“The Chinese evil in the State of California has been for a long time considered in politics a certain something to catch voters.” – “Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!” by the Workingmen’s Committee of California

Self-exalting partisans, who are always ready and willing to call out political opponents as the racist scum of the world, would like us to see California as the prototype of leftist, post-modern America free of backward prejudice. But that can’t be further away from the truth, revealed by the state’s ugly past of racial exclusion targeting Chinese Americans.

In 1880, the Workingmen’s Party of California published a 16-page pamphlet titled “Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!” in an effort to sway public opinion towards anti-immigrant sentiment and particularly against Chinese immigrants in San Francisco.

Established in 1876 and the forerunner of the Socialist Labor Party of America, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which facilitated the 1878 election of Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch as San Francisco mayor, was a small socialist group and one of America’s first political parties influenced by Marxism. It organized labor strikes and boycotts in hopes of awakening America’s class consciousness through Marxist class conflict.

In California, the group quickly degenerated into an anti-Chinese mob in July 1877, “roaming the city, attacking Chinese laundries, and beating those Chinese unfortunate enough to come within the mob’s reach.” In San Francisco, the concurrently nativist and socialist mob dovetailed two decades of anti-Chinese sentiment:

State legislation aimed at Chinese miners appeared in 1855. With the increase in unemployment following completion of the transcontinental railroad, anti-Chinese meetings took place on San Francisco sandlots as early as 1870. ‘Anticoolie’ organizations appeared at about the same time, sponsored initially by the Knights of St. Crispin, an organization of shoemakers. San Francisco public officials responded to this growth of anti-Chinese sentiment by passing a series of discriminatory ordinances. They closed down the Chinese school but denied Chinese children access to the public schools. They defined the carrying of baskets on a pole across the shoulders as a misdemeanor, an action aimed at Chinese peddlers. They required all lodging houses to have 500 cubic feet of air for each resident and made tenants equally culpable with landlords for violations. Police never enforced the ordinance outside Chinatown, but enforcement in Chinatown soon produced such crowding of the city jails as to put them in violation of the ordinance.

While the Workingmen’s Party as a national political movement was generally unsuccessful, it achieved notable political victories against Republican candidates in the Golden State in the 1870s. Many of its endorsed candidates were elected to city and state offices, including mayors, state assembly seats, and state supreme court judgeships. Before its quick descent into irrelevance, the party’s racist tropes against Chinese “cheap labor” fanned enough flame to pressure Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, effectively banning Chinese laborer immigration for over six decades, until the act’s repeal in 1943.

Sadly, instead of course correction, California’s political establishment has been doubling down with new proposals for discrimination.

In 1983, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) responded to a NAACP lawsuit by entering into a consent decree to achieve racial balance. The lawsuit alleged that the school district engaged in segregation targeting black and Hispanic students, based on crude school enrollment statistics. Subsequently, the “desegregation” consent decree, applying a “racial unidentifiability standard,” required that “no school could have fewer than four racial/ethnic groups, and no racial/ethnic group could constitute more than 45% of the students at attendance area schools or 40% at alternative schools.”

In other words, SFUSD justified its race-based admissions with arguments of disparate impact. This resembles prevalent practices of racial balancing today, under which proportional representation of racial demographics in a geographic area or jurisdiction is superimposed regardless of individual needs, socioeconomic nuances, or merit. As a result of the legal mandate, San Francisco’s Chinese American students were capped at 40 to 45 percent at any school—subject to a quota system that debilitated their admissions into the city’s most prestigious high school, Lowell High School. It would take over 20 years and a 1994 lawsuit led by Chinese students to end the quota system.

Race-based admissions have also been the unspoken norm for the University of California system. In spite of the state’s 1996 constitutional ban on racial preferences and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning race considerations in college admissions, the university system has long sought to balance its student demographics to reflect the state’s diversity. It has gotten so blatant that a lawsuit was filed in 2025 by Students Against Racial Discrimination to stop the discriminatory practice.

Statewide, attempts at legalizing race-based affirmative action, with the expressive intent of limiting Asian American students’ access to competitive institutions and programs, have never ceased.

In 2014, California State Senator Edward Hernandez introduced Senate Constitutional Amendment 5 (SCA 5) to eliminate the state’s ban on racial preference in higher education. The bill was killed in the State Assembly after a grassroots movement of concerned Chinese Americans forced three Democrats to retract their support. In 2020, the State Legislature placed ACA 5—a blanket repeal of Proposition 209, the state’s ban on race-based affirmative action in public education, employment, and contracting, on the ballot. 9.65 million Californians, many of whom voted for Joe Biden in the same election, rejected the proposal. But that didn’t stop Sacramento’s leftist lawmakers from trying again. In 2023, the State Assembly passed ACA 7, scheming a “research-based” exemption mechanism to Prop. 209. That ACA 7 was stranded in the State Senate, as a few sober-minded Democrats decided not to move the bill beyond the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the urge to reinsert racial discrimination at the front and center of public life is like a “gift” that keeps giving. The politicians are at it again with a new ACA 7, intended to gut Prop. 209’s educational provisions.

This time, the proposal is embedded in the “Road to Repair” reparations priority package of the California Legislative Black Caucus. Nowhere in the proposal was California’s broken K-12 education pipeline mentioned. Neither did its proponents consider the public’s bipartisan disdain for race-based education policies. There is only raw and rudimentary mathematics of zero-sum calculations: if California’s black students are “underrepresented” for whatever reasons, “reparations,” legislators say, must be given to position them preferentially in the education system. Never mind the state’s pronounced past of anti-Chinese discrimination. If the Chinese, and Asians in general, stand in the way, sacrifice them.

If codified into state law, the new ACA 7 would aid in the de facto practice of racial preferences in all areas of public education. In higher education, race considerations in areas like financial aid and scholarship decisions will replace merit, rendering it particularly disadvantageous for Asian-American students, who have already been targeted by race proxies in admissions.

The irony is not lost that the bill’s author, Assemblyman Corey Jackson, has excluded “college enrollment and admissions” from ACA 7’s proposed repeal of Prop. 209. This is merely paying lip service to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In other words, ACA 7 virtue signals a shallow compliance with the law in the ban on race-based college admissions, but proceeds to gut Prop. 209 in all other areas of public education. The admissions and enrollment question is being assaulted by UC and other schools at the expense of Asian American students, regardless.

How ironic it is for a state with no history of slavery to try every other way to prolong and relive its history of racial discrimination against Chinese Americans.

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