In 1854 California courts barred Chinese testimony by classifying Chinese as black.

Evidence

In People v. Hall (1954), the murder conviction of a white man was overturned on appeal on the argument that, as a member of “the Mongoloid race,” the principal witness, a Chinese man, was identifiable with blacks and so his testimony was ruled inadmissible because unreliable (see Goldberg, 1997:39). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1751

Categorization

• CANDY: A bizarre, quotable legal history fact: a white man’s murder conviction was overturned because the only witness was Chinese, deemed black, and thus unreliable.
• XREF: Connects to how anti-Chinese exclusion and anti-Black racism were legally fused in 19th-century US jurisprudence — echoes the racial classification machinations in Goldberg’s own Racial State work.