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When your white privilege blinds you to the fact that in 1845, black people were still being forced to “come to America legally”—in chains, as property
Within 40 years of Bill O’Reilly’s ancestors “coming to America legally” with no laws blocking them, the US’s first immigration control act was passed—and it banned Chinese.
Irish migrants would lead violent anti-Chinese massacres for the next decade.
Irish migrants would lead violent anti-Chinese massacres for the next decade.
In the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, Chinese were burned alive, scalped, mutilated, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged from gutter spouts. One Chinese miners' penis and testicles were cut off and paraded as a "trophy of the hunt.”
At least 28 Chinese were killed.
At least 28 Chinese were killed.
In the Snake River Massacre of 1887, 34 Chinese were murdered and mutilated, their bodies thrown into the river, with “atrocity that was probably unexcelled in all the anti-Chinese violence of the American West.” Dead Chinese kept washing up for years later.
(Since I’m writing from Los Angeles, let’s not forget the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in LA, in which 20 Chinese were mutilated and hanged to death by an angry white mob in what’s been called the “largest lynching in US history.” The trigger wasn’t “economic anxiety”—just bigotry.)
The virulent anti-Chinese hate that led to the Exclusion Act and massacres was whipped up by groups like the Knights of Labor, led by Terence Powderly—the child of Irish immigrants who later would become Commissioner General of Immigration under McKinley.
huffpost.com/entry/chinese-…
huffpost.com/entry/chinese-…
