WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE CHINESE LAUNDRY? A HISTORY OF CHINESE RACISM IN THE US
We don't think much about Chinese discrimination in America. Now you have read about Chinese discrimination after the Chinese were singled out for a tax on gold mining where many Chinese immigrants first labored. Because of this discrimination by the State of California, many Chinese went to work on the railroads. the Chinese population on the eve of the Chinese Exclusion ct of 1882 was about 200,000. That represents about 1/1000 of the US population at the time. Yet they were seen as taking away jobs from "Americans". The Chinese Exclusion's Act of the Federal Government was passed by Congress with pressure from California. It excluded Chinese from migrating to the US and refused citizenship. This wasn't the last time the Chinese were singled out.
Have you ever heard of the Chinese laundry? When I was a kid, there was a Chinese laundry not far from my parents house on Long Island, NY. That's where everyone brought their dress and sport shirts to be laundered and ironed. The shirts were folded and wrapped with brown paper and tied with string. Chinese laundries were ubiquitous; in New York alone there were over 3500 in the early 1930s. Because of discrimination, work in the laundries was one of the few avenues open to the Chinese. The law was aimed at taking jobs and wealth from the Chinese and passing it to "white workers and owners. With the support of white people in that same industry, in 1933 the New York City Board of Aldermen passed a law intended to drive the Chinese out of the business. Among other things, it limited ownership of laundries to United States citizens. When their efforts were unsuccessfully opposed by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a "conservative Chinese social organization" the openly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance was formed. Where the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association failed, the Chinese Hand Laundry...