California’s ACA 7 Is Affirmative Action With a New Name

“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.