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Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s Receipts. For some reason (we know the reason) the Trump administration has been really touchy about a Smithsonian exhibition that acknowledges that the obviously racist 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was indeed racist. I dug a little into the history of the law, and its (deliberate) parallels to policies embraced by Trump and Stephen Miller today.
This is far from the only time the administration has tried to rewrite history, of course. What are the most egregious examples you’ve seen? Drop me a note in the comments. And if you’re not already a member of Bulwark+, I hope you’ll consider joining. We’re all writing the first draft of history here, together.
–Catherine
Racist Law From 1882 Is Not That Racist, Trump Says
Buried in the White House’s broadside against the Smithsonian is a bizarre—and revealing—claim about the Chinese Exclusion Act.
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A RACIST LAW THAT INSPIRED MORE RACIST LAWS and was literally named after its racism is definitely not racist. At least according to the Trump administration.
Laser-focused on the midterms, the White House recently released a 162-page report on the most critical issue facing voters: woke museum exhibitions. The report follows a prior Trump executive order complaining about the Smithsonian Institution, which the president said had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
This new report, released by the White House Domestic Policy Council, renders in exhaustive, heavily footnoted¹ detail all of the Smithsonian’s alleged sins. Among its worst transgressions:
Museum exhibitions acknowledge that some of the nation’s founders were slaveholders.
In a PowerPoint slide in 2022,² a museum director included an image of a butterfly. This is offensive, the White House report explains, because butterflies are “a well-known symbol in the illegal alien activist community, symbolizing illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S.”
The National Museum of American History refuses to present a single “unified, national narrative,” and instead “asks visitors, ‘How should Americans remember their Revolution and the founding of the nation?’ without providing an answer.” Just as it was taken to pose a threat to the ruling powers in ancient Athens, the Socratic method is apparently an affront to real patriotism today.
But arguably the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.
FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on race or nationality. It banned nearly all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for a decade; it also blocked Chinese immigrants who were already in the United States from ever becoming naturalized citizens. The premise was: If you were of Chinese descent, you were incapable of ever becoming an American, on account of your race.³
The law was born of widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. It was passed amid a decade of growing repression and violence against Chinese immigrants in the Western United States, which resulted in massacres such as those in L.A.’s Chinatown (1871) and at Deep Creek in Oregon (1887), as well as many other acts of violence in the region before and after the bill was made law.
And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint (including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor).
Chinese immigrants were an easy scapegoat for a variety of local troubles, and economic uncertainty and racism became mutually reinforcing.
“The economic part was almost an alibi for the racism,” Columbia University historian and Asian-American studies scholar Mae Ngai tells me. “[White Americans] said they couldn’t compete with Chinese labor because the Chinese could supposedly subsist on just one grain of rice per day. There was something racially inherent about them being cheap.”
If the history (and the name of the law) weren’t clue enough as to the act’s racial framing, in 1889 the Supreme Court explicitly affirmed this as the intention—and offered its blessing:
To preserve its independence, and give security against foreign aggression and encroachment, is the highest duty of every nation. . . . It matters not in what form such aggression and encroachment come, whether from the foreign nation acting in its national character, or from vast hordes of its people crowding in upon us . . . If, therefore, the government of the United States, through its legislative department, considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security, their exclusion is not to be stayed because at the time there are no actual hostilities with the nation of which the foreigners are subjects. The existence of war would render the necessity of the proceeding only more obvious and pressing. [Emphasis mine.]
In other words, as Ngai put it: “This was a racist law, was openly racist at the time, and the Court upheld its racism under the rubric of national security.”
The White House would prefer to ignore this inconvenient history. In its new report, the administration draws attention to a museum exhibition’s display text about the law, which falsely—the memo claims—portrays “restrictive immigration laws as a tool of white supremacy.” It continues: