Monsoons & Memories

Only a few days before school starts up again! Specifically, this weekend plus Mon/Tues!

Thankfully I did manage to get some stuff done this summer -- made 3 drum stands and refurbished 2 more, did a ton of tie-dye (still a little more to do), and I feel ~80% done with the current round of house organization. Drew my July 4th comic, finished and posted a Batfam fic. Did the family visit trip to Vermont/Ithaca NY/Connecticut (got in a car accident, thankfully only got some scrapes that are ... mostly healed). Also dabbled a bit with block printing, and mostly wrapped up the comics anthology for this year (what's left is doing some test prints). So not bad for summer!

The last big item on my to-do list is to get my next Asian American Court Cases comic drafted up (hopefully to a point where I can spend the rest of the year inking it). And so all of this blathering is just a long prelude to me talking about court cases, yay!


So!

Last month, I did some research a few potential court cases, and ... it's kind of slim pickings.

Here's a bunch that I feel meh about:
( Read more... )


Here's a few to set aside for later:
( Read more... )

Which leads me to: Ozawa and Thind!!

So Ozawa is basically the court case where Ozawa's like "I'm so white please let me naturalize" and he backs his argument up with "Whiteness shouldn't matter because I'm loyal to America (unlike Benedict Arnold) and said loyalty/goodness is what really matters (when you eat eggs, you just care about the goodness of the egg, not the color of the egg). But also, I'm white because I'm culturally white (my children are Christian and don't know Japanese!). And also, I'm white because I found a dictionary that described Asiatics as "Yellowish-white" so I'm totally white. But really why are you making me prove I'm white?" (His brief is a riot to read, I love this wonky gremlin). Supreme Court in 1922 says "lol you're not white because it's about ethnic origin"

And Thind is the court case from 1923 where Thind's like "well I'm ethnically white as in I'm from Punjab and can trace my Aryan ancestry", and the Supreme Court's like "lol whiteness is a vibe, and you're not white."

My original thought from a month ago was that it'd be reaaaaally cool to do an Ozawa/Thind double comic, that follows these two people's very different lives. But also: it'd be pretty different, in terms of content and format. It'd be a cool project, but also a bigger project than my usual. I'd have to do a lot more research, especially into Thind.

Anyways, now, a month later, I finally get to do a little more research and like ... there's so much cool stuff?

Like... one of the reasons that Thind got rejected might be because he was involved in the Ghadar movement that was agitating for Indian independence? And also that the "are Indians white?" question has been decided one way or another in the lower courts, and this is the first one they decide to take it all the way to the top. The case is actually presented by an Indian-American lawyer! I was like "but wait, you can't be a lawyer unless you're a citizen, and you can't be a citizen unless you're white", and that's how I discovered Sakharam Ganesh Pandit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakharam_Ganesh_Pandit ) who convinced a lower court that he's white, and then, when the Thind case leads to the Federal government to try to revoke his citizenship, actually successfully defends against that and convinces them to stop?!! What a GOAT.

And then on the Ozawa side -- Ozawa doesn't really deal much with the Alien Land Laws because he's in Hawaii, but oh man, apparently his case is bundled with Takuji Yamashita's case ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita_v._Hinkle ), and wow, what a guy. What a life. Yamashita shows up to the US, does high school and then graduates law school, passes the bar, but then isn't allowed to be certified because he's not a citizen. So in 1902 he appeals that, but the State of Washington's like "nope sorry you're not white so you can't be a citizen so you can't be a lawyer." So then he's like "well I'll go into farming, then." And he does, but then the Alien Land Laws hit and he can't own land, so then he takes that up to the courts AGAIN, and that's what gets bundled with the Ozawa case -- if the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, it would have struck down the Alien Land Laws. But alas, it doesn't. But the guy just keeps working his leased farmland, doing good... and then internment! Man, such a sad life, but he just keeps on trucking. Super impressed, what a guy.

Anyways, now that I've done a bit more research, I feel like interweaving Thind and Ozawa doesn't quite work -- their ages and their motives are just too different. I can definitely see something with Thind and Pandit, kind of about the ambiguity of whiteness and living in the in-between spaces and maybe connecting that to the independence movement in India. Land where you live vs your homeland, and the acculturation process, maybe? And I can also see something with Ozawa and Yamashita, and maybe something about credentialing and how there's no way to prove their worth, no matter what they do and how many pieces of paper they get.


Anyways, much food for thought!!! :D!!! OMG I love history so much!!!