"Whiteness" & U.S. Citizenship

This episode of Lectures in History explores the deep historical entanglement of race and U.S. citizenship, focusing on how the legal definition of 'whiteness' shaped naturalization policy from the 1790 Naturalization Act through the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. USC lecturer Nora Lesserson examines how racial classifications—rooted in 19th-century pseudoscience like Blumenbach’s five-race theory and phrenology—were weaponized to determine who could become a citizen. The lecture highlights pivotal racial prerequisite cases, including the 1925 United States v. Cartosian, in which Armenian-American Tatos Kartosian successfully argued for legal whiteness based on European ancestry, social assimilation, and visual presentation. Lesserson emphasizes that whiteness was not a fixed biological category but a performative, contested status requiring conformity to cultural norms, dress, speech, and marriage patterns. The episode also draws contemporary parallels through the Kardashians, illustrating how racial fluidity and the commodification of black aesthetics persist in modern culture, even as legal whiteness fails to guarantee social safety—especially post-9/11. Ultimately, the lecture reframes citizenship as a process of exclusion, revealing that whiteness has long functioned as the unspoken foundation of American identity.