Courts codified Chinese racial untrustworthiness into evidentiary law

Evidence

Some states went as far as prohibiting Asians from testifying in court against White people. The California Supreme Court upheld such laws after determining they were based on the reasonable suspicion that Chinese, raced as Mongolians, possess dangerous characteristics that make them untrustworthy. Anti-Chinese racism reached the US Supreme Court in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, in which he pejoratively wrote, “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 339

Categorization

• XREF: Justice Harlan’s Plessy dissent — famous as the ‘Constitution is colorblind’ text — also voiced anti-Chinese exclusion; a telling paradox worth reconciling with how Harlan is remembered.
• SEED: Angle: how the same justice whose dissent championed Black citizenship argued for absolute Chinese exclusion — the hierarchy of racial acceptability within anti-racist rhetorics.