Why a Bobby Jindal Portrait Sparked a Racial Controversy | TIME

It does say something about politics and society in America:

For however inconsequential the object of controversy is, the portraits are capable of evoking a deeply unsettling reaction. That’s because they recall a dark history with lasting consequences. In a nation whose first lawmakers had constructed American identity based largely on whether European, Asian and African immigrants’ complexions appeared sufficiently “white”—a category that had been molded and manipulated from America’s early years—that Jindal’s portraits appear to have been scrubbed of his race matters greatly. A “white” complexion once afforded the right to a political voice; it was the lifeblood of the dominant majority.

Jindal’s skin tone in his portraits matters especially because it suggests that the “official” image of an American political leader is someone that is not of South Asian or Asian race. The touchy question of skin color remains regardless of the portrait maker’s intent, because throughout history, and arguably still today, differences in skin tone, such as those between Jindal’s portraits and Jindal himself—even if just a few shades—were specifically used to construct race and Americanness.

In the mid-1700s, the category of whiteness had been open to only Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and not even to Europeans like Italians, Spaniards, French or Swedes—they were “swarthy,” said Benjamin Franklin in 1751, while Africans were “black or tawny” and Asians “chiefly tawny.” But the acceptability of “swarthy” skin shifted as waves of Asian immigrants entered North America in the 19th century, and as popular imagery of colonial Indians in British Columbia or cheap Chinese laborers in the U.S. continued their likening to black slaves: dark, faceless, subordinate. Their racialization as disposable and immutably foreign, in contrast to the better-assimilated European labor migrants, in turn lifted these “swarthy” European immigrants to a sufficiently high racial status to merit the title “free white persons.”

Why a Bobby Jindal Portrait Sparked a Racial Controversy | TIME.