United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that Bhagat Singh Thind, who was a high caste Punjabi Sikh, settled in Oregon, could not be a naturalized citizen of the United States, despite the fact that anthropologists had defined the people in India as belonging to the Caucasian race. The ruling followed a decision in Takao Ozawa v. United States, where the same court had ruled that a light-skinned native of Japan could not be counted as "white", because "white" meant "Caucasian". In Bhagat Singh Thind, the court seemed to contradict itself, ruling that Thind was not a "white person" as used in "common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man."
