Immigrant Dreams and Nightmares in the White Supremacist Cauldron

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

— Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus" (carved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty) 

Chinese Americans never forget the fact that the Statue of Liberty faces out across the Atlantic Ocean, towards Europe. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses of dream-hungry immigrants coming across the Pacific — like those coming across the deserts and rivers along the Southern US border — have never been greeted by a Mother of Exiles. More often than not, they have been greeted by racist policies and laws, xenophobic hatred, and white supremacist violence.

Instead of a lamp-lifting Lady Liberty beside the golden door, many Chinese folks arriving on the West coast of the United States encountered the dank prison walls of Angel Island. [ Pictured: Chinese boys being inspected by immigration officials on Angel Island.]

The US government established the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1910 as a West coast counterpart to Ellis Island; but there were significant differences between the two. Located in San Francisco Bay next to Alcatraz, Angel Island had previously served as a detention center for prisoners of the Spanish-American and Indian wars. US officials believed it to be well-suited to Asian immigrants because it provided a natural quarantine for the communicable diseases which were "prevalent among aliens from oriental countries" (though Native Americans might have a different view of just who was bringing communicable diseases to these shores). Whereas European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were usually processed and released within hours, some 80 percent of the Chinese immigrants at Angel Island were detained for months or even years, pending detailed investigations into their identities. Aside from the agonizing isolation and dirty crowded conditions, the most notorious component of these investigations were the grueling and repeated interrogations, during which inspectors would harp over laboriously detailed questions looking for the slightest inconsistency as an excuse for deportation.

In response to this ordeal, many detainees skillfully carved calligraphic poetry into the walls of the detention barracks. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

"I wish I could travel on a cloud far away, reunite with my wife and son," says a poem composed of Chinese characters and carved into the barracks' wall. "When the moonlight shines on me alone, the night seems even longer."

Now, the state Parks Department and a nonprofit foundation have begun a $50 million project to restore this national historic landmark, including its decaying barracks and hospital. But as much as anything, it will be the poems that provide a window into the station's past.

"Here, we actually have talking walls," said Erika Gee, director of education for the San Francisco-based Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, which is raising private funds for the project.

Some of the poems were written with pencil or brush nearly 100 years ago. Others were carved using a classical Chinese technique, deep into the wooden walls  --  most likely by a professional carver. Many of the poems were written in the Tang dynasty style of regulated verse and couplets.

"We think there was a conscious effort of selecting what went up on the wall," Gee said. "We think there was actually a poetry club, and people chose the best examples to put on the wall."

More than 135 of these classically-styled poems by anonymous artists survive today as a testament to what it must have been like (and have been compiled in a book); and indeed a testament to what it must still be like today for detained immigrants.

Instead of remaining a citizen of China, I willingly became an ox.
I intended to come to America to earn a living.
The Western styled buildings are lofty; but I have not the luck to live in them.
How was anyone to know that my dwelling place would be a prison?

~ ~ ~

Everyone says traveling to North America is a pleasure.
I suffered misery on the ship and sadness in the wooden building.
After several interrogations, still I am not done.
I sigh because my compatriots are being forcibly detained.

~ ~ ~

A flickering lamp keeps this body company.
I am like pear blossoms which have already fallen.
Pity the bare branches during the late spring.

Now of course, Chinese immigrants had been struggling against systemic xenophobia and racism long before Angel Island.

The Chinese began arriving in California in large numbers in 1849 as part of the gold rush. [ Illustration: Early Chinese immigrants landing in the US.] It didn't take long for this to start pissing off white folks who felt that they alone were entitled to America's riches. In 1852, the California legislature's Committee on Mines and Mining declared of the Chinese that "their presence here is a great moral and social evil — a disgusting scab upon the fair face of society — a putrefying sore upon the body politic." As a result, the "commutation tax" and the "foreign miner's tax" were enacted, aimed respectively at obstructing Chinese immigration and hurting Chinese mining enterprises. The money from these taxes went to funding public hospitals which did not admit Chinese patients.

In 1853, the San Francisco Daily Alta California editorialized that the Chinese were "morally a far worse race to have among us than the negro. They are idolatrous in their religion — in their disposition cunning and deceited, and in their habits libidinous and offensive ... They are not of that kin that Americans can ever associate or sympathize with. They are not of our people and never will be, and it is undesirable that they should, for nothing but degradation can result to us from the contact ... It is of no advantage to us to have them here. They can never become like us."

In 1854, the landmark case People v. Hall established that no Chinese person could testify in court against a white person. The case began when a grand jury in Nevada County indicted George W. Hall for the murder of a Chinese man named Ling Sing. Three Chinese witnesses testified on behalf of the prosecution; Hall was found guilty and sentenced to death. Hall's lawyers appealed the verdict on the grounds that, under the Criminal Proceeding Act, "no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person." The case went to the state supreme court, where the verdict was overturned. Chief Justice Charles Murray explained that the Chinese were, in fact, Indians, because Christopher Columbus, upon reaching the New World, had mistakenly thought that he had reached the China Sea. Bizarrely, Murray further asserted that even if the Chinese were not American Indians, all non-white races could be considered black. People v. Hall offers us a fine example of white supremacist thinking; which is to say, it makes no sense whatsoever, but it gives us a glimpse into the twisted mental processes within the white establishment, which lumps all people of color together as voiceless beasts of burden undeserving of basic human equality.

Needless to say, People v. Hall emboldened white folks to openly terrorize Chinese folks without fear of legal consequences, leading to numerous lynchings and massacres and countless smaller crimes and transgressions, which the Chinese had no possibility of redressing. This led to the expression "Chinaman's chance" — meaning, you're screwed.

In the late 1860s, with the end of the Civil War and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Southern white plantation-owners experimented with the idea of replacing black slaves with Chinese "coolies" (the Chinese word kuli means "bitter strength"). To this end, the first Chinese Labor Convention assembled in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1869, during which Cornelius Koopmanschap (who had famously supplied the Central Pacific Raildroad with Chinese workers) captured the imaginations of hundreds of delegates and raised one million dollars for the project of bringing thousands of Chinese workers to the South. [ Illustration: Chinese laborers on the Milloudon sugar plantation in Louisiana.]

By 1870, some 2,000 Chinese were working in the cotton fields of Mississippi and Arkansas, and on plantations and shrimp farms in Louisiana. It took less than a year for serious conflicts to emerge, as the Chinese viewed themselves as employees with rights, while their white employers viewed them as slaves. The Chinese staged strikes to protest whippings and other harsh treatment; they also proved to be shrewd negotiators of labor contracts, and when their contracts were violated, they sued their employers in court — ironically, a right which they did not enjoy in California but which they successfully applied in the post-Civil War South. Within a few years, both sides had become disillusioned with the failed experiment; most Chinese laborers walked off their jobs to seek employment elsewhere or open their own businesses.

As the country's economic recession deepened in the 1870s, white hostility toward the Chinese became even more frenetic. The most popular poem of the era was "The Heathen Chinese" which depicted the Chinese as sneaky cheaters. Written by Bret Harte and originally published in Overland Monthly, the poem was picked up by every major newspaper in the country; it was set to music; illustrated pamphlet versions flew off newstand shelves; Mark Twain even collaborated with the poet on a stage version titled Ah Sin. 

In 1875, the American Medical Association conducted a study into the role of the Chinese in spreading syphilis in the US, building on top of a paper by Dr. Arthur Stout entitled "Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation". The study found no evidence to support its hypotheses, yet the AMA did not back away from its racist contentions. This is what white folks call "data". [ Illustration: This lithograph was published in 1878 with the caption, "A Picture for Employers: Why They can live on 40 cents a day, and They can't".] 

In San Francisco, city officials also passed the "cubic air law" (requiring lodging houses to have 500 cubic feet of open space for each adult) and the "sidewalk ordinance" (making it a crime to walk through the city carrying a pole over one's shoulder with a basket at each end). To enforce the cubic air law, police often raided Chinese lodging houses in the middle of the night to drag immigrants to jail (the law was not enforced in non-Chinese neighborhoods, nor in the crowded jails themselves). The sidewalk ordinance was aimed at shutting down Chinese laundries; although it failed to do so.

Indeed the story of Chinese laundries is a fascinating one. Contrary to popular belief, there is no ancient tradition of laundromats in China, since most families there do their own laundry. However, the Chinese arriving in America discovered that white men regarded doing laundry as "women's work" beneath their dignity. In mining camps, at construction sites, in cities, Chinese immigrants simply took advantage of an exploitable market demand in order to earn some money; and they could start a laundry business with very little up-front investment. However, the turn of events that really blew up Chinese laundries was, ironically, the attempt of a white businessman named James B. Harvey to exploit Chinese labor in his Passaic Steam Laundry company, a large-scale operation based in Belleville, New Jersey. Many East coast capitalists at that time had begun importing Chinese laborers from the West coast in order to break strikes (some industrialists even ended strikes by simply hiring one Chinese man to walk in and out of a factory, leading white strikers to believe that many Chinese were arriving). Harvey's laundry service had previously employed mostly Irish women, whose unionizing had become a hassle; so he fired all of his white workers and replaced them with Chinese workers. Unfortunately for Harvey, the Chinese men turned out to be just as demanding in their negotiations, and went on strike just as often, as their female Irish counterparts. Disgusted with the experiment, Harvey fired all of his Chinese workers in 1885. But these Chinese folks had learned the inner workings of a major laundry operation; they scattered across the East coast and went into business, inviting relatives to join them in upstarts. Within a few years, 2,000 Chinese laundries were running in New York alone.

Meanwhile in California, a second state constitution was ratified in 1879 which made it illegal for corporations to hire "any Chinese or Mongolian". As a result, the Chinese were pretty much forced to go into business for themselves; and laundromats, restaurants, and small grocery stores were solid markets. These were all mom-and-pop operations with long hours, tight budgets, and lodging in the back. No matter what racist laws got thrown at them, many Chinese found ways to make it work. [ Pictured: Chinese grocery store.]

In 1881, as anti-Chinese sentiment reached a frenzied peak, California Senator John F. Miller roared on the floor of Congress that he and his colleagues must "preserve American Anglo-Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration ... from the gangrene of oriental civilization ... Why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution over our domain of a degraded and inferior race, and the progenitors of an inferior sort of men?" On May 6, 1882, still in the wake of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing democratic rights to people of all races, President Chester Arthur signed into law the first Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese entry (and re-entry) into the US and forbidding all persons of Chinese descent from being naturalized as US citizens. Over the next 25 years, Congress would continue to pass racist legislation aimed at curtailing the rights of Chinese, forcing them to carry special certificates at the risk of deportation, denying them habeus corpus and the right to appeals, outlawing miscegenation and ownership of land, and generally initiating a period of anti-Chinese terror known as "The Driving Out". On multiple occasions, bloody race riots erupted against the Chinese in California, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, requiring federal troops to intervene; though the troops themselves sometimes joined in burning and looting Chinese districts. Between 1880 and 1900, the total number of Chinese in America fell by some 30 percent.

In response to the Exclusion laws, Chinese folks across the country pooled money to mount a series of legal challenges to this unconstitutional legislation. Famous cases such as Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1888), Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), and Lem Moon Sing v. United States (1895) went before the Supreme Court. In every case, the Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to pass legislation which discriminated on the basis of ethnicity. Yet the Chinese continued to take their fight to the courts.

In addition to legal struggles, the Chinese community simultaneously fought for their rights outside of the law: by developing means of exploiting whatever legal loopholes could be found. For example, in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court conceded that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, a person of Chinese descent born on US soil was indeed a US citizen; this meant that an American-born Chinese could claim to have children in China who could come to the US on the principle of jus sanguinis. This gave rise to the famous sytem of "paper sons" in which the paperwork for US immigration slots, based on fictional family ties, was sold in China. And after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 destroyed the city's citizenship records, the "paper sons" industry really got humming. [ Pictured: Wah Chong laundromat in 1884.]

Yet another front in the struggle was solidarity from activists back in China. In 1905, an anti-US boycott was organized in Shanghai to protest the treatment of Chinese in America: workers quit American companies; homes and businesses moved out of US-owned buildings; contracts with US merchants were cancelled; newspapers refused to run American advertisements; protesters prevented American ships from unloading their cargo. The boycott spread throughout China. Fundraisers to sustain the boycott were held in US Chinatowns. Many American businesses in China were forced to shut down. The boycott cost the US some $40 million in Chinese trade that year. In response, the US government demanded that the Qing government crush the boycott; they complied, but the point had been made; and while the policies of Exclusion remained in place, President Teddy Roosevelt issued an executive order to immigration officials to end abusive treatment of Chinese merchants; and proposals for a new round of anti-Chinese legislation were scrapped.

Which brings us full circle, to the establishment of the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1910.

~ ~ ~

So what does all this history teach us about the ongoing struggle for immigrant rights here in the US? [ Illustration: 19th century drawing captioned "You can go, or stay".]

Obviously, each immigrant group faces unique circumstances and challenges. WIth regard to Mexican immigration, the story is perhaps even more convoluted than most, seeing that the Southwestern US was illegally invaded and annexed in la invasión norteamericana (i.e. The Mexican-American War); which means that in many cases, today's descendants of European invaders are barring Mexicans from the land of their own indigenous ancestors, or at least land where Spanish-American residence pre-dates that of Anglo-Americans.

Nevertheless I think there are important areas of commonality between the Chinese and Mexican immigrant experiences; there are common echoes. The economic scapegoating; the media stereotyping; the racist xenophobic policies and laws; the unconstitutional detentions and deportations; the raw hatred and violence. These are experiences we share. I also believe in attempting to cautiously draw lessons from historical struggles in order to inspire and inform today's struggles.

I will explore my thoughts on this matter in an upcoming post (for now, I think you've probably heard more than enough from me). So I'll simply wrap up with a question: What potential lessons stand out for you in the Chinese American story with regard to today's struggles? What can we learn that has strategic or tactical relevance to the current fight? What ideas or inspirations will help us carry that fight forward?

[ "Data" in this post, such as historical names and dates, are drawn largely from two sources: Iris Chang's The Chinese in America: A Narrative History and Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans ]

Comments

[Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez]

wow...i don't know that i ever feel as ignorant or subsequently informed and grateful, as when i read these historical pieces on chinese peoples here. this was fantastic. (i ought to read a few new books, eh? my hands are full right now with all my pet's tissues) i really need to read it through one more time and soak it in.

this, i loved with my all: I am like pear blossoms which have already fallen.

and the walls of the prison!!!! (detention center? "Angel island," i think) i've always loved countries/cultures that used ideograms, characters. cultures where everyone uses art like that. you dont know how that thrills me.

and on the scary side, i had no idea, that until 1854, the Criminal Proceeding Act was a reality. damn. i mean it makes sense given history, but...there it is all bald-like.

thanks for taking the time. maybe i'll leave a comment again when i read through. maybe not. but i'm thinking on your questions.

[Kai]

Thanks, Nez.

I love that you love the poetry about "pear blossoms" on the prison wall. How sweet is that?

And yeah, the Criminal Proceeding Act...bald-like racism indeed.

Be well, 'mano.

[Tom]

The story of Chinese immigrants is more terrible than I had realized.

We hear the 'hard work' story again and again. We don't hear so much about standing up for legal and economic rights, striking, suing, organizing, support from abroad.

[Tom]

Oh, no, Iris Chang? I didn't know her, but we had a school in common.

[Tom]

By "Oh, no," I mean, more tragedy.

[Kai]

Tom, yeah you got it: "standing up for legal and economic rights, striking, suing, organizing, support from abroad"...these are the crucial things we don't hear enough about.

And yeah, Iris Chang's life ended tragically, but I like to celebrate how much she accomplished in her short years.

Thanks for your comments!

[Chris Clarke]

Iris Chang's life ending knocked the wind out of me, in fact. It frightened the hell out of me, and still does: all the horrendously bad news she researched seemed to stick to her soul. It does to mine as well.

But that's an aside. This is a great post. I bet Becky's going to want to adapt it for her fourth-grade clas.

[Chris Clarke]

Um, I mean that she'll find it full of information relevant to what she's teaching at the moment... not that she'd find it suitable for 4th graders as is. (blush)

[lovelesscynic]

I think I've often thought the Latino and Asian communities have a lot in common. Both in terms of having who we are defined rather arbitrarily by the US government, as well as containing groups who historically have historical tension. Korean and Japanese Americans etc.

I completely agree that our experiences with immigration and our portrayals as immigrants have a great deal of similarity.

I've read some of the Angel Island poems before. But it's nice to read them again. And your account of the legal status and labor history of Chinese immigrants was really interesting.

It's a lot to think about though. Thank you.

[Sylvia]

Thank you, Kai; this is a great historical gem. This post is splendid and rich with information, especially when it gets to the thoroughly systemic and entrenched nature of Chinese immigrants and residents -- legal, social, academic, economic. The decision from the Court to code Chinese-Americans and Chinese immigrants as black for the purposes of disenfranchisement under the law particularly placed a knot in my stomach.

Angel Island and its poetry -- I couldn't help smiling at such an endeavor under those conditions. It's often when we're squeezed through our most difficult moments that true beauty comes out of us. (Though I'm not going to turn this into a reverie of creative expression because I'd be doing this post a great disservice.)

To get to your questions, though, off the top of my head -- a particularly damaging trope that's resurfaced in the immigration debate surrounding Latin@s is this idea of the "anchor baby" and how it's turned into misery for families of color and placed a huge target on immigrant Latinas. It's racist in its justification, it's racist in its influence on these round-up tactics (I'm thinking particularly of New Bedford), and I'm not sure there's a loophole available now for something reminiscent of the "paper sons" phenomenon you mentioned.

All the ugly heads for this operation are reappearing in the case of Latin@s, and one of the best legal ways to start dismantling the monster is to challenge the ICE both procedurally and substantively on multiple fronts (warrants, raids, cooperation with governments, inhumane practices, the disproportionate applicability of the policy itself which would be harder to prove, etc.), along with a strong coalition lobby of the government to reform its immigration policy. The American Immigration Law Foundation has done a lot of work around debunking myths and tackling these cases. I know that Catholic Charities also offers a lot of resources like English courses to help with citizenship tests. Perhaps another key to mobilization should work to expedite the citizenship process for Latin@s as much as possible until new legislation is passed through extensive networking of these resources?

These thoughts aren't very extensively formed, but this post certainly has me thinking; thank you again.

[Sylvia]

especially when it gets to the thoroughly systemic and entrenched nature of white supremacy and institutional discrimination against Chinese immigrants and residents -- legal, social, academic, economic.

I'm sorry; sometimes I think faster than I type.

[Kai]

Chris, hehe I totally understood what you meant about adapting this for Becky's 4th graders...though I might add, I would take it as an amazing compliment if my actual writing were clear and simple enough for 4th graders (it probably isn't, I realize I tend toward overly convoluted formulations and big words and, well, kinda dark quips). Re Iris Chang, yeah it was crushing how she left, but remember she also suffered all her life from clinical depression so I hesitate to pin it all on her fearless research. I think the dark stuff has to "stick to your soul" if you're letting it in and really allowing these understandings to become part of you...I sometimes speak of "the heart broken open"...

lovelesscynic, well I'm glad to hear a fellow Asian agree with me about our intersections with the Latin@ experience. To me the similarities are striking. Thanks for your comments!

Sylvia, strangely I understood your formulation the first time around, I guess when I hear the word "systemic" in relation to a post like this, I know where it's going, lol (though I suppose the extra words do make it more obvious). Re the current immigrant struggle, you're hitting exactly the kind of train of thought I was hoping to nudge us all toward with my questions at the end there. I know plenty of great work is being done already by a number of legal and activist groups, which is inspiring; but as activists we can never be too creative so I really want to keep pushing ourselves to "feel out" every available avenue, especially on the legal front. You may be right about the lack of legal loopholes these days (and I guess we can't exactly create another San Francisco earthquake fire, can we?), but it never hurts to keep searching...!

[michael]

kai,

another fantastic post. regarding sylvia's comment and your question about where to go from here...there is an interesting and intense debate among immigrant advocacy groups (from the grassroots to the large, national ones) and immigrants themselves about whether to support recently introduced legislation in Congress that has a lot of good but a lot of not-so-good (to put it mildly), or to wait for a few years and meanwhile try and continue to grow the movement so that when new legislation is introduced, it is truly transformative and comprehensive. To me, any new immigration laws will be nothing more than a band-aid (though admittedly a wonderful and much-needed band-aid, at least for some immigrants) unless they deal with the big picture. This means making immigration a centerpiece of broad, positive, progressive social change - including human rights, trade, labor, foreign policy, environment, etc. As someone who spends quite a bit of time on immigration advocacy, I'm still not totally sure where I stand, though I tend to favor putting off short term gain for truly meaningful reform, even if it means waiting a few years. But I also realize that I am in a position of privilege - I'm not an undocumented immigrant, and my life is not hanging in the balance. So I certainly am sympathetic to anyone who is desperate for quick change. Bottom line: no matter how creative and inspiring non-legislative advocacy is, without new laws, immigrants - and especially undocumented immigrants - will continue to be abused, exploited and mistreated.

However, in order to bring about positive legislation, it's critical to continue to write, discuss and highlight the invaluable contributions immigrants have made and continue to make in the US. This truly is a nation of immigrants - though usually in spite of government laws and policy, rather than b/c of. Protest, letters to media, teaching in school - all completely necessary. Immigrants - of all nationalities and backgrounds - share much in common (as do progressives and those with a vision of a better America). We need to find that common ground to make the movement as large as possible.

Sorry for the rambling - I wanted to get something off before work. I'll keep thinking and try to come up with more creative solutions. In the meantime, Suburban Sweatshops by Jennifer Gordon is a fascinating look at immigrant labor in the suburbs, and a must-read for anyone interested in immigration advocacy.

[Nanette]

Wow, Kai... so much stuff I didn't know. The talking walls of Angel Island... I hope they get enough funding to preserve those and to allow visitors access. Reading the poetry (beautiful as it is... I too love the pear blossoms line) is one thing... actually being able to see the circumstances under which it was written and to imagine (as well as possible) some of the despair is something else entirely.

All this racial classification stuff, the inclusion laws, the exclusion laws, the "you're this but not that unless we need you to be that but not this" laws and so on is sometimes like being forced to live in someones Dali painting or something.

This completely wacky reasoning:

Chief Justice Charles Murray explained that the Chinese were, in fact, Indians, because Christopher Columbus, upon reaching the New World, had mistakenly thought that he had reached the China Sea. Bizarrely, Murray further asserted that even if the Chinese were not American Indians, all non-white races could be considered black.

... brought to mind another headline I read a while back and did a doubletake on that said something like "Chinese South Africans are suing to be considered colored and failing that, they'd like to be considered Black".

I thought it was a funny headline, but of course it's a serious story about South Africa trying to recover from all the White South African pathological issues with race and color - but it's (or was, at that time) leaving the Chinese South Africans out in the cold as far as laws go. Here, I've found an article on it that is much better than my poor attempts to explain. A small digression, but I thought it was interesting and indicative of just what a mess has been made of things and how far reaching it is.

Anyway, back to your article, I love the Shanghai boycott - as mentioned, we do not at all hear enough about the organizing and suing from abroad and protests and so on that went on - not a story that mainstream America would want told, for sure.

Okay well, I have more to say but this post is so rich with information (and the comments are too) and encourages so much thought that I'll have to come back to this when I have more time later.

[michael]

by the way, the legislation i referred to was the STRIVE Act, which was introduced in the House of Reps a little while back. it is NOT today's rumored proposals coming from the White House and Republicans, which (based on the rumors) will not only perpetuate a horrible status quo, but actually take things to a new level of bad, if that's even possible.

[Yolanda Carrington]

The number one lesson that stands out for me: the ruling class and assorted reactionaries will formulate any harebrained theory they can to justify oppression. If the conditions don't support their bigoted assertions, they'll manipulate shit until they do. As the sociopolitical structures change, oppressors adapt their manipulations and ideological justifications accordingly.

Keeping these historical lessons ever present in our minds can arm us in difficult and confusing periods. The chicanery is always the same but it will take different forms as it needs too. We've always got to be ready.

[Kai]

michael, thanks for your comments, I was hoping you'd have something to add from your legal perspective. I don't know enough about STRIVE yet, I'll have to do some reading up on that. I agree that it's crucial for progressives to agitate on every front of activism and advocacy; at the very worst we have to fend off the worst reactionary measures; at best we can actually achieve some democratic/human rights progress.

Nanette, yeah I read about the Chinese in South Africa...like you say, this stuff gets very surreal. I mean, how wild is that line of reasoning you quote from the California Chief Justice?

Yolanda, true, the theories and assertions shift continually according to just what the ruling class has on its agenda at the moment. And they accuse us of lacking rigor! Ha!

[XP]

Kai - you must have been on the same wave length. Still in the back burner is a post about Angel Island and the Fourteenth Amendment, when I do get to it, now I have an additional source.

One other reason they chose Angel Island, is the same reason a prison was built on Alcatraz, it was impossible for detainees to escape. From my own readings, Mexicans were forced to go through the same immigration station. In fact, the US government used the same old divide and conquer as they did in the South between the Latinos and African Americans. The picture you have up of the poem, I knew I saw it somewhere.

Poem 69 from Island -
Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days,
It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law which implicates me.
It's a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess.
I can only await the word so that I can snap Zu's whip.

From now on, I am departing far from this building
All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me.
Don't say that everything within is Western styled.
Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage.
-------------------

I am pretty sure, this is being used right now in today's concentration camps.

[Tom]

Kai,

Interesting comment you wrote at D's the other day.

[Professor Zero]

C'est un great post.