US v. Thind and the Rhetorical Labors of “Where Are You From?”

Abstract

This paper returns to United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind to take a closer look at the rhetorical logics within the case to understand how race-making discourses solidify the place of South Asian Americans within racial hierarchies. The author contends, an engagement with the rhetorical racialization of Bhagat Singh Thind throughout his trial provides an opportunity to unravel the racial dimensions of the question “Where are you from?”—a kind of historical origin story and illumination of the work of a phrase endemic to the Asian American experience. The question is deployed as a synecdochal framework for capturing the configuration of ocular and geographic ways Thind, and Asian Americans generally, are racialized. This essay argues, through a rhetorical criticism of Thind’s brief, Justice George Sutherland’s majority opinion, and the US brief against Thind, the Supreme Court deployed spatial and temporal discourses as rhetorical mechanisms that racially sutured Thind to a particular spacetime beyond the ostensible boundaries of whiteness. Tracing these discourses illuminates how Thind’s brownness became a coded index of white supremacist conceptions of origin, contributing to a conceptual collapse between the ocular, spatial, and temporal. The paper also argues, the oft-cited phrase “Where are you from?” functions as a rhetorical process of producing race that rests upon spatiotemporal assumptions. The question operates as a racial-ontological query to locate the primacy of whiteness and dislocate “questionably ethnic” people. Interrogating the racial and rhetorical labors of “Where are you from?” shifts the query from the status of a microaggression to a powerful practice of racialization.