Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

5. “Pale Face ’Fraid You Crowd Him Out”: Racializing “Indians” and “Indianizing” Chinese Immigrants

142 chapter 5 “Pale Face ’Fraid You Crowd Him Out” Racializing “Indians” and “Indianizing” Chinese Immigrants Dustin Tahmakera On the front cover of the February 8, 1879, edition of Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization is a drawing titled “Every Dog” (No Distinction of Color) “Has His Day” (Fig. 5.1). Artist Thomas Nast depicts a peculiar-looking male “Indian” leaning towards the attentive ear of a Chinese male caricature. Covered in tattered blankets and rubbing his chin in sagacious thought, the “Indian” stands slightly over the long-haired, hollow-eyed immigrant. Anti-Chinese flyers, such as “prohibit chinese immigration,” are posted on a wall behind them. Seated to their left in the background is an inattentive black man with the words “my day is coming” scrawled on the wall near his head. The “Red Gentleman ” utters a few wise words to the “Yellow Gentleman”: “Pale face ’fraid you crowd him out, as he did me.” The Red Gentleman’s sentence refers to the fear and paranoia that many white men, or “pale faces,” felt toward the “pale face ’fraid you crowd him out” 143 presence of the Chinese during the 1870s and exemplified through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. His statement also notes the irony and hypocrisy that whites feared a Chinese invasion and an attempt to take all of white America’s resources and means for livelihood as Europeans and EuroAmericans did in their invasion of “America” and its Indigenous Peoples.1 Fig. 5.1. Thomas Nast, “Every Dog (No Distinction of Color) Has His Day,” cover of Harper’s Weekly, February 8, 1879. The subtitle reads “Red Gentleman to Yellow Gentleman: ‘Pale face ‘fraid you crowd him out as he did me.’” 144 dustin tahmakera As Nast’s Red Gentleman suggests, whites’ anti-“Indian” fear became a basis for anti-Chinese paranoia. On February 26, 1879, less than three weeks after “Every Dog” first appeared, President Rutherford Hayes expressed his personal paranoia: “Our [white American] experience in dealing with the weaker races—the Negroes and Indians, for example,—is not encouraging. . . . I would consider with favor any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.”2 Echoing Irish-born Denis Kearney’s 1877 summation, “The Chinese must go,”3 Hayes spoke to a common sentiment among California’s white population, which accounted for 87 percent of the state’s residents.4 Despite the stereotypical portrayals of each figure and the seriocomic tone, “Every Dog” goes beyond the typical white/“other” binary to situate two “others”—Indigenous Peoples and Chinese immigrants—next to each other. Furthermore, the cartoon serves as an opening to discuss legislation enacted by white politicians acting on their fear(s),5 as referred to by Nast’s Red Gentleman, that “others” will physically (Indigenes) or economically (Chinese) harm them, occupy “their” territory, and thus, “crowd [them] out.” In addition to coining the Red Gentleman’s words, Nast’s drawing of an “Indian” forcibly going west and the Chinese going east suggests imagined and inevitable geographical intersections between the two. Yet little scholarship has revealed these sites.6 In this chapter I compare the California courts’ racialization of Chinese immigrants and Indigenous Peoples through legislation in the 1850s.7 Ironically, Chinese and Indigenes intersected politically through the California Supreme Court’s expanding definition of “Indian.” In People v. Hall (1854),8 the Chinese were racialized as “Indian” based on falsehoods and an unproven theory about Indigenes, who had not been allowed to testify in California since 1850. Through the court’s “Indianization” of Chinese, the new immigrants could not testify, either. For instance, if only Indigenes or Chinese witnessed an Indigene or Chinese man being physically harmed by a white male, the only person who could testify was the white attacker. He could say anything without fear of protest or rebuttal by the victim. Unlike earlier studies, my work explores not only the inhumanity committed by the California Supreme Court against Chinese immigrants but also the court’s perpetuation of historical racist presuppositions about Indigenes . In People v. Hall, the court viewed the Chinese through a frame- “pale face ’fraid you crowd him out” 145 work that had previously been reserved for assailing “Indians.” In an examination of the court’s racialization of Indigenes and the subsequent “Indianization ” of Chinese, I try to contribute to scholarship in comparative ethnic studies. In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe attempts “to place the...