Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America

1. The Press for Inclusion: Nineteenth-Century Black Citizenship and the Anti-Chinese Movement

 l l 1 The Press for Inclusion Nineteenth-Century Black Citizenship and the Anti-Chinese Movement But now observe the practical superiority of slavery over Chinese immigration, as an impelling force for good. Slavery compelled the heathen to give up idolatry, and they did it. The Chinese have no such compulsion and they do not do it. . . . Slavery compelled the adoption of Christian forms of worship, resulting in universal Christianization. The Chinese have no such influence tending to their conversion , and rarely—one or two in a thousand—become Christian. . . . Slavery took the heathens and by force made them Americans in feeling, tastes, habits, language, sympathy, religion and spirit; first fitting them for citizenship , and then giving them the vote. The Chinese feel no such force, but remaining in character and life the same as they were in Old China, unprepared for citizenship and adverse in spirit to our institutions. —Rev. Blakeslee, Special Report to the Senate on Chinese Immigration (1878) In his testimony before the Senate in 1878, a white minister argues for Chinese exclusion, his Orientalist construction of the Chinese alien generating its contrasting Other in the figure of the properly developed, black, Christianized, former slave.1 What is most disturbing about Rev. S. V. Blakeslee’s otherwise predictable discourse of the unassimilable Oriental is his representation of chattel slavery as a necessary civilizing institution that “successfully” transforms African heathens into modern American citizens. Twenty years later, Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan  x Black Citizenship and the Anti-Chinese Movement also constructed a black/Chinese racial tandem in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) when he challenged the Court’s majority ruling by constructing the Chinese immigrant as the negative instance of national belonging: There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. . . . But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom perhaps risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet to be declared criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.2 In Harlan’s attempt to dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow segregation, he constructs imagined privileges unfairly enjoyed by Chinese aliens to illustrate what was being wrongfully denied to black citizens.3 That is, Harlan’s rhetoric used Orientalist difference to assimilate U.S. blacks into a universalizing American national identity. Both Blakeslee’s and Harlan’s statements surprisingly suggest that in the late nineteenth century, the juxtaposition of Chinese immigrants and U.S. blacks could somehow generate a naturalized, commonsensical recognition of the deeply American character of black domestic subjects.4 This discourse of provisional black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is initially counterintuitive, given how today we often observe that in the nineteenth century, blacks and Chinese were represented as similarly loathsome, or degraded in terms of the “other,” that is, the “Negroization of the Chinese” or the “Asianization of blacks.” Of course, Harlan’s and Blakeslee’s public statements on race and citizenship spoke to radically different questions and motivations: one endorsing Chinese exclusion and the other opposing the legality of black/white racial segregation. The differences, however, behind such similar Orientalist figurations in these narratives of black domestication are even more suggestive of the significance of Chinese exclusion and American Orientalism in nineteenth-century discourses of black citizenship. This chapter examines the nineteenth-century black press’s struggles for political inclusion in this dominant discursive context of racialized Black Citizenship and the Anti-Chinese Movement x  citizenship, in which the anti-Chinese movement defined the racial, cultural , and political boundaries of the United States. An analysis of black newspapers across the country reveals that Orientalist discourses of Asian cultural difference ambiguously facilitated the assimilation of black Americans to ideologies of political modernity and consolidated black identification as U.S. national subjects. Nineteenth-century discourses of “black Orientalism” can be best understood as a specific formation of racial uplift, generating narratives...