'Yellow' Skin, 'White' Masks: Asian American 'Impersonations' of Whiteness and the Feminist Critique of Liberal Equality

Abstract

In two historical Supreme Court cases from the early part of the twentieth century, when only whites and blacks could be United States citizens, two Asian American immigrants made the startling move of claiming that they were "white" and, therefore, deserved to be naturalized. The two petitioners - Takao Ozawa and Baghat Singh Thind - claimed they were white by dint of skin color, anthropological evidence, culture, and various other qualities suggesting they "belonged" to America. The petitioners' claims resonated with one central message: "I am just like you." Thind's and Ozawa's claims ultimately failed. The petitioners were denied citizenship because the Supreme Court, not surprisingly, held that they did not qualify as "white," and that despite their claims to the con-trary, Ozawa and Thind were just "different." These cases are instructive not only for what they tell us about racial hierarchy and barriers faced by Asian Americans at the time, but also for what they say about current issues surrounding Asian American identity and the ineffectiveness of claiming sameness when one will invariably be labeled as different. Ozawa's and Thind's claims to whiteness and its attendant privilege serve as stark historical examples of a current phenomenon exhibited by some Asian Americans today: making assimilationist claims to the privilege of dominant, white culture in contem-porary debates implicating the concerns of Asian Americans. Echoes of Ozawa's and Thind's claims to whiteness sound throughout the rhetorical positions that some Asian Americans have assumed in current debates, includ-ing affirmative action. In this debate, the controversial "model minority myth" has served as the foundation for Asian Americans' claims resembling Ozawa's and Thind's, claims assuring racial insiders, "I am just like you." This paper situates these historical and current claims to whiteness by Asian Americans in the context of Catharine MacKinnon's feminist critique of the liberal model of equality, which forces those seeking "equality" to claim similarity to dominant norms. By virtue of traditional equal protection doctrine's "similarly situated" require-ment, those who are the same must be treated equally, and conversely, those who are different may be treated as such. MacKinnon's critique demonstrates how women seeking gender equality and racial minorities seeking racial equality, at the very least, face a patent unfairness insofar as they are required to equate themselves with their oppressors to remedy the conditions of their subordination. Furthermore, at worst, women and racial minorities face a doctrinal trap in which they are never meant to gain equality, since women and racial minorities are socially de-fined as "different." Equality claims ultimately collapse inward, as they are founded on a disingenuous struc-ture that treats sameness and difference as exact opposites, when, in actuality, they bear a hierarchical relationship to one another, with "difference" masking the subordination of women and racial minorities. Therefore, the "dif-ference" that these rights seekers must overcome is actually the subordinated positions they hold in gender and racial hierarchies, respectively. MacKinnon's critique of the liberal equality model's foundation in sameness and difference underscores the im-possibility of historical and contemporary claims to whiteness by Asian Americans. Despite their valiant efforts to show that they did indeed belong, Ozawa and Thind failed to overcome the social understanding of their ineluctable difference. Ozawa's and Thind's assertions that they were the same as whites (in fact, that they were white) act as a metaphor for the claims of some of today's Asian Americans, whose claims to white privilege belie the particulari-ties and "difference" of today's Asian Americans. This paper explores examples, both old and new, that reveal the falsity of claiming similarity to a white norm in the face of the real, race-based structural inequities facing many Asian Americans that constitute their "difference." In addition, this paper aims to highlight how Ozawa's, Thind's and contemporary Asian Americans' claims to white privilege by "claiming sameness" ultimately reinforce the white privilege to which these claimants aspire.