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As white men of comfort and privilege living in an age of limited social mobility, of course, Stoddard and the Buchanans in his audience had nothing literal to fear. Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their classs political and cultural power than to the perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned
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Theres no better example of the eras insecurities than the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, in which an Indian American veteran of World War I sought to become a naturalized citizen by proving that he was Caucasian. The Court considered new anthropological studies that expanded the definition of the Caucasian race to include Indians, and the justices even agreed that traces of Aryan blood coursed through Thinds body. But these technicalities availed him little. The Court determined that Thind was not white in accordance with the understanding of the common man and therefore could be excluded from the statutory category of whiteness.
The End of White America? - The Atlantic (January/February 2009)