Dhruv Pathak
By Dhruv Pathak
“I just got through fighting for freedom, and here I came back to Georgia and the United States was still segregated, and the education system and process. And they hit me again. Here I am on the GI Bill. They didn’t have to give me anything. All they had to do was open up the door and let me in. Give me an opportunity to further my education. But I was denied, because I was still what, was a Negro…. Denied, because of my race.”
Those are the words of Lewis Conn, a Black World War II veteran who returned home to find the country he had served still refused to see him as fully human. The same door was closed to others whose names we rarely mention, including one that most Indian Americans do not know: Bhagat Singh Thind. Thind was a Punjabi Sikh who immigrated to the U.S. in 1913 and worked summers in Oregon lumber mills to put himself through UC Berkeley.
Imagine Thind early each morning, his hands stained with sap, the weight of an axe on his shoulder, sawdust clinging to his turban and clothes as he labored alongside other men in the damp, pine-scented air. After long shifts, he studied by lamplight, his textbooks open atop a rough wooden table still flecked with wood chips. When the U.S. entered World War I, he enlisted, was promoted to Acting Sergeant, and was honorably discharged in December 1918. Like Lewis Conn, he came home having served. Like Lewis Conn, he found the door closed.
Thind applied for naturalization, and his case reached the Supreme Court. He argued that South Asians shared common linguistic ancestry with white Europeans and therefore should be considered Caucasian under prevailing law. The Court rejected his argument, ruling that shared heritage did not prove common racial origin, and found that no reasonable person would consider someone like Thind white.
The Court had spoken. His path to citizenship would take thirteen more years. In 1935, the Nye-Lea Act allowed all World War I veterans to apply for naturalization regardless of race, and Thind finally became a citizen in 1936, thirteen years late, only because he wore an American military uniform. For Indian immigrants, belonging has always been conditional. Thind’s terms of entry are remarkably similar to our parents’: our value as workers and professionals makes us acceptable, not because we inherently deserve the right to be here like so many immigrants before us.
For most of the twentieth century, the United States made its position on Indian immigration clear: one hundred maximum, that’s more than enough. That number was not an accident; it was the product of a legal architecture designed to keep us out. That was the quota established, then nominally loosened in 1946 by the Luce-Celler Act, a modest opening after decades of near-total exclusion. By 1960, South Asians in America numbered close to 12,000.
Chinese laborers had been banned outright by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only time in American history a nationality was explicitly prohibited by law. South Asians faced no such legislation, but what Congress didn’t do, extralegal violence sometimes did. In 1907, white workers in Bellingham, Washington, drove a community of Punjabi mill workers out of town by force, scattering them north to Canada and south to California. It’s a little-known episode South Asians would do well to remember: the message in Bellingham was the same one written into federal law. You do not belong here.
What changed that message was not a Supreme Court case. It was Montgomery. It was Bloody Sunday in Selma. It was the long, brutal, heroic resistance led by Black Americans to force a hypocritical democracy to live up to its own words.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965—passed in the same political moment as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—abolished the quota system and replaced it with preferences for skilled professionals and family reunification. It is the reason most of our parents are here and the reason we are here at all. This was not an act of goodwill from President Lyndon Johnson. It was a political necessity.
This is the history that made Indian America possible. I did not know it until I went looking for it. Maybe you didn’t either.
What we were handed upon arrival was not simply an opportunity; it came with a label. One year after the 1965 Act, sociologist William Petersen coined the term “model minority” in a January 1966 New York Times Magazine piece. It is worth being precise about what that term was meant to convey: it was, at best, a backhanded compliment, never an actual welcome. It functioned as a two-way mirror installed in the doorway of American belonging. On our side, Indian Americans saw only a reflection of our own merit and hard work, blinded by the flattering glare of being called the model minority. But on the other side of the glass stood Black Americans—the very people whose grueling civil rights fight had opened the door that Conn and Thind both found shut.
They watched us enter a reality they had built. The mirror, meanwhile, ensured we remained oblivious to their presence, never realizing that our success was a political weapon designed to keep us from looking back and seeing who had cleared the path.
So what does the model minority label truly ask of us? Does it require gratitude, or does it demand silence? The answer shapes whether we stand in solidarity with others or disappear behind the glass.
Solidarity is not incidental to liberation; it is its foundation. While the model minority myth casts us as economically valuable but politically invisible, our history tells a different story of interconnected struggle. From Martin Luther King’s Gandhian inspiration to the Dalit movement’s embrace of Black Power, the fight for dignity has always been a global conversation. The 1965 Act did not emerge in a vacuum; it was forced into existence by Black people’s struggle on our behalf. They broke down the door so we could walk through it, reminding us that any exclusion left standing eventually becomes a tool used against everyone.
Bhagat Singh Thind’s story reminds us that merit alone was never enough to win American belonging. What finally bent the arc of the moral universe was not a legal brief, but a century of Black Americans refusing to let a hypocritical democracy rest. They fought for a version of America that did not yet exist, a homeland defined by humanity rather than heritage. When they tore down the walls of segregation, they cleared the ground for Indian America to be built. Our community’s home here is not a product of our own making; it is an addition built onto a foundation of Black resistance.
We did not build this house. We were let in.
At least we can remember who opened the door.
Dhruv Pathak is a salesman and aspiring writer based in St. Louis, originally from Charlotte, NC. He writes to better understand people and contribute to our shared humanity. Contact: pathak.d@icloud.com.
