and in particular, the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, helped cement popular understandings of whiteness. Through these arguments, this essay provides further context to some of the social and political underpinnings of the Thind case.

KEYWORDS:

• Bhagat Singh Thind
• Sikh
• supreme court
• ethnic studies
• South Asian American studies
• film studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Historian John Hope Franklin has written in detail about the circulation of the film in the White House, the Supreme Court, New York, and elsewhere, as well as about protests raised against its screenings. (Franklin 1979, 426)

2 To make the numbers less abstract, it is worth noting that in 1920, the population of the United States was just slightly over 100 million people. This infers that one in four people in the U.S. had seen the film within five years of its release. In contrast, by 1946, the national population had grown to over 140 million people; the viewership statistics on the film within this 31-year period reveal that the film had been seen by 200 million people. Further, by 1946, the film had earned $18 million in just a few years since its release, a number that equates to over $1.8 billion in the present day (Corliss 2015).

3 In a more contemporary context, at present, six other films have surpassed this number in terms of global box office grosses. In order, they are, Avatar (2009, $2.9 billion), Avengers: Endgame (2019, $2.8 billion), Titanic (1997, $2.2 billion), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015, $2.1 billion), Avengers: Infinity War (2018, $2 billion), and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021, $1.9 billion) (Smith 2022).

4 For instance, The Sunday Puget Sound American published an article in 1906, titled, “Have we a dusky peril?” The article also had illustrations showing Sikh men with beards and turbans, including a depiction of a turbaned snake charmer (Puget Sound American 1906). San Francisco Call also published an article iin 1906, titled, “Our First Invasion by Hindus and Mohammedans” (San Francisco Call 1906) The article contains illustrations of Sikh men with beards and turbans, disembarking from a ship. The article’s title and the accompanying illustrations create much ambiguity for the publication’s audiences, conflating ethnicity, race, and religion.

5 One of the arguments by Thind that stands out due to its subversion of the construction of whiteness is a point he takes directly from the Dictionary of Races or Peoples, a report commissioned in 1911 by the United States. Thind cites a section of how this dictionary defines “Caucasian,” citing that it states, “Although the white race would be supposed to be the one best understood, it is really the one about which there is the most fundamental and sometimes violent discussion” (United States and Dillingham 1911, 30–31).