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Fearing “Yellow,” Imagining “White”: Media Analysis of the Chinese Exclusion Act,
1882
An analysis of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the San Francisco Chronicle during the year
of the act’s passage in 1882 reveals a nation driven by racial fears of the Chinese “other”
and the discursive construction of whiteness. Using interdisciplinary theories on race and
methodological tools of discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how the print press
used various discursive repertoires to express anxiety and fear of the Chinese labor. An
intertextual analysis of these discursive constructions of the Chinese also reveals how the
media constituted whiteness through religious, scientific, and psychosexual
preoccupations about labor, race, nation, and the Christian civilization. These racial fears
were exercises in nativism, where the imagined whiteness of the nation could lose the
contest for survival and dominance against the Chinese worker if the US American
government did not exclude Chinese immigrants.
Key words: Race, Racism, Chinese Immigration, Whiteness, Nation, Discourse, Nativism
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Introduction
By a wide margin, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It was
the first time in the US American1 history that a policy was adopted to exclude
immigrants based on their race and nationality, and it barred Chinese laborers from
entering the USA for 10 years. The Act also denied the Chinese people the right to
naturalize. Exempt from the provision were merchants, students, teachers, and travelers,
who were required to get a certificate from the Chinese government proving their
exemption.2 The Act was extended in 1904 indefinitely (Hing 1993 p.26). Eventually in
1917, “Congress created ‘an Asiatic barred zone,’ excluding all persons from Asia”
(Haney López 1996 p.38). The lifting of the all racial restrictions in immigration law did
not occur until 1965. Thus the Chinese Exclusion Act was a watershed event in the
context of race, nation, and the law as it helped to deny Chinese immigration for over 70
years. After its passage, it became a template for excluding other Asians, southern and
eastern Europeans, and Mexican immigrants from entering the USA (Lee 2002 p. 37). It
is an important historical event to discursively deconstruct because contemporary antiimmigrant measures like Proposition 187 (in California) and Proposition 200 (in Arizona)
maintain similar interpretative repertoires that reflect nativist sentiments.3
In this paper, I analyze the media coverage of the Chinese during the year of the
Act’s passage in the San Francisco Chronicle. I focus on the discursive influence of
religious, scientific and psychosexual preoccupations that contributed to the racialization
of the Chinese immigrants. This racialization encourages defensive emotions about the
nation. These nativist emotions not only reveal how the Chinese are racially constructed,
but also reveal how whiteness was constructed within the concerns of the USA through
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the debate about the Chinese Exclusion Act. The construction of whiteness included
fears about Chinese competition over labor, race, nation, and the survival of the Christian
civilization.
Race, Nation, and Discourse
This section draws upon an interdisciplinary theoretical approach using race
scholarship in anthropology, cultural studies and critical race theory. The aim of this
section is to show how religion and science as ideological institutions influenced the
concept of race at the time of the Chinese exclusion act. While these institutions treated
race differently, both shared the commonality of creating race in a win/lose manner in
regard to the notion of civilization.4 These preoccupations fed into notions of nation and
whiteness that helped exclude the Chinese from immigration and citizenship during the
late 19th century.
To begin, it is necessary to understand that race is not an inherent biological
essence nor is it merely an ideological ruse that masks class exploitation (Omi and
Winant 1994, Golberg 1993). Race is a socio-historical process that creates and recreates difference and hierarchy at the expense of non- “white” peoples for the privilege
of those deemed “white.”5 The term “race” use to describe social groups is a recent and
modern phenomenon. Although it is arguable that “race” may have derived from a folk
concept in the Romance language as early as the Middle ages that emerged from the
terms used for breeding domestic animals, the first concrete appearance of the term
“race” used to describe different people was noted in William Dunbar’s poem, “The
Dance of the Seven Deadly Synnis,” written in the 16th century England (Smedley 1993
p.37-38). The word was initially used to explain European history and nation formation
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and played a major role in the myths of national origin (Banton 1987 p. 1, Miles 1989
p.31). In this usage, “race” meant lineage or common descent, and identified a
population with a common origin and history, but not a population with a fixed biological
character (Miles 1989 p.32). So “race” could have the global reference of “Caucasoid,
Mongoloid, and Negroid” as well as a European meaning of “French and British race.”
The point is that the logic of racism preceded the actual term “race.” The expense paid
and the privilege given for race can be material and immaterial, economic and
psychological (Roediger 1991). Since race is a socio-historical process, the meaning of
race has shifted and changed over time. It is in this sense that race is historically specific
to a time, place, and space. However, there are broad genealogical rivers that feed the
tributaries of racial practice.
Cornel West (1988) explains that there are three modes of European domination
that are based on “white” supremacist logics. These three logics are discursive and
derive from a genealogical state. The first is the “Judeo-Christian racist logic [that]
emanates from the biblical account of Ham looking upon and failing to cover his father
Noah’s nakedness and thereby receiving divine punishment in the form of blackening his
progeny….The [second] scientific racist logic rests upon a modern philosophical
discourse…that promote and encourage the activities of observing, comparing,
measuring, and ordering physical characteristics of human bodies…The [third]
psychosexual racist logic arises from the phallic obsessions, Oedipal projections, and
anal-sadistic orientations in European culture” that see non- “white” people as sexual,
frivolous, passive, and dirty. Generally, the psychosexual racist logic is concerned with
acts of bodily violation and impurities and sees the potential of non-“whites” as
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dangerous transgressors of these actual and metaphorical bodily boundaries” (West 1988
p.22-23).
These logics function ideologically in that they promote racial dominance by
naturalizing or universalizing racism as inevitable.6 However, religion and science are
institutional traditions while the psychosexual racist logic is not a formal tradition.
Applying the work of Mary Douglas (1996) to Cornel West’s observations of “white”
supremacist logics enables a better understanding of how a psychosexual racist logic can
function pervasively without an institutional foundation. West’s three premises are each
a “pure” systems threatened by violations. Ham and his progeny are cursed, supposedly
by a mark on the skin, for violating his father’s dignity. Non-“whites” violate scientific
precepts when they demand political privileges equal to that of “whites,” when science
clearly “proves” their inferiority. And the purity of the human body is threatened by
contaminations and sexual violations. Each category reflects fear of things “out of place”
that threaten order, either socially, bodily, or metaphorically. It is this sense that racial
phobias are fixations on dirt and disorderliness. Whenever there are systems of purity
there is chaos that threatens those systems and “dirt” becomes shorthand for disorder that
carries racial and sexual connotations. As Mary Douglas writes, the “definition of dirt
[is] as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions:
a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique,
isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is a by-product of a systematic
ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate
elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a
link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity” (p. 36). Thus religion is a
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system, science is a system, and racial psychosexual preoccupations come out of
violations of those systems. A dirty matter transforms into a sexualized matter with an
extended focus on the violation of the system. Later in the paper it will become clearer
how psychosexual symbolism and sexual fear are racially applied to the Chinese, along
with religious and scientifically informed qualms.
The Christian religion is one of the oldest purveyors of racist logic (Smedley
1993, West 1988). And in the 16th century, the notion of “savage” was used to justify the
organized slaughter and exploitation of Africans and indigenous peoples (Smedley 1993
p,60). For the “savage” was “first of all a ‘heathen,’ a godless and immoral creature,
‘wicked, barbarous, and uncivil’ (Smedley 1993 p.60).
He was lazy, filthy, evil,
superstitious, and an idol worshipper, and was given to lying, stealing, treachery, murder
and double-dealing (Smedley 1993 p.60). His nomadic tendencies and presumed lack of
social order or laws were the antithesis of the habits of civilized man who was sedentary
and bound not only to land but also to other men by laws” (Smedley 1993 p.60).
Additionally, the savage was sexualized as a being with no self-control over libidinal
impulses which contrasted well with the European idealization of restraint, temperance,
and chastity.
This perceived state of Christian godlessness among “savages” reified the
colonizing European sense of civilization, giving divine right and justification for brutal
domination.7 The notion of the heathen “savage” would become more physiologically
nuanced over the centuries as biblical support for the “damned race” would resurface in
the story of Ham (West 1998, Jones 1997). This would distinguish the “dark savage” by
skin color and be more exclusively used toward African American slaves in religiously
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justifying their forced enslavement (Smedley 1993 p.216-217). However, the bible did
not guarantee the success of a “white,” Christian civilization and this would influence
future philosophies of racial difference and further fuel the fire of racial domination and
abstraction.
The rise of science was also concerned with the idea of “civilization” and
religious notions of the natural world motivated the early empirical work by naturalists.
In the 17th century, discoveries by naturalists seemed to support the religious idea of the
“great chain of being,” that God created all life in a strict ladder of perfection with the
highest forms in humans, angels and lastly God.8 Throughout the 18th century and up
until the mid 19th century, religion and science commingled in race theories. The debate
between monegenists and polygenists raged before Darwinian theories put them to rest.
Mongenists believed in the biblical story that humans came from a single source but have
degenerated at different degrees causing racial distinctions. Polygenists believed that
biological species were products of different “Adams,” making people from other races
not deserving of equality due to their separate and inferior nature (Gould 1981, Smedley
1993, Miles 1989, Graves 2001). Both would claim that a divine plan influenced all
biological traits. Both would make claims in predicting moral character in relation to
physical anatomy.
In contrast, “Darwin did not think that natural selection applied to morality”
(Graves 83).9 However, this did not stop the development of social Darwinism that
promoted the idea that the “survival of the fittest” applied to social and racial groups.10
Although Darwin popularized the idea of the “survival of the fittest,” it was the
sociologist Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase as it applied to his ideas that “human
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progress resulted from the triumph or more-advanced individuals and cultures over their
inferior competitors. Thus he saw wealth and power as signs of inherent ‘fitness,’ and
poverty as evidence of natural inferiority” (Graves 2001 p.82). Spencer’s description of
society was based on inheritance: genetic and cultural. “Thus, all people inherit their
parent’s genetic material, but they also inherit from them such things as culture, religion,
education (or lack of), and general social status” (Graves 2001 p. 83). It was Spencer’s
ideas that more influenced US American thought during the late 19th century than
Darwin’s ideas of natural selection. However, Spencer and Darwin advanced the
importance of competition in the survival of a species which complimented the prior
theories of race. Their ideas of social and biological evolution would influence the rise of
racist pseudosciences11 which would strongly warn against liberal immigration policies
that encouraged the racial mixing of divergent populations. These sciences encouraged
the state to take an active role in fostering its best stock by preventing the worst from
entering the country (Graves 2001 p. 104).
Between the notion of the “savage” supported by religion and the notion of the
“survival of the fittest” supported by science, the formation of the nation in the late 19th
century through immigration regulation had the importance of preserving Christian,
Anglo-Saxon civilization and encouraging its advancement against the threat of a
biological and moral degeneration that could come with an unrestricted immigration
policy. What religion and science bore in common was the narrative of win/lose in
regards to race. Religion warned that “white” Christian civilization could lose to
savagery and science warned that the “white” race could become less “fit” and succumb
to defeat in the contest for survival.
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And it is through the discourse about the Chinese people, that a critical analysis
reveals the nature of whiteness and “nation” through these racial hopes and fears. The
discourse about race and nation reveals many layers of racist phobia that amount to
nativism which is the “defensive spirit of nationalism” (Saxton 1995 p.9). First, the
social construction of non-“whites” in public discourse reveals how the “other” is feared
by dominant “whites.” Second, and by contrast, what is seen to be feared by “whites”
reveals the internal framework of whiteness and what constitutes whiteness. Third, and
by inference between the two, the framework for “white” identity also shows the
“imagined community” of the nation (Anderson 1991), especially through the public
discourse of the Chinese and immigration policy. The nativist discourse over the Chinese
exclusion act reveals the concerns for the nation expressed through ideas of a “pure”
civilization that contains religious, scientific, and psychosexual connotations.
History and Context of the Chinese Immigration
By the mid-19th century, there were an estimated 7,520 Chinese persons, mostly
male laborers, in the USA concentrated on the west coast (Takaki 1990, p. 216). They
came from the southern provinces of China to escape severe poverty at a time when the
Chinese government deemed emigration illegal and punishable by death (Sayler 1995 p.
9). The 1840’s “gold rush” drew the Chinese and their initial goal was to make quick
money through hard, intensive labor to bring back with them to China. These sojourner
laborers worked at 2/3 the cost of “white” labor, so industries considered them
“indispensable” and initially encouraged their immigration (Hing 1993 p.20). But as
Chinese laborers continued to arrive on the western shores of the USA, nativist
resentment increased. In the interest of good commerce and trade relations, China and
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the USA signed the Burlington Treaty in 1868. It allowed for emigration from China for
the purpose of trade as well as rights to be afforded to the Chinese by the US American
government (Salyer 1995 p.9, McLain 1994 p.29, Hing 1993 p.22). This was a
significant treaty, since around this time the Chinese represented about 25% of the wageearning force in California (Salyer 1995 p.10, Takaki 1990 p.216).
However, the treaty’s protections for the Chinese would be short-lived. It was
widely believed that the Chinese laborers were in the country as slaves, under a
“coolie”12 system of cheap contract labor13 that benefited the capitalists and crippled the
“free”, “white” workers. This belief was especially strong over the construction of the
railroad through western territories where Chinese labor was essential for the Union
Pacific tracks to join those of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869. Resentment toward
the “coolies” contributed to the “racing” of the Chinese. Like the “blacks,” the Chinese
were also viewed as heathen, morally inferior, savage, childlike, lustful and sensual
(Takaki 1990 p.217). And also like “blacks,” as well as Native Americans and people of
mixed ancestry known then as “mulattos,” the Chinese were banned from testifying in
state court against “whites” (People v. Hall, 1954) (Haney-López 1996 p.51). However,
“white” racial dominance treated differently the “blacks” and “yellows.” The concept of
race had been cultivated in the USA through a “white”/”black” binary and created a
domesticated construction of “otherness” that was specifically black, which was different
than the “foreign Otherness of Orientalism” (Gotanda 1999 p.133). While the
construction of “black” allowed the granting of citizenship to them by 1870, the Chinese
were denied it because of their foreign and “undesirable qualities” (Hing 1993 p.23).
Even Chinese women were suspect. And Congress, responding to allegations that
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Chinese women were coming to the USA for purposes of prostitution, banned the entry
of Chinese women for “immoral purposes” in 1875 with the Page Law. This effectively
barred all Chinese women and “further worsened an already imbalanced sex ratio among
Chinese” (Hing 1993 p.23). For example, “there were only 4, 574 Chinese women out of
a population of 63,199 in 1870 (Takaki 1990 p.237). In addition, only the Chinese were
specifically seen as enabling monopolies, thus hurting all other workers regardless of
color. It was “the great land engrossers, especially the Central Pacific Railroad, which
organized and defended the importation of Chinese” (Saxton 1995 p.101). Finally, as
“birds of passage” they were seen as working too hard (for less pay than “whites”),
saving too much, and spending too little for another “civilization’s” benefit (McLain
1994 p.10). Later, in the analysis section, it becomes clear that the public saw a Chinese
lack of responsibility to family and its values as an unfair advantage in labor markets,
which is mocking given the barring of Chinese women’s immigration.
By the 1880’s, there were 105,465 Chinese in the USA (Takaki 1990 p.216).
Lynchings, violence, and hateful discrimination beleaguered the Chinese worker. With
the dwindling availability of prospecting and railroad work, many Chinese went to the
cities to work in the commercial and manufacturing industries. “Chinese workers
constituted 52 percent of all boot and shoe makers, 44 percent of all brick makers, 84.4
percent of all cigar makers, and 32.7 percent of all woolen mill operators” (Takaki 1990
p.232). In 1880, an estimated 22,000 Chinese resided in San Francisco. Of those, 13,000
worked as factory hands and laborers, 5,000 worked as house servants, 3,000 as laundry
persons, and 1000 as merchants (San Francisco Chronicle March 4, 1882). Almost all the
Chinese lived in Chinatowns which provided security and social networks for the
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Chinese. Benevolent associations, also known as the “Six Companies” or “tongs,”
provided legal, economic, cultural, and social support to the residents of Chinatowns and
probably provided a substitute family for the bachelor laborers. “For white mainstream
citizens Chinatowns helped resolve the tension between needing the Chinese (or at least
some foreign group like them) for certain dirty jobs and fearing their unknown Oriental
powers. Chinatowns permitted everyone to keep an eye on the Chinese-check their
wanderings, their aspirations, their capacity to infiltrate society, their economy, and
politics-yet keep them at arm’s length” (McLain 1994 p.50). But forcibly keeping the
Chinese in Chinatowns was not enough to satiate nativist fears and political efforts to
exclude all further Chinese male workers culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Method
Using discourse analysis techniques on the San Francisco Chronicle articles of
1882 helps to uncover two aspects ensconced in these texts. First, the intertextual nature
of these articles can be seen through an analysis of the genres and discourse for which
coverage of the Chinese immigrants depends. Intertexuality refers to the “use of texts
(consciously or unconsciously) of materials from other, previously created texts (Berger
1991 p.20).14 Through the analysis of images, metaphor, metonymy, and intimations, it
is possible to see what previously created texts are related to as a reference (van Dijk
1988). “Intertextual analysis aims to unravel the various genres and discourses—often, in
creative discourse practice, a highly complex mixture—which are articulated together in
the text” (Faircough 1995 p.61). The examination of a text’s intertexuality involves
interpretation which allows for a richness of potential meaning to be revealed beyond the
official intent of the text’s message (Foucault 1972). This is particularly helpful in
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uncovering the “white supremacist logics” of religious, scientific and the psychosexual
discursive domination because it uproots these ideologies out of the text. This is also
helpful in showing how race becomes created and re-created in a socio-historical process.
Second, discourse analysis helps to decode strategies of persuasion hidden in the
text. Generally, these strategies can be seen as interpretative repertoires. Interpretative
repertoires mean “broadly discernable clusters of terms, descriptions, and figures of
speech often assembled around metaphors or vivid images” (Wetherell and Potter, 1992,
p. 90). These metaphors and vivid images are the key to unlocking the intertexuality of
institutional ideologies at work in racial constructions.
The analysis draws on newspaper articles referring to the Chinese in the San
Francisco Chronicle in the year 1882. The San Francisco Chronicle was selected
because 1) at the time it was a leading daily newspaper in California, 2) San Francisco
was a major port of entry for the Chinese immigrants coming into the country and 3) it
was the news daily of the city with the greatest population of Chinese in the USA. The
newspaper articles were gathered from a microfilm archive. All articles that mentioned
the Chinese in the heading or first paragraph were collected for a total sum of 126 news
articles.
All negative connotations were flagged and catalogued. Negative, sinophobic
connotations are metaphors, similes, metonyms, adumbrations and lines of argument.
Connotations could be a single word or a whole paragraph. Then these negative words,
phrases, or lines of argument were organized into eight categories. These categories
arose out of the newspaper discourse and were created because of the repetitive and vivid
imagery used to describe the Chinese.
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The prevailing category that emerged in 1882 with 244 negative references (or
23.3% of the 1046 total negative references) to the Chinese was that of economic threat
to “white” labor. Other categories also emerged. The criminal nature of Chinese was
highly suggested (165 or 15.8%), their evilness (130 or 12.4%), the possible invasion of
the USA by China through immigration (121 or 11.6%), their unassimilable nature into
US American culture (107 or 10.2%), Chinese immigration was likened to a natural
disaster (98 or 9.3%), and Chinese people were seen as disease vectors (92 or 8.8%). A
minor category of less frequent occurrences (89) of negativity rounded out the total sum
negative references of the Chinese. Each of the eight categories has two subcategories,
one of which deals with primary themes, the other with secondary themes. The
distinction between a theme’s primary and secondary subcategory status was determined
by frequency.
Analysis
1-“Coolie Slave”
The concern over Chinese labor competing with “white” labor took shape under
the assumed theory of Chinese servility and slavery in the USA. For example, 84
references were made to the Chinese as “coolies.” “Coolies,” as mentioned before, refers
to the Chinese in a system of contract labor. However, there was a tendency to conflate
contract labor with slavery in the news coverage. There were also 71 references to the
Chinese as either slaves or as servile in nature. Moreover, that the Chinese were taking
jobs away from the “whites” because they ate less, lived in cramped conditions, did not
have families to support, and did not invest in any community but their own, which made
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them unfair competitors (35). The San Francisco Chronicle’s overwhelming concern was
over the slave nature of the Chinese and its affect on the “white” worker.
This passage insists the Chinese immigrants do not come freely to the USA but
are slaves, aka “coolies:”
1-“How Coolies are Produced (subheading): A letter written to the New York
Tribune as long ago as 1869 by a Canton Correspondent of that journal,
circumstantially describes the method adopted by the agents of the Six Companies
to secure coolies for the United States. The letter substantially contained the
following points: ‘The coolie desiring passage to the United States and not having
the means, applies to the elders of his town or village, and gives as security the
persons of his family for the required sum. The elders thereupon go to the
Mandarin and give him their united bond for the amount and he gives his note to
the ticket brokers, who furnish the coolie with his ticket, which, though only
costing the brokers $40, the coolie is often obliged to pay for it as much as $300
to $400. If the coolie fails to pay the note when due, which happens five times
out of ten, the brokers require the Mandarin to meet it. He charges a heavy fee for
his services, but is soon reimbursed by the elders, who, in turn, exact another
large fee and then demand the entire amount from the coolie’s family. They
being unable to pay are sold off in succession, beginning with the youngest girl,
until the debt is canceled. Thus whole families are often sold to pay for a single
forty-dollar ticket, and it has happened that the coolie immigrant, after returning
to China, has himself been sold to satisfy the balance due, which the sale of his
family failed to meet.’” (August 6, 1882)
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Here the charge is made that the Chinese would gamble for economic opportunities in the
USA by using their family as a type of collateral. Governor John Bigler, who served
California from 1852 to 1856, popularized this “coolie” stereotype by arguing that most
of the Chinese were bound to long labor contracts, making them indentured servants, and
also by suggesting that family members were held hostage in China until the contract was
fulfilled. It was in this sense that Chinese contract labor was conflated with slavery
(McLain 1994 p.10-11). It condemned the Chinese as individuals as well as a
“civilization” toward the ills of slavery by making the Chinese an opportunistic
abstraction that little values even family ties in the pursuit of money. However, it is
important to note that even though slavery existed in China until 1906, the people who
arrived in California were not slaves but free laborers. Contract laborers are not slaves
but are free from employment obligation once their work contract has been fulfilled with
the employer. This essentialist thinking that mostly all Chinese who immigrate are slaves
overlooks the economic condition and famine that encouraged them to emigrate from
China and the benefits of their labor to the host economy and its development.
Below, this passage explains why there should be no obligation for the US
American government to treat the Chinese laborers with rights and protections. The basis
of the argument is that Chinese immigrants are slaves with little character or incentive to
be good citizens:
2-“The true theory of our political status extends the invitation to subjects of all
nations of like civilization with our own who by their hatred of despotism, or
fleeing from the weight of its oppressors, or animated with the love of free
institution, who have the energy to come here and make homes for themselves
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and their descendants and becomes a part of us, to come here at will and be
welcome has never been extended to the importation of paupers or criminals and
imported laborers brought here under contract or by purchase, not working for
themselves, but for others, and having no purpose or expectation of making
themselves citizens.” (April 17, 1882).
The Chinese are not seen as potential good citizens by US American standards because
they come from an empire that is not like the USA, they do not love freedom, and they do
not make homes and families. Slaves are assumed to not have families and homes, and
apparently assumed to have no innate desire for them either. No mention is made that
Chinese women were excluded from entering the USA to even start the process of new
families and homes. An “occident” vs. “orient” contrast is made where west equates with
freedom, democracy and good citizenry, and east equates with slavery, despotism, and
bad citizenry.
Three secondary themes emerged that the Chronicles used to justify alarm over
the Chinese immigrants as “coolie slaves.” First, that Chinese labor abetted capitalist and
empowered monopolies (12), particularly the railroads, which would further exploit all
workers. Second, there was the argument that the rampant use of Chinese labor would
deter the migration of Europeans into the USA (11) because of a lack of incentive to
compete against the Chinese, especially in the west. Third, that the Chinese immigrants
would injure (10), perhaps fatally, the strength and vitality of “free” “white” labor with
“coolie” “yellow” labor thus undermining the republican values. The passage below
illustrates all three themes succinctly:
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3-Public Sentiment Stronger (subheading): Captain W. L. Merry of Merry, Faull
&Co., Vice-President of the Board of Trade and the Immigration Association,
said: “The anti-Chinese sentiment is stronger than ever, only it makes less noise.
It is not a sandlot incendiary howl, but a respectable, rational sentiment,
proceeding for relief by the only legitimate way—through law. The sentiment is
growing every day. Everybody sees that we cannot go on as a free and selfgoverning people with an inferior, unassimilative race pouring in upon us in
limitless numbers, pushing free white mechanics from the avenues of labor and
absorbing line after line of manufactures. Unless we are to have an oligarchy of a
few moneyed men ruling the multitude of moneyless men we must stop this
Chinese overflow. The merchant cannot prosper when the mechanic is crowded
from his vocation. I find too in the Immigration Association that the Chinese are
an impediment to our success. When our agents approach people in Europe who
contemplate migration to America and say, ‘Why don’t you go to California?’
they answer, ‘What is the use? You have the Chinese there,’ and they cannot be
induced to come.” (February 28, 1882)
Issues of US American slavery and the legacy it left in the minds of the elite after the
civil war influence the nature of this passage. The meaning of “free” is seen in contrast
to what it means to be a “slave” (i.e. “not free”). In this case, the argument is made
about Chinese as slaves. Monopolies encourage slavishness among the laboring class
and the Chinese help monopolies further exploit others, with no mention of the possible
Chinese exploitation by monopolies. The Chinese are abstractly seen as tools, in an
endless, replaceable supply, for monopolists. Not wanting to be treated as tools
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themselves, Europeans are said to be deterred from immigrating in places where the
Chinese migrant works. The entanglement of race and class is clearly seen here. The
discursive treatment of the Chinese worker as “slaves” allows whiteness to put racial
distance between “whites” and “yellows” while putting “yellows” closer to “blacks” as
former slaves. And it was a way to racialize the Chinese as a domestic “other,” rather
than an oriental “other” (Gotanda 1999). It also underscores the “inappropriate
oppression of whites” by criticizing how the Chinese do their job which is a manner
“unbecoming to whites” (Roediger 1991 p. 68).
Here the themes of religion and science affect the racial construction of the
“coolie slave.” Recall that the racialized Christian notion of the “savage” is a lesser
being bereft of dignity, duty, and morality. The “savage” is reframed as “slave” against
the Chinese within the discourse of labor. Moreover, scientific notions also affect the
“coolie slave” construction through expressed anxiety over competition between “white”
and “yellow” labor. The Chinese men’s good fitness as competitors, that they require
less food and sleep yet still work long, hard hours, is twisted by anxiety into a negative
attribute. Law-abiding, family oriented, freedom loving “white” men would be bound by
their higher moral principles as US American citizens and unable to fairly compete with
the Chinese men. Thus religion and scientific themes converge within the discourse of
protecting “white” labor against the moral savagery of the Chinese allegedly inclined to
slavishness and unfair labor competitors.
2-“Cruel Murderer”
The focus on Chinese criminality seemed to be an attempt by the Chronicle to
counter the claims of the “humanitarian easterners,” who saw Chinese immigrants as law-
20
abiding and argued so as the Chinese Exclusion Act was being debated in the House and
Senate. Particular attention was paid to the cold-hearted viciousness of the Chinese. The
primary focus was their murderous nature (51) and their morally degenerate state (28). In
the passage below, the San Francisco Chronicle refutes a writer’s claim (Mr. Denslow of
the International Review) that the Chinese immigrant, “whatever may be the defects in
his moral code, neither sheds blood, robs, brawls, ravishes nor drinks rum. His vices are
confined to gambling, lying, petty pilfering, smoking opium and living compactly and
indecently.” The Chronicle article argues:
4-Pagan Ferocity (subheading): When, on the 15th of January, 1881, Huey Ah
Hop was caught chopping a countryman’s head to pieces, there was taken from
him a hatchet ground to the sharpness of a razor, the handle notched for secure
holding and the blade kept in a leathern sheath for safe carrying. Wielded by the
powerful hand of a Chinese murderer, such a horrible instrument goes clear
through the scalp, skull and brain at every blow. The writer well remembers the
sight of a poor Chinese woman as she lay in the prison hospital with six great
clefts in the skull, each one big enough to place the finger in, and all put there by
a peaceful, non-murdering Chinaman. And these six gashes are the trademark, so
to peak, of the hatchet-demon. It is never a single blow that he strikes, but it is
always the gash on gash, cut on cut, hack on hack, that he inflicts. No matter
whether his victim be active or passive, the same desire to slash and maim a fallen
foe that accentuates the Indian and painted Fijian animates the gentle Chinese.
So, too, in his pistol shooting, every chamber has to be emptied, and bullet after
bullet sent thudding into the quivering body. Under the mask of his docility, the
21
Chinaman carries the latent love of blood: an assertion substantiated by the wild
fierceness of his affrays directly he is aroused. Mr. Denslow not only makes a
radical error, but he decorates it with a very fringework of mistakes. The
Chinaman does shed blood, and shed it everytime with horrifying accessories. He
does rob, and nearly always accompanies his robberies with violence. He does
brawl, and always with a savage desire to kill. He does ravish, and his victims are
always tender children. He does drink rum, and drinks it to drunkenness.” (April
23, 1882).
In effect, the Mr. Denslow’s argument that the Chinese participate in only victimless
crimes like gambling and opium smoking is countered by the Chronicle through a
vehement rebuttal that they are maliciously murderous by impulse with children as the
primary targets.
In the same article, the Chronicle continues to describe the Chinese as morally
degenerate people that even cruelly treats their most vulnerable members:
5-“A Cruel Race (subheading): Chinamen fight like wildcats, and it is no idle fear
that possesses the women at home as to what would become of them in the case of
difficulty. The Chinese are essentially cruel in their natures, a quality they
display to their heart’s content toward their fellow who are sick and dying. On
the 23d of March, 1880, the body of an unknown Chinaman was found on Oneida
alley, where he had been turned to die. On November 22, 1880, a dying
Chinaman of Albany, Or., was put by his countrymen in a pigpen, where he
died….These are but sample cases of an inhumanity that is almost daily practiced,
and which is fully know of by every San Franciscan.” (April 23, 1882).
22
Three secondary themes of Chinese criminality worth noting are their tendency to
assault people (22), their opium habits (18), and their inclination to rape “white” females,
particularly children (12). These three secondary themes seemed to reinforce the
Chronicle’s construction of the Chinese as a morally defective type of people who lack
self-control and seek to do damage to those who can least protect themselves.
Again, the religious notion of savagery is repackaged within the discourse of
crime and the Chinese character yet embellished with little restraint. The sexual
accusations against the Chinese are also hyperbole as they are said to not only rape
“white” women but “white” female children. Overall, it is a portrait of the Chinese men
with no moral integrity, as impulsively violent, that prey on the most vulnerable, sexually
and murderously.
3-“Evil Heathen”
The Chronicle referred to the Chinese or reported on the Chinese as an evil 52
times. “Evil” was used as a substitute noun for Chinese immigration, as well as the term
“curse.” 37 references were made to the Chinese as heathens or a related term for nonChristian persons. Additionally, the Chinese presence was also referred to as a curse
(20). There were no extended lines of argument but instead these references were
isolated descriptives that permeated the news coverage. “Heathen” was used
interchangeably with the Chinese person.
6-“The people of this coast may therefore congratulate themselves on the
prospects of their approaching deliverance from the evils of coolieisms.” (April 8,
1882).
23
7-“He wanted such steps taken as would put an end forever to the evils of Chinese
immigration, but he did not believe the bill presented here would accomplish that
result. (April 18, 1882).
8-“They were polytheists of the worst kind, fungi on the body politic, and took
$45,000,000 annually away from California. They were polytheists while living,
and their polytheist bodies were taken in a dead cart back to the Celestial
Kingdom to be laid alongside their polytheist sires. He said that Senator Jones of
Nevada had risen above his party and declared that colored suffrage had been a
dismal failure, and that this esthetic feeling for Chinese would result in the same
way. The Chinese come here to fatten on the country. They can’t be made
citizens by our laws or by the laws of God himself.” (April 28, 1882).
9-“Chinese Children: Characteristics of the Young Heathen (headline); Heathen
Hoodlum (subheading).” (November 8, 1882).
10-“The curse of coolieism (subheading): A prominent Chicago merchant who
has just returned from the Pacific coast, in a long interview published to-day,
expresses the opinion that coolie labor has made a corpse of San Francisco as a
city.” (April 25, 1882).
Notable secondary themes related to religion as applied to the Chinese are as
follows: darkness (8), incubus (3), and devil (3). Again, like the primary themes in this
category, these secondary themes appeared in an episodic manner, either as a noun
substitute for China or the Chinese immigrants.
The religious motivation to see the Chinese as a threat to Christianity is clear in
the discourse. Richard Dyer (1997) writes that Christianity creates a racial genealogy of
24
the blessed and cursed, graced and damned that applied to the social construction of
whiteness. This racial genealogy also has links to the concept of civilization which
carries religious and scientific support. Later in the paper, the relationship between
heathen to Chinese and Christian to civilization will be made clearer.
4-“Celestial Invaders”
The concern over the invasion of the Chinese, either by nation or by their labor,
was mentioned 71 times. I also noted 27 times the call for protection or defense against
this Chinese invasion. One particular passage captures the threat of invasion by China
and the need to defend the nation, through the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act:
11-“China has been tempted by the taste of foreign contact and commerce even to
dream of foreign conquest, that to her has been so repuguant [sic]. She has seen
how a few of her outlying, enterprising subjects have made great gains in wealth
and learning. And a revolution is taking place in her polity, foreign and domestic,
that must work out stupendous result, and to us most hazardous, unless prepared
for and met promptly, properly and energetically. Even to-day she has a navy that
puts ours to shame. She lies within twenty days of us, and could, if occasion
required it; place on our shores an army the equal of which modern times have not
seen. This is not likely to occur soon, but it may come any day….What are we to
do to properly avoid this? First, treat the Chinese that are here justly, fairly,
according to manly Christian ideas under our relations with China and the world,
but ADMIT NO MORE, and allow the number now here to diminish and steadily
and as rapidly as it is possible under the fair discharge of our duties to ourselves
and to them, and as soon and as rapidly as we can. Let them entirely leave this
25
country as the Moors were cleared out of Spain, and as the Tartars left the south
of Europe a few centuries ago. Let me ask, what would be the position of
California tomorrow, with a Chinese invasion and a Chinese settlement in the
center of every city, every town on the coast, each one compact, unified, solid
against us, with isolated Chinamen in every neighborhood and hamlet throughout
the country, men who would act, inevitably, for their people as scouts, guides and
spies, leading them through our mountain passes into our valleys, villages and
towns, betraying to them all our strongholds and exposing all our weaknesses,
every Chinaman in the country, with his knowledge of the topography and
surroundings, being to the invaders, worth a hundred of their own men?” (March
5, 1882)
Another passage depicts the “invasion” of Chinese labor that threatens to destroy “white”
labor:
12-A foreign race has invaded California. It comes not to assist, but to destroy
the hopes and aspirations of free labor. The descendants of the brave pioneers are
unable to cope with a race that “produces, but does not consume.” The unequal
competition has already, in many instances, ruined the older and middle-aged
members of this community. It attacks the basis of future generations of the
State—the native-born Californians, both male and female. (March 5, 1882).
The Chronicle’s reporting on the “Chinese invasion” seems to a literal and figurative
dimension. On the literal level, the passage 11 is a plea to strategize against China,
which the Chronicle already assumed has planned to attack with a force to destroy and
26
conquer the USA. On a figurative level, this “invasion” is also a competition between
two perceived labor pools: “white” and “yellow,” regardless of gender.
A notable secondary theme of the “celestial invasion” category is the anxiety
expressed over the Chinese threat to “home,” a literal one or the metaphorical “home” of
the nation (8).
13-“To-day this community is a unit in its fear of Chinese immigration, and the
same law which justifies a man in driving away the tramp who invades the
sanctity of his home and threatens his household, the same law that justifies me in
driving the tram from my door, calls on me to shut the door to this invasion of
Asiatics. This is our home, and we want to keep it sacred to our ideas of what a
home should be: and in the same spirit, gentlemen, we would protect our country
and our political institutions. (March 5, 1882).
Religious, scientific and psychosexual preoccupations lurk in this discourse. However,
while warfare imagery can have religious overtones and certainly contribute to the
Chronicle’s coverage, scientific and psychosexual concerns are more pronounced. Again,
the competition between “white” and “yellow” labor is seen to be able to “destroy” the
former. And this certainly has a Spencerian aura to its warning.
But it is the home
invasion metaphor that adumbrates a personal threat that has psychosexual undertones.
Because not only is the potential rape of wives and daughters imaginable, but the defiling
of “white” male masculinity at home as well as in the nation by a “celestial invasion” is
conceivable as well.
5-“Uncivilized Unassimilate”
27
The two primary concerns about Chinese integration in the US American society
were that the Chinese were not civilized (28) to the high degree of “Anglo Saxon”
civilization and that this made them fundamentally unassimilable (31).
14-“…The friends of humanity and a high civilization were seeking to improve
the condition of the laborers, while Chinese immigration was hostile to the
laboring man.” In his [Professor Bluntschli] eyes we were acting contrary to the
spirit of advancing civilization in allowing Chinese immigration. We were
inviting the social problem to vex us which are now troubling the old world.
Although the anti-Chinese law had not then been passed, he declared it absolutely
impossible that Americans could tolerate the influx of Chinese much longer. He
said we would sooner or later be forced to keep them out. He did not consider it
merely an American problem, but looked at it as a question of European
civilization. America, in his opinion, was simply first called to deal with the
Chinese immigration, but the countries of Europe would later on be confronted
with the same problem. When emigration from China was once fairly started,
they would endeavor to overrun all countries. If not prevented, China could send
out numbers sufficient to overthrow modern European civilization, without being
herself benefited thereby. (Paraphrasing Goheimrath Bluntschli, Professor of
Political Sciences in Heidelberg, on his opinion of the implication of Chinese
Immigration August 10, 1882)
15-An Unassimilative People (Subheading): The Chinese, though they are with
us, are not of us. They are, as far as they can be, a government by themselves,
imperium in imperio. They will not mingle or affiliate with our people, and if
28
they would, God forbid that they ever should for the result would be in my
opinion, be a people with the vices of both, without the virtues of either. But
whether this opinion is correct or not, the fact is that they are in our midst a
distinct people, and will so remain. (March 3, 1882).
Five secondary themes emerge that shed light on the justification for their
uncivilized and unassimilable nature. First, they are accused of not spending or investing
their earned money in the USA but instead horde their wealth to take back to China, after
their labor contract is over (10). Second, the Chinese are seen not to have as a goal the
attainment of citizenship (9). Third, they are seen as “alien” (9). Fourth, they are seen to
be “machine-like” (6). And fifth, they had no families which not only gave them unfair
advantage economically against “white” male labor, but it also made them “strange” and
“separate” (6). Little is spoken of how industries exploited the Chinese so that sojourner
workers could not make enough to go back to China, that anti-Chinese riots and
xenophobia forced them into Chinatowns for protection, that citizenship was not offered
to the Chinese by the US American government, and that the Chinese were not burdened
by families because sinophobia excluded Chinese women from entering into the country
and white women from romantic access to the Chinese men.
Religion and science influence this particular critique of the Chinese. The
religious impulse to call the Chinese people uncivilized again flows from the idea of the
savage. Savage people are without order and civilization. But scientific notions would
concretize the merging of physical difference of race with moral character making the
Chinese not only savage, but without civilization or the capacity to assimilate into
“white” civilization. The “white” confidence in the Anglo-Saxon ability to absorb other
29
peoples while retaining their own dominant traits was shaken with the Chinese (Higham
1994).
6-“Overwhelming Deluge”
The Chronicle referred to the Chinese or reported about the Chinese in two ways
that communicated threat through a natural disaster. One was the use of overabundance
as a threat to the republic (38). The other was water-related imagery to describe the
Chinese (22).
16-Adult Chinese Males (subheading): In number equal or nearly equal to the
entire population of women in our State, a body more than half as women in our
State, a body more than half as numerous as the entire voting population, a body
already sufficient to perform the larger part of the labor of the community—both
skilled and unskilled, and with an increasing force so vastly out of proportion to
that of our own people engaged in such occupations as to show that if not stopped
it will soon take up and fill every line and avenue of manual labor. (March 5,
1882).
17-Devastation and Destruction (subheading): Through the valleys and the
meadows. The sufferers rush to save themselves: some to repair the breach and
some to build new barriers: anything to warn off the flood and protect the
drowning country. Such a flood as this had come upon California, and the law of
self-preservation demands from us that we shall protect our home and our
country. (March 5, 1882).
As passage 16 describes, the population size, present and potential, was seen as a social
problem to “white” labor, but the repeated emphasis was on the great size of the Chinese
30
labor population. And in passage 17, the force of the Chinese immigration is like a flood,
with the ability to “drown” the nation.
The Chronicle used two secondary images that relate to the “overwhelming
deluge.” First was the image of the “horde” (13) and second was the image of destruction
(11). The use of the “horde” image, like the flood and the overabundance image, echoes
the untamable animalness of the Chinese, simultaneously underscoring their numbers and
uncontrollability. The theme of “destruction” reverberates these fears.
Religious themes support the communication of the Chinese as excess, flood,
horde and destruction. Many of these disasters hark back to the biblical notion of the
nine plagues in the Book of Genesis, while some echo the flood story of Noah’s ark.
Ruin through surfeit holds a deep grip on the religious imagination and it is shown here
against the Chinese.
7-“Disesased Filth”
The two primary images of the Chinese that related to health concerns were the
Chinese as generally diseased (23) and as filthy or dirty people (22).
18-Things have now arrived at such a point on this coast that it may be safely said
to be dangerous to purchase anything to which is attached the least suspicion that
it has been manufactured by Chinese. Particularly does this apply to a cigar,
which the consumer is compelled to take into his mouth, and while inhaling its
fumes is probably also inhaling the germs of a loathsome disease, imparted to the
cigar by the heathen who made it, being possibly affected by smallpox, leprosy or
some other vile contagious disorder. (June 14, 1882).
31
19-After reciting a portion of the report which holds the Police and Health
Departments responsible for the bad sanitary condition of Chinatown, Dr. Meares
recited the anxiety which he claims the Board of health has always manifested to
relieve the community of the sanitary evils of Chinatown (April 27, 1882).
The two secondary images used to describe the Chinese were foul odor (10) and
the Chinese as specific carriers of smallpox (9). Alan Kraut (1994) details at length how
the treatment of immigrants as a health “menace” was not unique to the Chinese but
affected many other groups as well. However, the effect was the same in the manner that
racist prejudices were medicalized for nativist purposes (p.2).
Sigmund Freud once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, meaning that an
interpretation of phallic projections need not apply with everything. In this case, a cigar
is not just a cigar, but a racialized phallic symbol. Mary Douglas wrote that dirt was a
by-product of systematic ordering (1996). The dirt on the cigar is the touch of the
Chinese person who made it. The danger involved in smoking the cigar goes beyond
smallpox, leprosy and contagion and straight to social order, racial boundaries, and the
public maintenance of those boundaries through disease panics. The mouth of the
“white” man is imagined as clean and without disease while the hands of the Chinese
worker are seen as a dirty threat to public health. So too Chinatown was spatially raced
as evil due to its unsanitary state.
8-“Sordid Sorts”
This last category is a medley of negative images used against the Chinese that
generally describe degeneration. Four notable negativities are 1) the Chinese as
animalistic (42) 2) the Chinese as dangerous (39) 3) as well as Chinese women as
32
prostitutes (18) and 4) the degrading affect of the Chinese (14). In the interest of space,
examples of number 1, 2 and 3 are offered below (1 and 2 in example 21, 3 in example
22) since 4 is a general negativity and does not offer particularly rich imagery for the
purposes of illustration.
21-“With the large forces that China could send here, with modern arms, the land
would be swept and devastated, as do myriads of locusts, in one unbroken mass,
sweep over the country, devouring everything before them. (March 5, 1882)
22-“…the Chinese Government has always prohibited the immigration of
respectable women to this country, and that nine-tenths were improper characters.
He [Representative Calkins] then urged that the Government owes protection to
the laborer and his family, and should prevent people coming who would injure
them in any way.” (Reporting on a speech in the House by Congressman Calkins
of Indiana supporting the Chinese Exclusion Act, March 14, 1882).
Passage 21 is again biblical in its description of the Chinese as a locust swarm. Passage
22 shows how Chinese women who immigrate to the USA must not be “respectable” and
must be “improper,” which is coded language for Chinese women as prostitutes.
However, it is interesting to note the leap in “logic” when the Chronicle writes that these
women have a potential to “injure” the “white” laborer and his family. The method of
injury is left to the imagination of the reader.
Generally, all these images from “coolie slave” to “sordid sorts” show how the
media constructed the Chinese as a defiler of the nation and a threat to whiteness. More
specifically, the media played intertextually on religious, scientific, and psychosexual
motifs to show a “purity” of the race and nation. The Chronicle racialized the Chinese
33
out of former influences but in a new fashion. In a religious sense, the Chronicle
conveyed the idea of the Chinese as a “savage” by highlighting the servile, murderous,
uncivilized, animal, and heathen natures. In a scientific sense, the focus on disease, filth,
competition between races, and the unassimilable nature of the Chinese played on notions
of “fitness” and biological understandings of survival and dominance. Psychosexually,
beyond the sexual accusations that the Chinese men rape “white” women and children,
the Chronicle voiced a deep anxiety about a Chinese invasion that moved beyond the
literal to the figurative interpretation. The concern over a “home invasion” discussed
previously shows a fear of rape and pillage of Anglo-Saxon America as well as an
emasculation of the “white” male by an unfairly exceptional competitor, unconstrained
by duty of citizenship, family, or the need to sleep and eat. The “Chinese invasion”
greatly threatened the perceived purity of the country as a “white haven” and religious,
scientific, and psychosexual preoccupations helped to construct the win/lose narrative of
the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Whiteness and Nativism
The social construction of the Chinese can also shed light on the social
construction of “white” US American identity in 1882. “One of the surest ways to
confirm an identity, for communities as well as for individuals, is to find some way of
measuring what one is not” (Takaki 126, quoting Kai Erikson). I have shown in the
previous section that eight interpretative repertoires emerged about the Chinese. These
repertoires portrayed the Chinese as slavish, criminal, non-Christian, unassimilated,
excessive, dirty, degenerate and as an enemy. Thus by contrast “white” US Americans
are then constructed as free, law-abiding, Christian, assimilated, moderate (in population
34
size), healthy, pure, orderly and as the defenders of the nation. But this “white purity”
also has its roots in a historical process of racialization that is also supported by religion,
measured by science, and imagined psychosexually.
An intertextual analysis reveals these three preoccupations help to support a
contest narrative between “whites” and “yellows.” The nation in the late nineteenth
century, particularly California, was imagined by “whites” as pure Anglo-Saxon, despite
the actual heterogeneous demographic including various non-Anglo-Saxon European
peoples. “Whites” believed that they were “a chosen people with an impeccable ancestry”
(Horsman 1997 p.141). This Anglo-Saxon purity could be threatened, as the science of
the day warned, through the mixing of or competition between racially discrete people.
Anglo-Saxon is a murky term at best but at the time it was defined “in contrast to blacks,
Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, or Asiatics” (Horsman 1997 p.141). With psychosexual
overtones, “whites” saw the Chinese of having the potential to “rape” the Anglo-Saxon
civilization if drastic measures were not in place to protect the “white” workers, nation,
and Christian civilization. Fear fueled this contest narrative, and religion and science did
not offer an alternative ideology of mutual aid or cooperation between the “civilizations”
that could have mitigated that fear of racial competition.
Instead, this win/lose narrative that connects the various discursive repertoires of
the Chinese Exclusion Act shows how nativist discourse reifies “white purity” within the
discourse of labor, race, nation, and Christianity. The win/lose narrative was a way to
motivate the protectionist discourse of nativism as well as to vent the frustrations that
come from the violations of Chinese immigration to the Christian civilization and the
Anglo-Saxon race. To see the Chinese as a dirty defiler of the whiteness is most acute in
35
the metaphor of the “home invasion,” where the home was imagined as a type of “white”
haven, occupied by a moral, hard working, Christian, “white” family. Anne McClintock
(1995) explains the significance of the “home” as it relates to nationalism. She argues
that “nations are symbolically figured as domestic genealogies” (357). And the “family
trope is important for nationalism in at least two ways. First, it offers a ‘national’ figure
of sanctioning national hierarchy with in a putative organic unity of interests. Second, it
offers a ‘natural’ trope for figuring national time….The family offered an indispensable
metaphoric figure by which national difference could be shaped into a single historical
genesis narrative” (357). To argue the “invasion of the Asiatics” into a home or nation
suggests a fear of destruction of a particular domestic genealogy as well as the rape of
whiteness, which would signify the end of a pure genealogical line and time.
Given that the purity of “white” civilization was at risk, the call for protection in
such an extreme measure as the Chinese Exclusion Act is not surprising. With so much at
stake that is revealed in the discourse, there is little wonder the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882 passed with ovation.
Conclusion
Discourse analysis of the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the Chinese
during the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act’s passage reveals various racist discursive
repertoires. The Chinese were seen as “coolie slaves,” “cruel murderers,” “evil
heathens,” “celestial invaders,” “uncivilized unassimilates,” “overwhelming deluge,”
“diseased filth,” and generally “sordid.” By contrast, the meaning of whiteness can be
seen. A “white” identity entails free, law-abiding, Christian, protective, defensive,
civilized, moderate (in population number), clean paragons of temperate Anglo-
36
Saxonism. The symbolisms of purity and impurity motivated these racial constructions.
These symbolisms are an imaginary exercise in racial community, as much as the nation
is an imaginary exercise in national community. And although the specific language and
target of racist nativism has changed over time, similar themes still reverberate in the
current anti-immigrant discourse in the USA today. For example, in the southwest region
public discourse portrays Latinos as “invaders,” “outsiders,” “burdens,” “parasites,”
“diseases,” “animals,” and “weeds” (Santa Ana 2002). Newspapers racially construct
brownness as outside or antagonistic to the nation in regard to immigration, suggesting
that brown immigrants are the “enemies” of the body politic who steal jobs and social
service benefits, and (Kil forthcoming, Hugh Megan 1997).
Religion and science bear substantial weight on the creation and re-creation of
race. Religion and science offered strict views of the social order with non-“whites” at
the bottom of each system. Each system contains a racist logic that is prone to violation.
The Chinese were seen as violating those systems with their economic potential and were
thus seen as a threat to “white, Anglo-Saxon civilization.” The nativist plea to protect
“white” labor from “yellow” competition was conveyed with religiously and
scientifically motivated defensive fears based on competition. Religion not only
authorizes the fantasy of the “savage” and the imagined state of squalor that the savage
occupies, but religion also authorizes “whites” to expel that state or be conquered.
Science too helped in this racial expulsion by positing an empirical idea of racial ordering
that could succumb to the dominance of the most “fit” if extreme means were not
executed to benefit the “whites,” disadvantaged by their superior racial deportment.
37
Thus, science and religion helped “whites” to fear the quantity of yellowness and
put hopes into the quality of whiteness within the discussion of race in the late 19th
century USA. Both ideological forces authorized the association of “white purity” with
the concept of civilization. Because the Chinese violated this “purity,” psychosexual
projections of the Chinese took subtle form in the discourse that denigrated them. The
Chinese were seen a physically threatening, culturally overpowering, and savage in their
ability to conquer labor markets as well as the “Christian white haven” of the USA.
From this perspective, the future survival of “white” civilization heavily depended on the
passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
38
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1
Throughout this paper, I will use “US American” and “USA” unless quoting another
author’s text. I choose to use these terms because “U.S.,” “America” and “American” are
too general and also underscore US American solipsism.
2
Also exempt were Chinese laborers who arrived 90 days prior to the act’s passage,
though they were required by the act to obtain proper papers from US port officials if
they desired to depart and return to the USA (Salyer 1995 p17-18).
3
Proposition 187, a Californian voter initiative passed with overwhelming support in
1994, was also called “Save our State” or “S.O.S” initiative. “S.O.S” alluded to
California as a ship in distress in need of rescue from undocumented immigration. The
proposition sought to deny any public education, emergency health services, and social
services to undocumented people. Most of the proposition was later deemed
unconstitutional by the federal courts. In Arizona, a movement to revive the sentiment of
42
Prop 187 in California succeeded in 2004 with the PAN initiative, short for “Protect
Arizona Now.” It is another voter initiative that requires proof of citizenship to register to
vote, photo id to vote, and proof of eligibility for nonfederally mandated public benefits.
Both initiatives play on the notion of the undocumented immigrant as a life-threatening
abstraction to the state in need of protection.
4
“Civilization” is a code word for race. I use the term in quotes when it stands alone to
emphasize to the reader that it is a problem term, as it is used to generally describe races,
cultures, natures, and political institutions in an evolutionary manner with white, western
civilization in an advanced state. However, I leave it without quotes when I use it to refer
to the Christian civilization and Chinese civilization, for example, for the purposes of
continuity in analyzing the Chronicle’s discourse.
5
Throughout this paper, I will use quotes around “white” and “yellow,” to emphasize
their socially constructed nature. I will not use quotes around whiteness or yellowness as
the process of racial abstraction is assumed in these terms.
6
See Terry Eagleton’s “Ideology: An Introduction” (1991) for an analysis of how
ideologies work to obscure social reality in ways convenient to dominant powers.
7
Interestingly, this archetype of the savage was similar in the British perception of the
Irish people (Smedley 1993 p.54)
8
The “great chain of being” originated with Aristotle’s System Naturae and was revised
during the Enlightenment age (Graves 2001 p.18).
9
“Charles Darwin was not the first evolutionist, but he provided the first clear
explanation of the agency both of natural selection in adaptation and of common ancestry
in evolution. Variation was a key element in Darwin’s thinking. Natural selection was
43
concerned not just with any variation but with variation that defined the survival and
reproductive potential of individuals in the struggle for existence. The power of Darwin’s
theory was that it was immediately applicable to a wide variety of natural phenomena.
This adaptability was precisely what made natural selection and evolutionary reasoning
indispensable to race theory” (Graves 2001 p.53).
10
“The champions of Anglo-Saxonism in the United States established eugenics as a
political tool between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth
century. They declared that the Anglo-Saxon population should be credited with all
positive developments in Western civilization. Democracy itself was to be seen as a
unique development of the Teutonic races. Other races had copied it, but it could flourish
only among people of the Anglo-Saxon race. Dilution of the American population by
non-Teutonic races threatened to destroy American social institutions” (Graves 2001
p.100).
11
Pseudosciences resemble science but do not follow a rigorous scientific method and are
more susceptible to ideological, moral, and cultural influences that make pseudoscientific
assumptions fallacious. An example would be the eugenics movement of the early 20th
century.
12
The word “coolie” comes from two Chinese words, “koo” meaning to rent, and “lee”
meaning muscle, and was a derogatory reference to unskilled Chinese laborers. It would
later have the connotation of “Chinese slave” as anti-Chinese sentiment escalated (Norton
1924 p.283-296).
13
Although a system of slavery did exist in China until it was abolished by the Imperial
government in 1906, the people who arrived in California were not slaves. They were
44
contract laborers or “hired muscle,” thus they were free laborers, but sadly exploited and
vilified free laborers.
14
The definition of the word “texts” is used broadly.