Race in America has tended to operate hierarchically, with groups “ranked” based on their proximity to Whiteness. The stereotypes assigned to different groups effectively work as a divide-and-conquer strategy that can keep non-White groups apart as they contend for access and power. The model minority myth, for instance, places Asian Americans adjacent to Whiteness and has been used as a wedge to prevent interracial solidarities from forming.
But race in America can also operate in a binary that has religious roots in the division of the “heathen” vs. the Christian. The heathen category flattened racial hierarchies by grouping different people together as the “unsaved.” Some classified as heathens found solidarity with other so-called heathens against White Christian colonizers. But others sought to escape the category by claiming a higher position on a civilizational ladder, sometimes deploying racist tropes themselves in the process.
That’s what some Chinese businessmen tried to do in mid-19th century America. Chinese gold-seekers had begun arriving in California in 1848. They faced discriminatory taxes and became the frequent victims of theft and violence. In People v. Hall in 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled that their testimony was impermissible in court, thereby freeing three White men who had been convicted of murdering a Chinese man on the basis of Chinese witness testimony. People v. Hall rendered it virtually impossible for Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants to defend themselves from persecution.
In the face of such hostility, a “young merchant in San Francisco” named Pun Chi wrote “A Remonstrance to Congress” on behalf of other businessmen. Sometime between the mid-1850s and mid-1860s, they presented the document to missionary William Speer to translate and send to Congress. Speer never sent it, but he published it in an 1870 book on China and America, explaining that it “is thoroughly Chinese, and will aid our people to understand the views and feelings of that people.”
The authors of the “Remonstrance” unflinchingly called out the “unrighteousness of humiliating and hating the Chinese as a people.” Showing their awareness of Christian doctrine, and their understanding of its significance in American national life, they described Jesus as “in accord with the holy men of China”: “He did not permit distinctions of men into classes to be loved or despised. But now, if the religion of Jesus really teaches the fear of Heaven, how does it come that the people of your honorable country on the contrary trample upon and hate the race which Heaven most loves, that is, the Chinese?”