The race riots that took place on the West Coast are one example of how white civilians chose to police race and citizenship on a social level, through organized campaigns of fear and violence. On a parallel level, challenges over race and who “counted” as a citizen were also being waged on a different stage: in court.
As the numbers of South Asians attempting to immigrate and become naturalized citizens increased in the early 20th century, the ambiguous racial legal standards that had been developed to exclude large swaths of non-white immigrants became one arena in which to challenge the existing order. Among the first South Asians to succeed in this battle was a man named Bhicaji Balsara, a Parsi Zoroastrian from Bombay who fought and won a battle in court over his status as a “free white person.” Balsara arrived in the United States around 1900 as a cotton buyer for the Tata Group and settled in New York. He petitioned for citizenship in 1906, and his case was heard before the District Court in the Southern District of New York.
Objections to Balsara’s admittance as a citizen lay largely upon the “free white persons” standard in the Naturalization Act of 1870, but Balsara’s argument was that his “color [was] white and his complexion dark.” He argued that his Parsi ancestry was an indication that he belonged to an “Aryan” race, as Parsis hailed originally from Iran. In the Circuit Court’s ruling, however, serious concerns were raised over accepting “white persons” as a broader category, including Aryan, Caucasian, and Indo-European groups, which, at the time, were seen as distinct from categories of white people in the United States and Europe. At this time, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Irish had also not “become white,” both on social and legal levels, in the American context. To expand the acceptance to all white persons, the Court stated, "will bring in not only the Parsees… which is perhaps the purest Aryan type, but also Afghans, Hindus, Arabs and Berbers.” Newspaper coverage at the time publicly mused their fears that a precedent set in Balsara's favor would create a "loophole for little brown men and big brown men." At the same time, the Court identified Balsara’s “high character” and “exceptional intelligence,” stating that a higher court must examine this issue.
As this debate took place, the Department of Justice released a 145-page brief explaining why Parsis would not be considered as “free white persons.” Their brief cited multiple first-hand accounts of Western travellers in Persia and India describing the inhabitants as “swarthy of complexion,” and argued broadly that the Naturalization Act’s racial standard was intended to only include Europeans and people of European descent. The Circuit Court of Appeals eventually heard Balsara’s case in 1910, and ultimately ruled against the argument laid out in the DoJ’s brief. Their ruling ultimately stated that Parsis were not to be mixed up with other Indians, singling out “Hindus” as the “swarthy” population. Parsis, on the other hand, could be considered as white and as constituting a community “as distinct from the Hindus as are the English who dwell in India.” Many interested parties watched as this ruling came down, including New York's Syrian-American community, who hoped that a positive ruling in Balsara's case could help establish a precedent to be used in their own naturalization cases.
Indeed, United States v. Balsara did have a profound legal impact on the question of South Asian naturalization in the 20th century. The Court’s decision left myriad other ethno-religious communities in South Asia — Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, and Jews — in a legal gray area. Were they to be accepted only if they could demonstrate ancestry from a “white race”? What was even more confusing was that the decision over the status of Parsis was not definite. Twenty years after the Balsara decision, the same New York Circuit Court rejected the petition of another Parsi man from Bombay, Rustom Dadabhoy Wadia, who came to the United States in 1923 and lived on New York’s Lower East Side with his American wife, Gladys Voorhees. In their ruling, the Court insisted that the “common understanding” of “white person” be applied in such cases as Wadia’s, thus establishing that a common-sense interpretation of whiteness would exclude any South Asian heritage. This, combined with severely tightened national immigration quotas, created barriers toward naturalization that would require years of struggle to undo.