From the Jim Crow era to Trump’s presidency, white supremacist nationalism in the United States has maintained visible difference as a tactic of exclusion. Whether policy-based exclusion like the 2017 Muslim ban or cultural exclusion through rising hate violence, visible difference works because it can easily be learned and applied. Within the US, belonging is usually marked through a clear binary: those who are visibly marked as outsiders are excluded while those who are included reap the benefits through obvious policy, social, and cultural rewards. I argue such a distinction between inclusion and exclusion is not so obvious. Studying the racialization of Sikh Americans across the 20th century, my forthcoming manuscript offers readers a map to chart how visible difference and exclusion has transformed throughout US history and how these individual-level policy transformations are linked to national and global shifts in the construction of the nation-state.