What can you glean from face value?

The point of this short consideration is not to answer the material it considers, at least not to the point of refutation.

The goal of this assessment is to 1) establish why I don’t find it convincing 2) point out some directions the argument would need to go to become convincing and 3) demonstrate analysis of evidence’s probative value (a.k.a. weighing its proper effect) without referencing outside sources, using only general knowledge.

The article in question is (https://ethnicamerican.org/what-does-1-year-and-9-months-mean-to-an-ethnic-american/). Fair warning, this is literally the only webpage on the website that I’ve opened, so I’ve no idea what is on the rest of it (except that it probably nudges in a discreditable direction. I’m not a fan of mere ethnonationalism, particularly as applied to America).

The article’s quick sum is this: prior to passing the Bill of Rights, Congress passed a definition of ‘American’ which explicitly referenced ‘white’ ethnicity; ‘American’ therefore integrally includes an ethnic dimension.

The first point which raises doubts about this argument comes in the image included in the article, to wit:

I assume this is an authentic picture. The problem here is that the section highlighted, implicitly presented as evidence, does not match the assertion it follows: “This legislation defined an American as a ‘free white person of good moral character,’ establishing the initial criteria for citizenship.” The picture, if we read the text, established that being a “free white person” is required to gain citizenship as an alien. It does not require ethnicity as a prerequisite for holding citizenship, for being an American.

Now, possibly the quote is taken from another part of the legislation. I haven’t read it, and going there is contrary to this assessment’s purpose. However, at the least this incongruity constitutes a weakness in the article. It either offers false proof or fails to offer proof, depending on how you read the author’s intention. In the first case, the article is discredited as a whole; in the second case, it merely loses much of its probative force, given that this claim is the center point of the article’s argument.

The second problem I’ll mention is smaller, but it does make me less willing to rely on the article’s representation: how it emphasizes that the law pictured above came prior to the Bill of Rights and thus established the ‘Americans’ to whom that document refers. Yet if you know the history, the Bill of Rights was passed as a result of conditions attached to the passage of the Constitution in various of the states; as such, this bill was necessarily passed after the Bill of Rights was put into process, albeit such a monumental endeavor as the first 10 amendments took more time than a simple bill. The article could legitimately argue that this bill shows the mindset of the Founders, given is contemporaneity, but to argue that it was prior to the Bill of Rights is not precisely ingenuous.

Third, the assertion made by the article seems to me to assume definitions and understandings which exist in the modern context, without demonstrating them in the colonial or early federal context. Specifically, it attributes to the term ‘white’ an intent to define a certain people group positively, focused on the existence of that group rather than on it not being another group. Is this assumption justified?

Here let me introduce a variant of Occam’s Razor: evidence has probative value (ability to prove) equal to its minimally incredulous explanation (the explanation which requires the least deviation from the judge’s prior position). It may suggest more than this (for instance, a black smudge on the ground could suggest spontaneous combustion), but it only proves (necessitates the acceptance of) the minimum explanation (so the black smudge may be much better explained by the hypothesis that somebody dropped some ash or charcoal here and didn’t fully clean it up). This rule results from the evidentiary weight of what I already know, the weight which the new evidence must displace (which is why proof of the ordinary can be much less strenuous than proof of the extraordinary).

Even then, if multiple explanations of similar incredulity are available, it only proves that one of them is true; it only proves this to the point of likelihood; and the explanation ‘proved’ may be disproved so soon as new evidence is adduced which contradicts it, just as it was emplaced by contradicting the previous explanation.

The third problem, then, is that I can offer a less-disruptive explanation for the term ‘white’ in this law: the political problem of slavery. The obvious intent of the law was to avoid making slaves into full citizens, given how much political trouble that would cause. Asians, of course, were not in concern, and American Indians were of a different nationality, not operating as US citizens. Apart from Arabs, who would likely be passing scarce, probably to the point of being a non-concern (for to be a concern, they’d not only need to immigrate to America but seek citizenship), the only ethnicities which could plausibly come to America were Europeans, Jews, and Africans.

The problem here is that the article adduces no proof of what ‘white’ means. Does it exclude European Jews? Does it include southern Europeans, like the Italians, who would later face discrimination in the US for not being white? The only group we can confidently state it excludes is the African ethnicity- in other words, slaves, imported (1808) or domestic.

Moreover, if it be asserted that this term was meant to exclude ethnicities other than ‘white,’ including Arabs, we run into several problems making this truly an ethnic distinction. First, Arabs and other non-Europeans at this time would have been, in their home countries, nearly entirely non-Christian. The distinction could thus be aimed more towards religion than race. Second, the number of non-white persons immigrating and requesting citizenship (as known to the states) might plausibly be so low that they simply weren’t considered in the law, leading to the use of the term ‘white’ with no purpose except to exclude slaves (who were black).

These problems, note, do not necessarily make the article wrong. But they do reduce its probative power (ability to prove) to near nothing. They also suggest some questions whose answers would alter that probative power:

· How many non-white, non-slave persons can to America requesting citizenship in this era?

· How did the colonies handle such cases? The states? The federal government?

· What did the term ‘white’ mean in other laws?

· What did the legislators speak of in deciding on the law adduced?

· What is the full text of the law? Does it support the assertion which I cast doubt on in Problem #1?

· How does this interact with ‘birthright citizenship,’ which was instituted by the 14^th Amendment, over 75 years later? What were immigration, citizenship, and ethnicity laws at that time? How were they applied to Jews, Italians, Irish, and more blatantly ‘non-white’ groups?

· What was the ethnic make up of America at this time and over the next half-century? How about the ethnic proportions of its citizenry?

In sum, I don’t find this article at all convincing. It has too much looseness and unsupported assertion in its statements, and the evidence it does adduce has an easier, less extraordinary explanation. It can convince one who already believes it or reinforce his evidentiary position, but that’s no great accomplishment. It does have a use, however, to which I have put it: demonstrating how to evaluate a source on face value.

God bless.