[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]
On a
historical and a contemporary lesson from an iconic Justice’s prejudices.
In this
post on the United States v. Wong Kim
Ark (1898) Supreme Court decision, I highlighted Justice John Marshall
Harlan’s ugly and apparently lifelong exclusionary racisms (both in and beyond
his work on the Court) toward Chinese Americans. As I’ve done often in this week’s
series (I guess when your blog is past 4100 posts over 13.5 years you often have
thought already about the things you’re continuing to think about!), I’d ask
you to check out that post for the key quotes and details about Harlan’s
ideology to which I’m responding here, and then come on back for a couple
further thoughts.
Welcome
back! Two years ago, historian Peter S. Canellos published a new biography of
Harlan, The
Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero
(2022). I haven’t read Canellos’ book yet, so I don’t want to assume anything
about any aspect of it, but that hyperlinked official Simon & Schuster description
calls Harlan “the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people,
immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US.” In many
ways, especially in his frequent Supreme Court dissents that are apparently Canellos’
principal subject, Harlan did indeed play that role. But the historical lesson
here is that white supremacy is a multi-tentacled thing, and I mean that not
only about the great legal mind who also had such a racist blindspot toward
Chinese Americans (including, as I noted in my above post, in his most famous
such dissent), but also about the implicit exclusion of Chinese Americans from
Simon & Schuster’s phrase “the nation’s prime defender.” Not for that part
of our national community, he wasn’t.
About a
month ago, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was
caught on camera telling a group of protesters advocating for a ceasefire
in Gaza that they should “go back to China.” While there were and are some
specific and complicated contexts for Pelosi’s comments related to the funding
sources for this prominent protest movement, the bottom line is that a national
political leader—and one who during her career in the House represented
San Francisco at that—using the phrase
“Go back to China” in any context is a very, very bad look, one that echoes
much of the worst of anti-Chinese American prejudices and exclusions (including
Harlan’s). As we’ve seen time and again in recent years, most especially in the
responses to Covid, such anti-Chinese American attitudes and narratives are
very much still with us, and indeed seem shared across much of the political
spectrum in striking ways (compared to how fully Trump and the MAGA movement
exemplify certain other longstanding prejudices in our current moment, that
is). One more reason why Justice Harlan’s racisms are not only a non-favorite
moment, but one from which we can and must learn a great deal.
Last
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?
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