Euphoria Metamorphosing into Despair

It is amazing to learn how quickly a bit of euphoria can turn into despair. No matter how I tried to contain my optimism, it cannot be denied that I was fairly euphoric after the interview (with those smiles and “see you again”). There was of course this doubt in my mind toward the unfounded optimism as I was not the one who would decide. The doubt is now growing each moment. Last night, A told me that in his own country those who have not selected are not notified of the negative result. Oh yeah, how naïve I was. However, believing I am among the short-listed, should I not expect to be notified whatever result it is? Pessimism > Optimism

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“At Canaan’s Edge” gave us this interesting information about race: … Scientists seldom agreed even on the number of categories, as [Thomas] Huxley [of England, the inventor of the term “agnostic”] counted four races, Joseph Deniker seventeen, Ernst Haeckel thirty-six. Proposed systems faltered on skillful demand for verification, often by Franz Boas of Columbia University, because the skulls of Lithuanians unaccountably matched those of Ethiopians…

The Supreme Court settled the statutory meaning [of “white person”] twice within three months, holding first in November of 1922 that “the words ‘white person’ are synonymous with the words ‘a person of the Caucasian race.’” This anthropological standard doomed the citizenship petition of Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant of twenty-eight years’ residence, who had submitted evidence of his own white skin along with scholarly opinions that “in Japan the uncovered parts of the body are also white.” The test of “mere color,” while obvious, had proved “manifestly… impracticable,” declared a unanimous Court, citing expert accord that skin tone “differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races.”

Only weeks later, the Justices were plainly vexed to hear in arguments for Bhagat Singh Thind that their own experts considered high-caste Punjabi Indians along with certain Polynesians and Hamites to be of Caucasian descent. Even worse, the racial term “Caucasian” appeared to rest on a single specimen in the collection of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, who in 1795 had conjectured from the resemblance to his German skulls that ancient Europeans may have lived near the specimen’s retrieval site in the Caucasus mountains of Russia. The Justices reversed the Ozawa test with howls of newfound contempt for “the speculations of the ethnologist,” again unanimously. “What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech,” wrote Justice George Sutherland, “to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” The Thind decision not only threw up expendable barriers to citizenship but also supported a wave of federal denaturalization actions and state laws against land ownership by Asians… (pp. 341-342)