Thread by @AmericanStudier

I wanted to say a couple things about a historical figure who used to be on my Memory Day Calendar (for his June 1 birthday), why I removed him, & the difference between history & commemoration: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. #twitterstorians

For a long time, I knew Harlan only for his inspiring (mostly—hold that thought) dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), & specifically for his striking & influential argument there that the Constitution is “color-blind.”

chnm.gmu.edu/courses/nclc37…

Along with Homer Plessy & his lawyer, the thoroughly awesome Albion Tourgée, I thus put Harlan into the category of “inspiring historical figures we can learn from amidst a horrific, exclusionary, white supremacist historical event.”

google.com/books/edition/…

It was my college friend turned phenomenal scholar @HeidiKKim who, in response to my Memory Day post some years back, highlighted for me a far more troubling side to Harlan’s Plessy dissent: his contrast of African Americans to Chinese Americans.

In order to argue for African American equality under the Constitution/law, Harlan contrasts that community to Chinese Americans, whom he calls in the dissent “a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States.”

That was of course the frustrating truth during the Exclusion era, as the Chinese Exclusion Act denied the possibility of naturalization & stripped citizenship from Chinese Americans who had gained it.
saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/01/consid…

But Harlan isn’t simply noting that reality: he’s fully endorsing it, & doing so in legal terms, in a Supreme Court decision which solidified it further. He would do the same in his dissent to the Wong Kim Ark decision two years later (1898).

oyez.org/cases/1850-190…

That’s what I’ve come to learn about Harlan: that he was one of the most prominent voices for the exclusionary, white supremacist narratives that targeted Chinese Americans & underpinned the Exclusion era’s treatment of that existing American community.

(Treatment, by the way, which created the category of "illegal immigration" & profoundly US influenced immigration law in the process.)
saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/05/consid…

In an 1898 lecture, for example, Harlan developed that exclusionary, racist narrative further, calling the Chinese “a race utterly foreign to us and [that] never will assimilate with us.”

law.upenn.edu/live/files/208…

So what? Does this mean we should “cancel” Harlan, to use the (entirely false but so damn pervasive) framing of so many of our current debates over history? Without granting that false frame & narrative legitimacy, I’d say a couple things.

I absolutely believe we need to remember Harlan, to make him a part of our histories of the Supreme Court & the law, of debates over civil rights in the late 19C. You can’t tell those stories accurately w/out him, including especially his Plessy dissent in a central role.

But you also can’t remember Harlan’s Plessy dissent w/out its anti-Chinese racism, which needs further contextualizing in both his own career & the Exclusion era. Such fraught, even contradictory layers are all part of our legal, civil rights, social, collective histories.

Moreover, there’s a significance difference between history/memory & commemoration, a celebration of the past. (I’m indebted to Michael Kammen for my earliest thinking around these formulations.)
google.com/books/edition/…

We should be very selective about what & whom we commemorate. We can remember & make part of our histories many figures & histories that we don’t commemorate, don’t build statues & memorials to, don’t give that collective pride of place in our spaces & our stories.

That’s particularly true for powerful white Americans like Supreme Court Justices (or presidents, or Founding Fathers…). We’ve already had so, so many commemorations of them, we certainly don’t need more & indeed can & will remember them fine without.

As I learned more about his exclusionary racism I came to feel that Harlan shouldn’t be commemorated, which is why I took his birthday out of the Memory Day Calendar. We should still remember, read, teach, talk about him. But he’s not an American to commemorate.

If we’re looking for a white American from those histories to commemorate, Tourgée's a great choice. But I’d also & especially advocate for commemorations of, statues/memorials to, figures like Homer Plessy & Wong Kim Ark. That's what we need so much more of. Fin (for now!).

PS. Can’t create a thread about memory and commemoration without mentioning some of the folks doing such great work on those topics, incl @DrKarenLCox @HilaryGreen77 @AshleighWrites & @AdamHDomby!