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‘A race so different’: Chinese exclusion, the slaughterhouse cases , and Plessy v. Ferguson

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0023656042000217237

1469-9702

Hoang Gia Phan,

Chinese history and philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Dred Scott v. Sanford, 19 How. 393 (1857). Fehrenbacher Fehrenbacher Don, E Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective New York: Oxford University Press 1981 [Google Scholar], Slavery, Law, and Politics, 192. Ibid., 'The Opinion of the Court,' esp. 194–99. Perhaps most famously, Althusser Althusser Louis 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press 1971 [Google Scholar]: 'In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission' ('Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,' 182). Both Foucault and Balibar have taken up this ambiguity to theorize, respectively, power and citizenship. See Foucault Foucault Michel 'The Subject and Power.' In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983 [Google Scholar], 'The Subject and Power,' 212; Balibar Balibar Etienne 'Subjection and Subjectivation.' In Supposing the Subject edited by Joan Copjec. London: Verso 1994 [Google Scholar], 'Subjection and Subjectivation,' 8. Ibid., 12. Smith Smith Rogers, M Civic Ideals New Haven: Yale University Press 1997 [Google Scholar], Civic Ideals, 2. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Like Karen Orren I proceed from the 'primacy of labor.' See Orren's Belated Feudalism. Orren's 'claim is that inquiry into how work is induced and regulated will open new avenues to understanding fundamental changes in politics. The primacy of labor is based on the premise that labor is a bridge between the realm of state elites and institutions and the ongoing activities of social life. … Changes in these relations, or a change in demands on the part of the state, may cause, historically have caused, adjustments of political institutions, accompanied by varying degrees of conflict' (Belated Feudalism, 21). See Roediger Roediger David The Wages of Whiteness London: Verso 1999 [Google Scholar], The Wages of Whiteness. According to Roediger, 'the terms white and worker became meaningfully paired only in the nineteenth century … during a time in which the United States, whose citizens were taught by their revolutionary victory and republican ideology to expect both political and economic independence, became a nation in which, by 1860, roughly half the nonslave labor force was dependent on wage labor and subject to new forms of capitalist labor discipline' (The Wages of Whiteness, 20). See Morgan Morgan Edmund, S American Slavery, American Freedom W. W. Norton 1975 [Google Scholar], American Slavery, American Freedom, esp. 'Toward Slavery;' Engerman Engerman Stanley, L 'Servants to Slaves to Servants: Contract Labor and European Expansion.' In Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery edited by P. C. Emmer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff 1986 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 'Servants to Slaves to Servants;' and Allen Allen Theodore, W The Invention of the White Race 2 The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo‐America Verso 1997 [Google Scholar], The Invention of the White Race, esp. Chapters 6 through 8. Eltis Eltis David 'Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern World.' In Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor edited by Stanley Engerman. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 'Slavery and Freedom,' 35–6. By 'free worker' I mean one who sells himself on the labor market as a commodity; i.e. in that double sense described by Marx: 'Free workers in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production. … The free workers are therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own' (Marx Marx Karl Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1 Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990 [Google Scholar], Capital, 874). On the ideology of free labor in the ante‐bellum US, see Eric Foner Foner Eric Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War New York: Oxford University Press 1995 [Google Scholar], Free Soil. See the text of Pennsylvania's 'An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,' Pennsylvania Law Book, Vol. 1, 399; enacted 1 March 1780. The worry over the productivity of free black labor was great, and in what came to be called 'the great experiment' of West Indian emancipation the main concern was continuity in sugar production, which rested upon the successful transformation of an enslaved population to one of 'free labor.' See Drescher Drescher Seymour 'Free Labor vs. Slave Labor: The British and Caribbean Cases.' In Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor edited by Stanley Engerman. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 'Free Labor vs. Slave Labor,' 50–86. For an insightful discussion of such 'gradualist' emancipation and the notions of 'need' and 'value' in assimilation, see Holt Holt Thomas, C '"An Empire over the Mind": Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South.' In Region, Race, and Reconstruction edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982 [Google Scholar], 'An Empire over the Mind,' 283–313. The US Constitution, in Shapiro Shapiro, Martin, ed. The Constitution of the United States and Related documents Northbrook, Ill.: AHM 1973 [Google Scholar], The Constitution of the United States, 1–34. Fehrenbacher Fehrenbacher Don, E Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective New York: Oxford University Press 1981 [Google Scholar], Slavery, Law, and Politics, 193; Fields Fields, Barbara. (1990). 'Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.'. New Left Review, 181: 99 [Google Scholar], 'Slavery, Race, and Ideology,' 99; Best Best Stephen 'Fugitive Sound: Fungible Personhood, Evanescent Property.' In The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2004 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 'Fugitive Sound.' Barbara Field's elision of this third term in her reading of the famous clause is striking, since she later presents a brief pre‐history of 'race,' in which indentured servitude figures. This is the argument, following David Brion Davis, of Barbara Fields. See Fields Fields, Barbara. (1990). 'Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.'. New Left Review, 181: 99 [Google Scholar], 'Slavery, Race, and Ideology,' 102. Steinfeld Steinfeld Robert, J The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1991 [Google Scholar], The Invention of Free Labor, 10. Surprisingly, Steinfeld does not offer a reading of the US Constitution. Throughout my extensive searches, I have not found any historian who does read the presence of this other labor system in the Constitution. Nonetheless, my reading here is indebted to Steinfeld's good history of the career of indentured servitude. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 11. Shapiro Shapiro, Martin, ed. The Constitution of the United States and Related documents Northbrook, Ill.: AHM 1973 [Google Scholar], The Constitution of the United States, 1–34. Madison Madison James The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 which Framed the Constitution of the United States of America: Reported by James Madison, a Delegate from the State of Virginia edited by Gaillard Hunt and James Brown Scott. Buffalo: Prometheus 1987 [Google Scholar], The Debates in the Federal, Vol. 2, 481, 487. Steinfeld Steinfeld Robert, J The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1991 [Google Scholar], The Invention of Free Labor, 138. Shapiro Shapiro, Martin, ed. The Constitution of the United States and Related documents Northbrook, Ill.: AHM 1973 [Google Scholar], The Constitution of the United States, 1–34. Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 5th Congress (1797–98). See especially Gallatin, 1979; Baldwin, 1978–79 from the Debates, 5C. See also Smith Smith James Morton Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1956 [Google Scholar], Freedom's Fetters, 79–81. This semantic debate also reveals the extent to which 'original intent' was perceived as crucial to later debates over the legal form of citizenship. Steinfeld Steinfeld Robert, J The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1991 [Google Scholar], The Invention of Free Labor, 11. Northrup Northrup David Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995 [Google Scholar], Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 4–7. See also Galenson Galenson, David, W. (1984). 'The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis.'. Journal of Economic History, 44(no. 1): 1–26. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 'The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude.' See also Konvitz Konvitz Milton The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1946 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], The Alien and the Asiatic, who notes that before the end of the Reconstruction period many former slaveholders in the South expressed 'lively interest in the possibility of substituting Chinese coolie labor for Negro slavery. It had been suggested in Memphis, in 1869, that such a substitution might be in order; and on several occasions about this time Southern planters had visited California with this purpose in mind' (The Alien and the Asiatic, 12). Konvitz suggests that such a 'substitution' became unnecessary with the de facto end of Reconstruction and its emancipatory possibilities: 'Once [the planters] realized, however, that they had regained control of the Negro, their interest in Chinese labor swiftly abated' (Ibid., 12). For a more specific, comparativist account of the relation between black labor and Chinese labor, see McWilliams McWilliams Carey Brothers under the Skin Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1943 [Google Scholar], Brothers under the Skin. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896). Ibid., 542, my emphasis. Ibid., 542. Ibid., 542. The primary meaning of 'imply' is 'to involve by logical necessity; entail.' Similarly, the entry for 'implication, logical' in the Philosophy Dictionary (HarperCollins, 2nd ed.) notes: '1. sometimes called definitional implication, deducibility of one statement from another. 2. sometimes synonymous with logical entailment, the relationship of two statements whereby if the first is true, then the other is also necessarily true.' The form of the precedent effaces the legal debates this case originally engendered. The majority opinion in Slaughterhouse cited by Brown becomes the authoritative construction of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments; its narrow 5–4 majority and the many dissenting opinions are often forgotten. The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 US (16 Wall.) 36 (1873). Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 529. Ibid., 529; Kaczorowski Kaczorowski Robert, J Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 New York: Oceana 1985 [Google Scholar], Politics of Judicial Interpretation, xiii, 144. Slaughterhouse, 49, emphasis in original. Ibid., 49–50, emphasis in original. Ibid., 51, emphasis in original. The political economic persistence, or 'survival,' of these 'feudal,' hierarchical structures is explored by Karen Orren in her Belated Feudalism. Focusing on the law of master and servant, Orren argues, 'At the time the United States entered upon full‐scale industrialization after the Civil War, its politics contained, at the core, a belated feudalism, a remnant of the medieval hierarchy of personal relations, a particularized network of law and morality‐a system of governance‐that the word "feudalism" conveys. It had been dislodged neither by the American Revolution nor by the advent of the US Constitution, but remained embedded within American government‐as state within a state‐dividing public power, limiting the reach of legislation, setting the bounds of collective action, well into the current century' (Belated Feudalism, 3). Ibid., 51. Ibid., 72. Marx Marx Karl Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1 Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990 [Google Scholar], Capital, 925. Ibid., 712. Ibid., 717. Ibid., 719. Ibid., 874. In 'On Manufactures' (1791) Hamilton in many ways predicts what would occur in the industrial North in the nineteenth century: the increasing specialization and division of labor, the increase in immigration, and the growing participation of women and children in labor outside the home. See Hamilton Hamilton Alexander 'On Manufactures.' In A More Perfect Union: Documents in U.S. History 1 To 1877 edited by Paul F. Boller, Jr and Ronald Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1996 [Google Scholar], 'On Manufactures,' 95–99. Roediger Roediger David The Wages of Whiteness London: Verso 1999 [Google Scholar], The Wages of Whiteness, 46. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 46. Indeed, this view can be seen in 'The Republican Party Platform of 1860,' the famous formalization of free labor ideology. The Republican Party was founded on the slogans of 'free soil' and 'free labor.' The language of the Platform foregrounds the appeal of wage labor as one possible form of independence: '[W]e commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence' (in Boller and Story Boller, Paul F., Jr and Ronald Story, eds A More Perfect Union: Documents in U.S. History 1 To 1877. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1996 [Google Scholar], eds, A More Perfect Union, 186). As with the language of radical labor reformers, the Republican Party Platform of 1860 links different types of wage labor with 'independence.' Also, and perhaps more importantly, it refers to the skill, labor, and enterprise of the white working men of its address. The importance of these references lies in their resonance with the language of white labor. Phrases such as 'skill, labor, and enterprise' worked to reinforce white labor's use of whiteness as a source of working class identity and blackness, which in ante‐bellum labor politics was its variously implicit and explicit other, as a signifier of servility and dependency. Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 28. Ibid., 29. The multiple disadvantages of such an entrance into the free market of labor were only compounded by the rise of post‐bellum liberalism, and the increasing disenchantment with Reconstruction. The extent to which such a rise in this conservative middle class view affected negatively upon the aspirations of freedmen should not be underestimated. Not only influential scholars like Francis Parkman but journal editors such as The Nation's editor E. L. Godkin argued, for example, in favor of the reformers' 'financial science,' enthusiastically modeled after the political economy of Adam Smith: free trade, the law of supply and demand, and the gold standard. Most significantly, they argued against an activist government. Such calls for limited government participated in the Northern retreat from efforts at economic and social uplift for the recently 'emancipated' (Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 498). Many of these liberals argued for educational and property qualifications for voting, and spearheaded the campaign for civil service reform. 'Universal suffrage,' wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr in 1869, 'can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice: it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic Coast, an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific' (in Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 497). For Adams and other reformers, egalitarian ideas were an anachronism, expressive of the 'unscientific sentimentalism' that characterized the ante‐bellum era. The egalitarian claims made by blacks at this time were either ignored or suppressed in this growing antipathy towards the original ideals of Reconstruction. In the view of the new liberal reformers, Reconstruction demonstrated the dangers of unbridled democracy and the political incapacity of the lower classes (Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 497). '"Reconstruction," declared The Nation, "seems to be morally a more disastrous process than rebellion"' (Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 499). In an almost complete reversal, Reconstruction and its egalitarianism were far worse than the actual 'rebellion'—that is, the rebellion of the Southern Confederacy—itself. Slaughterhouse, 72. Kaczorowski Kaczorowski Robert, J Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 New York: Oceana 1985 [Google Scholar], Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 173–93; Foner —— Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution New York: Harper & Row 1988 [Google Scholar], Reconstruction, 530. Slaughterhouse, 69. Ibid. Ibid. The practice to which Miller alludes, of 'reducing the [former] slaves to the condition of serfs attached to the plantation' in order to maintain them in slavery was widespread in the Southern states, and became even more so with the end of Reconstruction. In his report to President Andrew Johnson on conditions in the Southern states when the war ended, Major General Carl Schurz had attested to this: 'It is, indeed, not probable that a general attempt will be made to restore slavery in its old form, on account of the barriers which such an attempt will find in its way; but there are systems intermediate between slavery as it formerly existed in the south, and free labor as it exists in the north, but more nearly related to the former than to the latter, the introduction of which will be attempted' (Senate Executive Doc. No. 2, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., Vol. II, 32; cited in Hill Hill Herbert Black Labor and the American Legal System Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1985 [Google Scholar], Black Labor and the American Legal System, 66). Ibid., 72. Plessy, 550. The intermingling—and sometimes the interchanges—of 'race' and 'class' as categories of identification are prevalent throughout Plessy v. Ferguson, the Slaughterhouse Cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, and the various Chinese exclusions cases. While I do not claim that Brown here refers to 'class' in the sense used today—i.e. as index of economic group affiliation in a social division of labor—my argument does proceed from the premise that such classifications as the 'Chinese race'—when used to designate a population of laborers as is the case in Plessy, Yick Wo, and all nineteenth‐century cases involving Chinese in America—entail the racialization of 'class' and the class‐ification of 'race.' As I have argued with respect to the precedent‐setting Miller decision of the Slaughterhouse Cases, certain 'classes' of laborers correspond to certain 'races.' My argument maintains a determinative effectivity for the ideology of 'race,' even as it maintains, via labor, a reciprocal and equal effectivity for the political economic register of 'class.' For a related (though more functionalist) argument on the 'ethnicization of the work force' see Wallerstein Wallerstein Immanuel 'Ideological Tensions of Capitalism.' In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso 1991 [Google Scholar], 'Ideological Tensions of Capitalism.' Plessy, 551. Ibid., 550, my emphasis. Saidiya Hartman analyses the police power and the court's mobilization of 'the social' in the final chapter of her Scenes of Subjection. My reading of the Plessy decision agrees with her more detailed analysis as well as her conclusions regarding the inequalities produced and reproduced by it, though its specific focus will be upon other inequalities, namely, of labor and citizenship. Plessy, 550. Bourdieu Bourdieu Pierre 'The Objective Limits of Objectivism.' In Outline of a Theory of Practice Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998 [Google Scholar], 'The Objective Limits of Objectivism,' 17. For an elaboration of 'habitus' as a strategy‐generating principle for individual action and its relation to the field of the social, see ibid., 72–95. 'It is true that only the fifteenth amendment, in terms, mentions the negro by speaking of his color and his slavery. But it is just as true that each of the other articles was addressed to the grievances of that race, and designed to remedy them as the fifteenth' (Miller, Slaughterhouse Cases, 72). The structural similarities between the Slaughterhouse Cases and Yick Wo v. Hopkins are striking: both involved tradesmen facing a perceived monopoly; local health and public safety legislation passed under the claim of the police power; claims for protection under the post‐war amendments; and debates over the meaning of the very terms of the amendments themselves. Yick Wo, 309. While positioned against the Slaughterhouse Cases in Brown's dichotomy of precedents, the decision in Yick Wo v. Hopkins also formulates the condition of unfreedom called 'slavery' in the language of labor: 'For, the very idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life, at the mere will of another, seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself' (Yick Wo, 370). Plessy, 550. Ibid., 559–60, my emphasis. Ibid., 560. Saidiya Hartman argues, along with the dissenting opinion of Harlan, that the Plessy decision 'revived the spirit of Dred Scott' (Hartman Hartman Saidiya Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‐Making in Nineteenth‐Century America New York: Oxford University Press 1997 [Google Scholar], Scenes of Subjection, 198). Hartman's focus here is a symptomatic reading of the majority decision. I would go further to suggest that Plessy (including both its majority and dissenting opinions) not only resurrected Dred Scott but also revived, in significant ways, the exclusionary letter of the law inscribed in that ante‐bellum decision—that is, the language of citizenship. I want to attend to the apparent paradox that Harlan's laudable critiques of the Plessy decision and its inegalitarian implications rely on another set of exclusions. Also, despite their many differences, Harlan's dissent shares with the majority opinion certain identifications of race and labor that will prove fundamental to the labor hierarchies under (re)construction at this time. Plessy, 561. Ibid., 562, my emphasis. Ibid., 543. Ibid., 559. Ibid., 555. Gunther Gunther Gerald Constitutional Law Westbury, N.Y.: Foundation Press 1991 [Google Scholar], Constitutional Law, 409. Plessy, 559. Ibid., 555. Ibid., 561. Interestingly, Harlan's view contradicts the racial classification of the Chinese in People v. Hall (1854), while affirming its racial‐assimilationist logic. In this ante‐bellum case, the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese immigrants could not testify against a white person in a court of law. Delivering the majority opinion, Justice Murray argues that the Chinese were contained under the generic term 'Indian.' He goes further, however, to argue that, even if the Chinese were not to be understood as 'Indians,' they would fall under the generic category of 'Black,' as 'contradistinguished from White' (People v. Hall [1854] 4 Cal. 399). Murray's reasons for thus construing the legislative intent were posed as a matter of cultural difference: 'The evident intention of the act was to throw around the citizen a protection for life and property, which could only be secured by removing him above the corrupting influences of degraded castes. It can hardly be supposed that any Legislature would attempt this by excluding domestic Negroes and Indians, who not unfrequently have correct notions of their obligations to society, and turning loose upon the community the more degraded tribes of the same species, who have nothing in common with us, in language, country, or laws.' His logic is an assimilationist one, insofar as its cultural implication is that 'domestic Negroes and Indians' can have, by virtue of years of residence within and contact with Anglo‐American institutions, a proper understanding of the social contract. Schuck and Smith Schuck Peter, H Rogers M, Smith Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity New Haven: Yale University Press 1985 [Google Scholar], Citizenship without Consent, 84, original emphasis. Konvitz Konvitz Milton The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1946 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], The Alien and the Asiatic, 7–11. 22 Stat. 58 (1882); 23 Stat. 115 (1884); 25 Stat. 476, 477 (1886); 25 Stat. 504 (1888). The Chinese Exclusion Case: Chae Ping v. United States, 130 US 581 (1889). 22 Stat. 826, cited in 'Opinion of the Court,' Chinese Exclusion Case, 596. Chinese Exclusion Case, 597. Charles McClain McClain Charles In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth‐Century America Berkeley: University of California Press 1994 [Google Scholar] notes that one 'contemporary estimate put the number of Chinese holding return certificates at the time of the [Exclusion] Act's passage at thirty thousand' (In Search of Equality, citing The Examiner, 3 October 1888, 6, col. 2). Ibid., 598. 22 Stat. 826, cited in ibid., 600. Ibid., 585. 16 Stat. 739. Ibid., Art. V, cited in Chinese Exclusion Case, 585. Chinese Exclusion Case, 587. They continue to employ the language of contract throughout their argument: consideration; promise; performance; and expectation (587–88). Finally, they argue that upon execution of the contract by the appellant, his right 'was as perfectly vested as the title to real property is vested by the execution and delivery of a deed' (587). In a longer argument than can be elaborated here, one might pursue the structural analogies between property inheritance and 'cultural' inheritance, and their possibly homologous relation to the perpetuation of national coherence. Ibid., 588. Ibid., 600. Ibid. Ibid., 600–1. Ibid., 585. Ibid., 609 Ibid., 604, 606. Ibid., 606. Ibid. Ibid., 596. In 'Segregation's Last Stronghold: Race Discrimination and the Constitutional Law of Immigration' Gabriel Chin Chin Gabriel 'Segregation's Last Stronghold: Race Discrimination and the Constitutional Law of Immigration.' UCLA L. Rev 46 no. 1 (October 1998) [Google Scholar] asserts that the legislative history of the statutes invoked in the Chinese Exclusion Case 'indicates that they were not primarily motivated by a desire … to protect American labor, but instead to foster white supremacy by defending white civilization against an undesirable race' (Chin, 22). In Chin's argument, Chinese exclusion was solely a matter of 'Racial, Not Economic, Protection' (ibid., 28). Chin proceeds from the premise that 'race' is a category entirely separate from relations of production. This premise leads him either to ignore or to dismiss as irrelevant the explicit language of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which specify Chinese laborers as the targets of exclusion and permit the entry of those Chinese 'proceeding to the United States as teachers, students, merchants, or from curiosity.' Chin relegates to footnotes (and provides no discussion of) those arguments in favor of Chinese exclusion which refer to 'the degradation of the American laborer to the Chinese standard' (ibid., 31, note 165) and to the Chinese as essentially 'servile in labor' (ibid., 32, note 167). While Chin successfully elaborates the legal parallels between 'race'‐based domestic segregation (affirmed in Plessy v. Ferguson) and 'race'‐based immigrant exclusion (affirmed in the Chinese Exclusion Case), his rejection of any connection between labor and the legal articulation of 'race' limits his argument's understanding of racism to 'bigotry' (ibid., 5) and an unexplained 'belief in racial hierarchy' (ibid., 37). Chin's argument proceeds, in other words, from the assumption that 'race' and racisms exist prior to inscription in political economic debates. Ibid., 594. Ibid., 596. I would add that 'interests' here is a both capacious and multivalent term, which contains and can stand in for the economic, national, and 'cultural' interests that gather around immigration exclusion. Cited in Montgomery Montgomery David Citizen Worker Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993 [Google Scholar], Citizen Worker, 144. Smith Smith Rogers, M Civic Ideals New Haven: Yale University Press 1997 [Google Scholar], Civic Ideals, 17. Lloyd Lloyd David 'Race under Representation.' In Culture/Contexture edited by E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck. Berkeley: University of California Press 1996 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 'Race under Representation,' 257–58. Ibid., 250. This distinction, however, is not always maintained, since Lloyd's argument also relies, too exclusively perhaps, on the abstraction of the theoretical subject‐of‐linguistics to the status of the social 'subject' in general. The aesthetic–linguistic exclusivity of his emphasis subordinates other, equally material determinations that affect the subjects of assimilation (for my purposes, the economic and the legal). My reading of the demand for assimilation is not to suggest, however, the complete success of such assimilation. The problems of such assimilation into 'free labor' were great, and the formerly enslaved resisted political and legal attempts to reinsert them into another set of labor hierarchies. But this is the topic of a longer investigation. Indeed, on this both the majority and dissenting opinions in Plessy agree: the social is divided from the civic realm of formal legal equality. Chinese Exclusion Case, 595. Ibid., 595. Additional informationNotes on contributorsHoang Gia Phan Correspondence to: Hoang Gia Phan, 2727 California Street, Berkeley, Calif. 94703, USA. Email: hgiaphat@socrates.Berkeley.edu Correspondence to: Hoang Gia Phan, 2727 California Street, Berkeley, Calif. 94703, USA. Email: hgiaphat@socrates.Berkeley.edu