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• 1 2021-05-01T18:27:08-07:00 Interracial Encounters: Unexpected Circus Connections 56 plain 2021-05-04T18:06:21-07:00
  The rising anti-Chinese sentiment in the second half of the 19th century coincided with the growth of the Chinese labor population in America. The discourse on the Chinese (immigrant) question occurred during America’s development in relation to the roles of African Americans, Native Americans, white women, and Irish immigrants during a reconstructed post-antebellum America.⁸² The Chinese immigrant posed an added threat to these populations in America’s racial hierarchy. Overlapping relationships among African Americans, Native Americans and women with the Chinese reveal the groups often opposed each other in order to help their own cause for identity and belonging.⁸³ At the same time harmonious relationships occurred among the communities which further illustrate the complexities of race divisions.
  
  The forming of racial hierarchies and the popularity of anti-Asian entertainment, stories and imagery during this period exemplify how anti-Asian racism became deeply rooted and accepted in American culture. The othering tactic in entertainment equally crossed over to questions of American identity and citizenship.
  
  This 1876 jug is based on the poem "The Heathen Chinese" or "Plain Language from Truthful James" by Bret Harte satirizing against anti-Chinese racism. Instead readers saw it as story of white superiority over the Chinese. The poem became popular and reinforced the racism among the population. The jug is an enameled and glazed hard-paste porcelain and depicts on one side, a man choking a Chinese man, a representation from a scene in the poem. Imagery of this attitude towards the Chinese, like entertainment, contributed to the growing hatred on the Chinese.⁷⁷ 
  
  
  Chinese yellowface characters started to appear on the stage in mid-19th century. Blackface minstrelsy began to add yellowface performers like “John Chinaman” to the other comical racialized characters which they mocked, such as the Dutch, Irish, Jewish and African Americans. Comedy acts of the “chinaman” featured “queued coolie figures speaking in nonsense words and eating dogs, cats, mice and rats.”⁷⁴ The popular play, titled after the Workingmen’s Party of California anti-Chinese slogan The Chinese Must Go, included yellowface characters acting out stereotypes and belittling cultural traits speaking in pidgin English to “infantilize and emasculate or to render them into unassimilable aliens." Marriages between Chinese men and Irish women were also satirized in popular Irish songs, noting fears of interracial marriages that might threaten the status of working class white and immigrant Irish.⁷⁸
  
  
  African Americans also performed yellowface regularly on the vaudeville stage. From the 1890s to the 1920s, African American comedians impersonated Chinese immigrants due to its popularity. ⁷⁹

  Krystyn Moon asserts that if white performers of blackface minstrelsy depicted both black and Chinese immigrants on the stage ‘to reaffirm the inferiority of both groups’ but also to “highlight the foreignness of Chinese immigrants,” then one way of understanding African American performers of comic Chinese characters is that they worked to differentiate themselves from the Chinese, thus ‘asserting their role in the creation of American identity and culture.⁸⁰

  This reflection of yellowface and Chinese foreignness by African American performers as an assertion of American identity deserves a look into portrayals of interracial encounters during this period. Attention to interracial relationships takes the counterpoint to the presumed white dominance and allows the Othered to be in a historical context rather than a binary viewpoint. Chinese relationships with other groups reveal American notions of citizenship, identity and racial difference.⁸¹
  
  The act of building myths and constructing stereotypes about race populations was a fluid and changing process to fit current government and capitalist agendas. The 19th century anti-Chinese movement defined racial, cultural, and political thought in the country.⁸³ This page shares brief portrayals and perceptions during this period of Chinese relationships among the communities represented in the exhibit's chapters: African Americans, Women, Native Americans, and the Japanese. The accounts highlight the complexities of race in American society and intersectionality's importance. The circus provided opportunities for interracial interactions among these groups and without doubt, they equally formed close friendships and conflicting relationships during this time.

  African Americans

  
  
  Frederick Douglass supported Chinese immigration under his vision of “composite nationality” and conditions of “perfect human equality.” Douglass gave a 1869 speech in Boston where he advocated for the acceptance of Chinese immigration. Excerpts:

  I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth...⁸³
  
  The grand right of migration and the great wisdom of incorporating foreign elements into our body politic, are founded not upon any genealogical or archeological theory, however learned, but upon the broad fact of a common human nature. ⁸⁴

  
  The African American community held disputes with the Chinese community of California in the late 19^th century. This opposition manifested mainly in the workforce. ⁸⁵ “Susan Roth Breitzer asserts that no matter how African American nativism evolved over time, the belief was always that Blacks, born as Americans, should be chosen over immigrants for a “good job and union membership.” Employers’ preference for Chinese workers severely hindered them, causing them to “support anti-Chinese legislation in the late nineteenth century.” ⁸⁶
  
  In order to thoroughly cut off the profit enticements for Chinese laborers and work force, some articles suggest cooperation with white in The Elevator, a Black newspaper, in July 1, 1870.

  Let white and colored persons combine whenever it is practicable and advantageous, and have their interests in common.' In this context, black–white “interests in common” were conceivably the vanishing of the Chinese “menace."⁸⁷

  
  On several instances, Black newspapers reflected their shared interests with the Chinese. In other articles, notions displayed orientalist prejudices by African Americans with other native born Americans of the period. Provincial Freeman contained an article which called the Chinese petitioners “heathen idolaters,” and “Mongolian strangers.” Simultaneously, the editors also reiterated the Chinese condemnation of hypocritical American Christianity and criticized the “so-called democracy of the United States.” ⁸⁸ These contrasting views within the African American community reflects the period's complicated questions of American identity and democracy.

   Krystyn R. Moon sees a similar mentality in Black music of the late nineteenth century. She says that since slavery had erased Blacks’ connection to a specific homeland and Americans considered Black culture as an important differentiator of America from Europe, Blacks could always claim an American identity. They often cited Chinese racial inferiority and foreignness to reinforce that claim and “ally with the whites."⁸⁹

  
  The Chinese in America and their foreignness was an accepted pawn to reinforce arguments for other populations. In the 1896 Plessy v. Fergusson case that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation with the "separate but equal" idea, Supreme Court Justice John Marshal Harlan gave the one dissenting opinion:

  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. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. 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 ... and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. ⁹⁰

  While Justice Harlan’s dissenting opinion may appear as a beginning move from racial discrimination against African Americans, it did not apply to the Chinese. What is troublesome is that in this court case argument no Chinese people were involved, yet Harlan drew comparisons between African Americans and the Chinese's place in the country.

  White Women

  White women saw the Chinese as an undesired presence due to competition for jobs. The connection between the labor of Chinese men and white women became a heated topic in discussions about women's role in the labor force and women's rights in general. In 1870, labor protestors in San Francisco assembled under signs reading "Woman's Rights and No More Chinese Chambermaids." An 1876 newspaper editorial from Virginia City argued that because of Chinese men, "women cannot establish and make a success of laundries here".⁹¹
  
  
   

  
  Native Americans

  The press strategically placed accounts on two differing populations next to one another, to disparage and compare them. This was also a tactic often employed by the circus for publicity on performers . Newspapers routinely juxtaposed articles of Native Americans and the Chinese to sensationalize the notion of the savage versus the civilized and exaggerate their complicated relationships. Native Americans and Chinese presented in opposition to each other served the interests of the dominant white population. ⁸⁹

  Newspapers, because of their function as organs of commercial and political interests, have a particular relationship to the contradictions of democracy and empire. ⁹⁰

  
  An example of a direct comparison of the two populations is the description of the diseased Chinese alongside an article about the Native American gentleman Old Winnemucca, the father of Northern Paiute activist and author Sarah Winnemucca. ⁹¹

  The whole outfit has a dirty appearance, causing people who have examined it to wonder how anybody not utterly debased can enter the filthy dens and indulge in a smoke from pipes which have undoubtedly been used by leprous Chinese, and run the risk of contracting contagious disease. ⁹²

  
  Below this article and equal in length was this favorable description of Old Winnemucca:

  He gallantly extended his hand to the ladies, but taxed the gentlemen a cigar for the honor, and for this privilege received a half dozen Havanas made by Chinese in Chicago. ⁹³

  
  The press framed the Native Americans and Chinese as enemies. A popular song "Big Long John, a Chinaman" published in 1874 described an Indian scalping Big Long John and cutting off his queue. ⁹⁴

  
  Other times the newspapers reported on the conflicts of violence between the two groups. There was an element of “funniness” in the reporting of the conflicts that indicate these stories were a sense of entertainment.⁹⁵ One describes:

   When one of these battles [between Chinese and Native Americans] is about to take place, the news is circulated far and near, and the occasion is observed as a sort of holiday and general merry-making. ⁹⁶

  Another describes:

  The Chinese, as a general thing, get the worst of it, and when they turn tail to run, no language can describe the laughter and hurrahs of the multitude. ⁹⁷

  Many populations opposed others to elevate their own cause. To further the Native American cause, Northern Paiute activist and author Sarah Winnemucca used the common anti-Chinese rhetoric. In a Baltimore speech:

  the negro. Chinaman and every other foreigner is welcomed here,
  but your hand, your doors, your hearts are turned against us. Broken down, we
  are worse than the negro, whom you fought for and set free
  - Baltimore American, January 6,1884 ⁹⁸

  
  She stressed the Chinese foreignness to illustrate the mistreatment of Native Americans and their connections to the land. She clearly indicates them as outsiders and not belonging. In this comparison of the Chinese treatment versus the Native Americans:

  The Chinese, said she, sometimes do fearful things, and commit horrible murders, but you search for those men for two or three years until you catch them, and when they are caught you punish them. You don't attack all the Chinese who are with you. No, you let them live with you. You take all the natives of the earth to your bosom but the poor Indian, who is born of the soil and who has lived for generations on the lands which the good God has given to them, and you say he must be exterminated. (Thrice repeated, with deep passion, and received with tremendous applause). 
  - Daily Alta California, December 4, 1879⁹⁹

  Wong Chin Foo

  The Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo employed prejudiced rhetoric in order to garner support for the Chinese cause. In speaking out against the Geary Bill which was set to renew the Chinese Exclusion laws for ten more years, Foo spoke against African Americans and Native Americans to advance the Chinese. ¹⁰⁰

   

  Why should the grown-up child of African parents, who were raised in the jungle and brought here in chains, be a citizen and voter when the educated child of Chinese parents, a race that boasts of a civilization dating hundreds of years back of this nation, be made an outcast? Why should the American Indian, who, when he chooses, slaughters and kills and is only subdued by the bullet and the bayonet, be preferred to the Chinese boy or girl born in the United States, educated in your public schools, and the descendant of a race that, so far, has never lifted a hand against the injustice of oppression by your people?¹⁰⁰
  
  I have just discovered that I am the only individual in New York that has no country. The very thought of it knocks all the light and hope out of a fellow. A man without a country, kicked out of China, disowned by the United States, and all for what? … Has the Federal government of the United States the right to make a law which would be retroactive, as in this case, to strip me of my citizenship and franchise?¹⁰¹

  The fact that Wong generated sympathy from the speech proves this opposition of races was an accepted strategic practice that worked successfully. Others agreed with his views and the comments on letters display the complicated issues on race and immigration.

  From The Dispatch:

  he tells his story and tells it well. It remains for intelligent American citizens to determine if under a literal rendering of the Constitution of the United States he is not right.¹⁰²

  Anonymous letter:

   not have as good a right to vote as an ignorant and superstitious negro or as the toughs and thugs of "New York’s East Side,” asking rhetorically, “is he not cleaner, whiter and more intelligent than the average Italian immigrant?¹⁰³

  The Japanese

  In San Francisco, the Call frequently reported on the feuds between Chinese and Japanese residents. In 1902, it predicted and sensationalized a prolonged feud between Chinese and Japanese residents in San Francisco when a member of the Chinese Sam Yup merchants allegedly shot and killed a Japanese cook. The newspapers highlighted their conflicts rather than alliances, even though many Chinese lived and socialized alongside Japanese. The press intentionally reinforced an imagined racial divide more than real. ¹⁰⁴

  
  Contradictions and Collaborations

  The range of opinions on the Chinese and the contradictions, whether true or fabricated, spread rampant. Unfortunately, the popular anti-Chinese sentiment carried into the country’s consciousness and the government’s agenda, resulting in the 1882 Exclusion Act barring the Chinese from entering the country. It was not fully dismantled until the Civil Rights era in 1965.
  
  In 1873 a journalist noted the contradictions he heard about the Chinese in California:

  He is patient, docile, persevering, quick to learn, no eyeservant, the best cook or waiter you ever saw. Last week he stole $600 out of my drawer, and is now in State Prison He is sober. Last night you saw him smoking opium in the most horrible of dens. He saves his money. And takes it out of the State to spend in China. He is indispensable. But he is a curse to the community. He will make a useful citizen. His whole race is vicious and degraded. ¹⁰⁵

  
  It is important to consider other evidence that show moments of collaborations and inclusivity. While these populations formed often violent, close and complicated relationships, they were not always fraught with conflict.

  
  Native Americans and the Chinese worked alongside one another with the Nevada railroad. Evidence suggests that Chinese and Native peoples developed supportive and friendly relationships in the midst of tension. Living sites of Chinese and Native people indicate trade between the two groups. Past interviews with Native Americans and Chinese also share stories of close friendships formed by the railroad that included intermarriages with children. ¹⁰⁶
  
  Jordon Hua studied the relationships between the Chinese and Native Americans during the 19th century.

  A Chinese man who owned a restaurant in Hawthorne, California served mostly Native Americans. He was reported to be a “great favorite” with the Native Americans, but less admired by fellow Chinese men. ¹⁰⁷ 

  A Chinese physician near the Colville Reservation in Washington was preferred by the Native American residents in the area over the agency doctor. ¹⁰⁸

  Chinese men also frequently married Native American women. As the population of Chinese women in the U.S. was extremely low and laws existed that blocked marriages between Chinese and Euro-American women, American Indian and other ethnic women were the most likely potential spouses of Chinese men. It seems that intermarriage between the two groups primarily occurred from 1880 onwards. ¹¹⁰

  Wong Bow, a Chinese man, married a Yurok woman and lived with her tribe in California. They had two children together. ¹¹¹

   

  
  
  The Black-owned newspaper, Colored Citizen, in Helena, Montana was edited by J. P. Ball, Jr. His father, James Presley Ball, an  African-American photographer of the J.P. Ball & Son Studio and an abolitionist, took portraits of Chinese immigrants during the Geary Act anti-Chinese period; suggesting perhaps amicable interactions with the Chinese community and the Balls. ¹¹⁰
  
  In Montana, a marriage between a Chinese man and Swedish woman before the miscegenation law was passed in 1909:

  George Washington Taylor came to Montana from Hong Kong in 1873 and settled in Helena as a lawyer’s servant. Shortly after his arrival in Helena either by death of his mother or by abandonment of his uncle, George, whose Chinese name is unknown, started learning to speak and write English. Sometime after his mother’s death, Jesse F. Taylor of the Sands and Taylor Cattle Company adopted the Chinese boy and renamed him George Washington Taylor George Taylor stated in 1942 that he renamed himself, as “my imagination and fancy were drawn toward George Washington, the father of this country.” Through the 1870s George worked as a stockman and cowboy for the state and had numerous interesting adventures as part of his life working the range in the Choteau and Cut Bank area of Montana.¹¹⁰
  
  In the 1880s George married a Swedish woman named Lena from Minnesota, and by 1900 they had two children. The 1900 census lists the Taylor family living in Dupuyer Township, in Teton County, and involved in farming. According to other sources George and family established a small stock ranch near Birch Creek. According to several reports, the Taylor family established a steady operation in the Birch Creek area, and their home was one of the finest in the local country and a favorite stopping place for travelers. George and Lena Taylor, luckily, avoided the adverse effects of Montana’s miscegenation law. In 1909 Montana’s legislature passed the state’s first miscegenation law barring intermarriages between “whites” and other ethnicities, such as African Americans, Chinese, or Japanese. Sadly, others in the African American, Chinese, and Japanese community felt the repressive effects of this racist law until 1953, when it was finally repealed by the legislative assembly. ¹¹¹