| Abstrakt: |
This paper examines the landmark 1923 Supreme Court case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, alongside the Hindutva response to a 2020 landmark case, California Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Cisco Systems Inc. These two cases are in many ways different: while Thind was confronting racial prerequisite laws concerning citizenship, the Hindu right (or Hindutva) is protesting the inclusion of caste in antidiscrimination laws. Yet, reading these together enables us to see how upper-caste South Asians have historically mobilized caste to uphold not only Brahminical, but also white supremacy. While much work on race and caste highlights the parallels between racism and casteism as descent-based discriminations, I illuminate how they intersect, shaping immigrant struggles to establish belonging and rights in the United States. Caste served as a lynchpin for Thind's case. Thind and his legal team used caste to prove the purity of Thind's "Aryan blood" and therefore his whiteness and eligibility for citizenship. In doing so, they also reproduced anti-Blackness. Though the Supreme Court rejected Thind's argument, it retained the idea that caste, race, and blood are linked. Nearly a century later, Hindutva's response to Cisco appears to want to abolish caste by not naming it. Yet, read alongside the rise of the language of "merit" and "castelessness" in India, and the move to "colorblindness" and model minority racialization in the United States, their "caste-blind" agenda bolsters both Brahminical and white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
