Creating Whiteness in California (Chapter 1, Naruta 2006)

pages 1-21 of Naruta 2006

Creating Whiteness in California.............................................…...1

Anthropological Theory and the Social Phenomenon of Race……5

Organization..………………….…………...…………………….18

Chapter 1: Creating Whiteness in California

Although Chinese Californians have been a vital part of the state since its formation, some white European Americans in the later nineteenth century strove to impose the label “foreign” on any American of Asian descent. Within a handful of years, respectable European-American periodicals reflected a mainstream public discourse about a supposed racial category, “the Chinese” or “Mongolians.” This discourse hinged on assertions that Chinese Americans were an irreconcilably foreign group, one that necessarily threatened the successful existence of white society. And it wasn’t just talk; these new ideas gave rise to a wide array of legalized discrimination and repeated spasms of violent attacks on Chinese Americans.

This study looks at causes and effects of the Chinese Exclusion movements. For its proponents, “Chinese Exclusion” was a shorthand for late nineteenth and early twentieth century efforts to make the U.S. more white. It also referred to a set of border controlling legislation that focused on “race” regardless of country of origin (C. McClain 1994: 155-156). For nearly a century, the Chinese Exclusion laws shaped public debate about U.S. identity in ways that had material consequences. First passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion laws barred immigration of members of “the Chinese race.” Enforcers focused on complete exclusion meant that in practice even the few exceptions the law granted—to well-capitalized merchants, students, and members of the clergy—were far from guaranteed (Fu 1907; Chew 1908; Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969; C. McClain 1994; E. Lee 1997, 2003; Greene, Glass, and Nealand 2004). The Chinese Exclusion laws created a complete ban on the right to naturalization for members of “the Chinese race,” and laid the groundwork for related race-based discrimination, such as laws that sought to reduce the number of people of Asian descent by making it illegal for persons ineligible for naturalization to own land (Chow 1974: 153; C. McClain 1994: 283). Congress renewed Chinese Exclusion laws every ten years before indefinitely extending them in 1904 (Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969: 26-30; Chow 1974: 154), after which they were only finally put out of use in 1968. Their long endurance highlights the necessity of examining impacts of nineteenth-century racial categories on formulations of social identity.

To understand the emergence and legitimization of the Chinese Exclusion movements, this study focuses on the period from 1850, when California became a U.S. state, up until the 1910 opening of the facility designed for modern enforcement of Chinese Exclusion, the Angel Island Immigration Station in the Bay of San Francisco. The study period’s historical context shows a time of profound social upheaval and of redefining ideas about the characteristics of “the white race.” The established race-based systems of political, economic, and social hierarchy were undergoing challenges from multiple sources. Post-Civil War political restructuring and constitutional amendments were threatening racial hierarchy. The industrial revolution was transforming work and economic life. Anglo Americans, long the politically dominant group, were experiencing a new demographic landscape both as the U.S. expanded further West and as an influx of immigration brought large numbers of Europeans not previously considered “white.” A number of Anglo Americans responded by creating a new definition of the white race, one which relied largely on assigning negative characteristics to other races. The “white race” was being “reinvented” (T. Allen 1994: 1). The Chinese Exclusion movements coincided with the abandonment of Reconstruction and moved in parallel with reductions of African Americans’ civil rights and the establishment of legalized segregation. The discourses and consequences of the Chinese Exclusion Movements were pivotal in new creations of racial identity.

This dissertation draws on anthropological theory that has been reinvestigating the creations of race. I discuss anthropology’s work to rehistoricize the very racial categories that had previously been asserted to be natural facts of biology through examining the part they played in seventeenth-century colonial Western European and Anglo American efforts to create racial identities linked with opportunities and restrictions. Additionally, as these formulations of identity had material consequences, and integrally involved physical objects and spaces, archaeology has great potential for elucidating historical processes of identity formation. This dissertation joins recent archaeological studies exploring the creation and reinventions of whiteness.

The anthropological research I discuss in this chapter argues two elements were key in the first creation of whiteness: namely, forceful expansion into inhabited lands, and a demographic minority’s desire to maintain disproportionate political and economic power. These conditions were renewed in the new state of California in the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time links were again being asserted between racial identity and rights to land ownership, or special regulatory burdens on one’s buildings or means of livelihood. To show how these processes of racial identity formation played out in California, this project synthesizes historical evidence and archaeological data from excavations at the sites of former Chinatowns in Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Riverside, as well as newly emerging data from Oakland.

This broad array of data allows testing of a hypothesis long held to explain racial discrimination against Chinese Americans and the enactment of Chinese Exclusion legislation and policies: that legalized and de facto discrimination against Chinese Californians originated with and was primarily driven by unemployed Irish immigrant laborers. An unexpected result of this study has been to refute that explanation. A wide range of historical and archaeological evidence demonstrates the main agitators for Chinese Exclusion were not a small group of the unemployed, but rather a number of mainstream Anglo-American political and business leaders attempting to consolidate political and economic advantage. While numbers of Californians spoke and acted against anti-Chinese discrimination, it was codified in local and federal law. Looking at these opposing currents in society, this dissertation examines the processes that gave rise to widespread acceptance of the creation of both new racial identities and race-based discrimination.

In the remainder of this chapter, I discusses recent developments in anthropology that pave the way for operationalizing archaeological study of the complex social phenomenon of racial identity formation. I briefly review biological anthropological studies demonstrating racial categories are not supported by physical facts. I discuss the need anthropologists are identifying for theoretical reorientations that “rehistoriciz[e] race and anthropological knowledges” (Harrison 1995: 50; also Pauketat 2001). The emphasis on historical contexts of social phenomena productively orients us toward studying processes by which racial categories have been created, and the influences perceived “racial” differences have on formations of social identity and social relations. I discuss recent work in archaeology of the Atlantic States’ colonial period that underscores the role of material objects in asserting and reinforcing ideas about social identity while exploring effective means of operationalizing archaeological study of the historical creation of whiteness. Finally, I draw on these results in examining the actions of those publicly agitating for Chinese Exclusion in order to develop an archaeological approach useful to exploring later nineteenth century redefinitions of racial identity.

Anthropological Theory and the Social Phenomenon of Race

In a recent article, anthropologist Smedley (1998: 690) points out that while the idea of race or racial discrimination did not exist before the seventeenth century, early into English colonialism, one’s racial category would become “the main form of human identity” in the United States (also Harrison 1995: 48). Highlighting the relatively recent development of “race,” Harrison (1995: 50, 1998: 619) notes it was the classification of humans into biologically-defined racial typologies that described each race’s physical appearance, intellectual capabilities, and behavioral characteristics that was most closely associated with “anthropology’s early professionalization as a science,” and this work in anthropology has been linked with a nineteenth and twentieth century racialized worldview that spread from Europe and North America to other parts of the world (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997: 517).

Yet anthropology also has a legacy of collecting ample evidence demonstrating racial categories have no basis in biological fact. Boas (Harrison 1995: 52; Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997: 518) and W.E.B. Du Bois (Harrison 1995: 54) took up the challenge of providing empirical evidence to disprove the racial typologists’ assertion that physical features such as head size and shape—and the linked assumptions of intellectual capability and moral character—were racially determined. Both researchers demonstrated physical features presumed to be fixed by race were actually quite mutable. They found that depending on clothing practices, nutrition, environmental impacts on health, populations could experience dramatic changes in physical characteristics in as short a time as a generation. Boas and Du Bois demonstrated that qualities “racial science” (Brace et al. 1993: 3) asserted were biologically fixed and determining were actually impacts from social conditions (Harrison 1995: 54).

In an article addressed to their anthropological colleagues, Mukhopadhyay and Moses (1997) draw attention to the need for anthropologists to develop terminology and concepts that could more accurately reflect knowledge of human biological variation, while simultaneously recognizing and bringing public awareness to historic and continuing uses of racial categories in fostering and maintaining social and economic injustice. Response to the call of creating a “holistic analysis of race” (Harrison 1998: 609) draws on theory and data from socio-cultural, biological, and archaeological anthropologists (Sussman 1998). The resulting cross-specialty dialogue includes work in the areas of developing understandings of human variation not dependent on the factually unsupportable “racial science,” both rehistoricizing the idea of race and developing historical archaeological methods for investigating the creations of whiteness (AAA 1998; AAPA 1998; Cartmill 1998; Harrison 1998; Hill 1998; Smedley 1998; Sussman 1998).

Biological anthropological research is demonstrating the lack of fit between the model of biological races and the realities of the broad ranges of human variation (e.g. Overbey 2005a, 2005b; Templeton 1998; Cartmill 1998; Brace et al. 1993). Where “racial science” asserted each racial type was manifest in a defining set of physical characteristics which could be determined by statistical averages among members of that race, and physically manifested in persons closest to the “pure” racial type, there is no actual grouping of traits that would coincide with the “racial” categories “Caucasoid,” “Negroid,” or “Mongoloid” races (Brace et al. 1993: 3; Smedley 1998: 699). Instead, biophysical traits—such as skin color, hair type, and nasal width—occur independently of each other, and biophysical variations among world populations are “continuous and gradual, overlapping population boundaries, fluid, and subject to evolutionary changes” (Smedley 1998: 699).

Smedley (1998: 694) emphasizes racial categorization has origins in the Western European concept of the Chain of Being, which expressed the idea that it was the divine order that Western Europeans, created to be the top of a racial hierarchy, should rule over other peoples. Although the categories forming the racial hierarchy were asserted to be evident in nature, attempts to demonstrate their existence from empirical data have always failed. Mukhopadhyay and Moses (1997: 518) relay one example of how the supposed racial categories have no relation to empirical evidence. Racial typologies were seen to be deterministic of cranial dimensions, which in turn were also asserted to be reflective of mental and moral development (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997: 518, citing Blakey 1987; Smedley 1993). “Racial science” researchers then tried to use actual cranial measurements to develop a scheme for representing evolutionary advancement through comparative measures of cranial dimensions (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997: 518). After their measurements showed the supposedly more advanced “long-headed” shape exhibited in Scandinavians was shared in African populations, the researchers abandoned this particular scheme of using cranial measurements in support of racial hierarchy (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997: 518, quoting Smedley 1993: 259).

Finding that racial categories are social inventions rather than physical reality, biological anthropologists have worked to abandon the empirically insupportable category of race and instead develop methods for accurately studying the biological variation that exists among humans. Harrison (1995: 53) notes biological anthropologists, such as Livingstone (1962) and Brace (1964), proposed replacing the analytical category of race with analysis of clines, the “continuous gradation[s] over space in the form or frequency of a [particular] trait” (Harding 1993: 133). The development of tracing degrees of relatedness through DNA mutation analysis and introduction of further skeletal data led Brace et al. (1993: 3-4) to revisit the question of how to effectively study human biodiversity. Suspecting clinal analysis alone was not enough to reflect the influence historical events and associations have on how populations create subsequent generations, Brace et al. (1993: 1) conducted an empirical study that would include both physical traits related to “long-term adaptive response to selective forces,” such as skin color and body form, with “adaptively trivial” traits, such as craniofacial measurements, which, like family resemblance, merely reflect degrees of relatedness of populations. Brace et al.’s (1993: 5-6) study of craniofacial features, skin color, and body form employed the large sample of skeletal remains of ancient Egyptians from the Predynastic Upper Egypt and Late Dynastic Lower Egypt, and data that included modern populations nearby and around the world. “Racial science,” Brace et al. (1993: 3) note, would expect statistical analysis to find the craniofacial features racial science researchers thought to be so wedded to “race,” such as nasal width and degree of facial projection, varying in conjunction with skin color. There was no such correlation. Instead, Brace et al. (1993: 1, 17) reported that skin color and body proportions exhibited a clinal gradient that “suggests long-term adaptive response to selective forces.” Brace et al. (1993) suggested that cluster analysis of the adaptively trivial traits, craniofacial measurements, could trace the degrees of relatedness of northern and southern Egyptian populations, and found their cluster analysis of craniofacial measurements indicated that regardless of skin color, northern and southern Egyptians showed the greatest number of ties of relatedness with each other, followed by ties with populations in Europe and India, and then with populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Brace et al. (1993: 1) concluded that together, cline and cluster analysis are useful tools in examining human biological variation, but to attempt to find “race” in biological fact is “as useless as it is impossible.”

With biology emphasizing that racial categories are inventions rather than reflections of fact, anthropologists are working to “rehistoricize” the idea of race (Harrison 1995: 50; 1998). Since in the United States today the idea of identity is so linked with identification with a racial category, for comparison Smedley (1998: 693, 691) looks to practices of the ancient Romans and Greeks. The literature of Greeks and Romans contains no racial designations, she notes, and most writers attributed skin color variation as related to environmental factors (Smedley 1998: 693). Art Romans and Greeks produced that depicted Africans did not employ any physical characteristics that the Western European intellectual tradition would later hold to be associated with “negroid” features, and people’s physical variations were accurately depicted without resorting to stereotyping (Smedley 1998: 693, citing Snowden 1983). Greeks and Romans would incorporate into their society of people from outside populations (Smedley 1998: 691). They believed “ethnic identity itself was fluid and malleable,” Smedley (1998: 691) writes, and acquisition of languages formed “avenues to new social identities.”

Historical analysis identifies racial categories and racial discrimination as first arising in connection with European colonial expansion and the concurrent creation of race-based slavery (e.g. Smedley 1993, 1998; Harrison 1995: 51-52; Epperson 1999). T. Allen (1994: 17-19, 23, 1997: 239-259; Smedley 1998: 694; Harrison 1998: 621) argues the “invention” of the white race took place in North America in the later seventeenth century. This research holds that a pivotal event was a rebellion of English and African bond-laborers in colonial Virginia, who in 1676 took up arms in protest of the colonial government creating a trade “monopoly” and acting “for the advancement of private favorites” (T. Allen 1994, 1997; Bacon 1676). After the English colonial authorities suppressed the so-called Bacon’s Rebellion, T. Allen (1994, 1997) argues, they deliberately pursued a strategy of emphasizing a shared white racial identity and solidarity in order to divide these populations and maintain their subordination. The strategy was enacted in part in the ensuing decades’ laws codifying race through distinguishing rights and opportunities allotted to whites, “Africans,” “Mulattoes,” and “Indians,” with a focus on to what degree various populations could participate in the full range of benefits allotted to whites (Bell 2005: 447). In exchange for supporting the Anglo colonial authorities and the affiliated planter class, poor whites were offered a “birthright” (T. Allen 1997: 248) as European Americans, in the form of an idea of social superiority by virtue of being white. Harrison (1998: 621) emphasizes that the idea of white privilege had real consequences, including whites gaining differential access to civil rights and a claim to entitlement over non-whites in resources such as land or jobs. Roediger (1991) calls a sense of racial superiority and claims to material entitlements the “wages” of whiteness.

In a recent archaeological study of eighteenth-century Virginia, Bell (2005: 447) argues the process of creating “whiteness” is a form of ethnogenesis. As white identity transcends ethnicity (Harrison 1995: 64), more analytically useful might be Omi and Winant’s (1986) naming the creation of whiteness as a particular form of identity creation, a racial project. This racial project asserted the characteristics attributed to be inherent in the white race demonstrated the naturalness and “appropriateness” of the particular political and economic relations they desired (Radin 1934; Leiris 1958:7-9; Almaguer 1994; K. Anderson 1995: 10-28; Hanley-Lopez 1996; AAA 1998; Zack 2001). But regardless of whether the term “ethnogenesis” is applicable to creating whiteness, Bell’s approach to archaeologically investigating the creation of races proves to be productive.

Bell (2005: 447) identifies the “on the ground” processes of creating race-based group identification and suggests how they can be investigated archaeologically. In line with Jones’ (1997) theoretical analysis of archaeology of ethnicity that emphasizes the creation of ethnic identities as a cumulative and therefore constantly shifting product of actions people take with one another, Bell sees the creation of whiteness as having involved continually asserted acts. Bell (2005: 447) defines the acts as falling into the category of “internal definition,” or acts to create a sense of group identity, and “external differentiation,” the development of “belief in difference from others.” While B. Anderson’s (1987) term for these processes, creating “imagined communities,” might be interpreted as suggesting they are largely intangible, Bell found they left material evidence in the archaeological remains of an early eighteenth-century colonial Virginian site.

Archaeologically-recovered handmade ceramics, notes Bell (2005: 447), attest that the site’s colonial Europeans lived in an environment of “regular interethnic contact” with Native Americans and African Americans. Bell (2005: 447-448) found that in this multiethnic context, the colonial Europeans used both material culture and legal differentiations to foster ideas of white solidarity and difference with all others. Colonial domestic architecture, Bell argues, enforced difference between Anglo-American planters and the African Americans they held in slavery through dividing living quarters, not only separating a white planter’s living quarters from the cabins of enslaved Africans, but also separating the work enslaved Africans performed at the planter’s house into buildings at its rear. Bell (2005: 451) sees this spatial differentiation as a significant shift, as colonial Virginian and English domestic architecture of the previous century’s included such service worksites within the main mass of the planter’s house, separated from the planter’s living and entertaining spaces only by a “through passage” after which the architectural style is named. Bell (2005: 447, 452, 457) finds a new vernacular style of planter’s houses, “hall-parlor” houses, not only symbolically claimed the planter’s house as space separate from enslaved African workers, but also facilitated Anglo-American planters building a sense of group identity, through “an open floor plan easily assessable to visitors” and an overall scale that brought visitors into intimate proximity with the planter’s household and living spaces. For white colonial Virginians, Bell (2005: 454) argues, these houses functioned as what Riggins (1994: 111) termed “collective objects,” or “material forms exhibiting and maintaining ties to a group” (Bell 2005: 454). Having constructed a model of how architecture might be used in a multiethnic setting to assert the existence of racial distinctions and a collective group identity of whiteness, Bell (2005: 457) finds archaeological excavations at a thousand-acre Virginia plantation of the first half of the 1700s, Flowerdew Hundred, showed colonial planters pursuing this strategy. Yet only part of the strategy is shown by the material culture Bell examines here. The architectural and spatial mechanisms for creating a sense of internal definition and external differentiation would have worked—at least initially—to emphasize differences between Anglo-American planters and European-American laborers. Further work would be required for the planters’ houses to function as “collective objects.” Bell notes the laws that followed Bacon’s Rebellion and provided differential access to civil rights for Native, African, and European Americans worked to create a group identity of whiteness, one that could be claimed to extended from the Anglo-American planter class to poor European Americans. Bell’s results suggest architectural layout and other orderings of space will be key in archaeological investigations of the creation of whiteness, and will need to be investigated with attention to legal and other contexts that structured their use.

Orser (1998: 666) argues studying processes by which racial categories have been created and the influences perceived “racial” differences have on formations of social identity and social relations should be a core area of concern for historical archaeologists. The manner in which he set out his argument is significant for understanding current limitations in historical archaeological conceptions of the creation of whiteness. Pointing to historical research (Ignatiev 1995; T. Allen 1994, 1997) tracing English and Anglo-American discrimination against ethnic Irish, Orser (1998: 665) criticizes that today the notion of Irish Americans as part of “White America” is taken for granted. Orser (1998: 665, citing Ignatiev 1995: 109) writes that during U.S. slavery, Irish immigrants, as poor freemen, were “often used [instead of enslaved African Americans]…for the most dangerous jobs because [they]…were wholly expendable.” Orser (1998: 665) argues that “the Irish did not move into the ranks of ‘white’ America until they repudiated the rights of those deemed nonwhite,” and that this was accomplished by affirming the Anglo-American planter’s authority at the top of a racialized hierarchy through engaging in such employment as being a slave overseer. Orser (1998: 665) holds that this struggle to receive official “whiteness” was crucial due to Congress’s 1790 Act that limited the right of naturalization only to “any alien, being a free white person” (quoted in C. McClain 1994: 70).

Orser’s account of the relation between Irish ethnicity and whiteness may be oversimplifying. It ignores the influence of U.S. anti-Catholic and Anglo-American Nativist prejudice against Irish Americans (Meyers 1943). No less significantly, the mid-1800s Englishmen Orser quotes seem to be emphasizing not that the issue is the Irish aren’t white, but instead that they’re subhuman. Orser (1998: 665) quotes Gibbons (1991: 96) to relay the position of “the staunchly anti-Catholic clergyman Charles Kingley,” who

stated that he was “haunted by the human chimpanzees” he saw around Sligo[, Ireland]. For him, “to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.”

In the mid-1800s, the English were a century into a military-backed colonization of Ireland that attempted to eradicate Irish language and culture (R. Allen 1994), and the clergyman Kingley’s sentiments were publicly echoed at that time, Orser ( 1998: 665, quoting Foster 1993: 184) notes, in many forums, including the English magazine Punch, which called the Irish “A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro.” Here again the Anglo anti-Irish characterizations did not claim they ranked low among human “races,” but instead asserted the Irish fell below human status. In the U.S., an Anglo-American stereotype of Irish women as shrewish and Irish men as drunk, belligerent, and incapable of practicing a fiscally-sound work ethic was publicly embodied in the form of the “Stage Irishman” of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Byrne 2004). Byrne suggests Stage Irish shows have been overlooked in examinations of Anglo-American stereotyping, noting that not only did they arise in tandem with blackface minstrel shows, but also that the same actors would often move between playing blackface and playing Stage Irish. Both forms surviving well into the twentieth century (e.g. Arnold and Browning 1969; Loewen 1999: 425-429), if not beyond, suggests endurance of the processes defining white group identity and out-group differentiation that Orser argues the 1790 naturalization statute had made urgent. It also raises the question of investigating the transformation of these processes over time.

Orser’s (1998) call for developing historical archaeological investigations of whiteness, emphasizes understanding how social identity is influenced by laws that create differential access to civil rights based on racial categories. Looking at the role of laws in creating “race” points to the necessity of examining the Chinese Exclusion movements. If the first U.S. naturalization statute was an instrumental part of creating racial categories, its Reconstruction-era revision in 1870 to include “aliens of African nativity, and …persons of African descent” (quoted in C. McClain 1994: 70) indicates the definition of whiteness was undergoing revision. Subsequent years’ revisions of the links between civil rights and race show this was an ongoing process. C. McClain (1994: 70) notes an 1875 attempt to fix the language of the statute “probably uninten[tionally]” amended the naturalization provision to be free of any racial stipulations. As former Chinese nationals worked to gain the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, some prominent Anglo Americans expressed contempt for the idea of any non-Anglo immigrants—whether from China, Ireland, or Germany—becoming naturalized and participating in democracy. When Chock Wong, the publisher of the San Francisco Chinese-language newspaper The Oriental (C. McClain 1994: 71), filed naturalization papers, the Oakland News (31 December 1875) opined

Only think of Patrick O'Shannessey hobnobbing with John Chinaman in some popular gin shop, canvassing the merits of Herr Driesback, an aspirant for Senatorial honors. The thought almost takes away one’s breath and we pause in wonder and amazement.

The News’ editorial serves as a reminder that even during periods when Chinese Americans were common targets of white discrimination, there were prominent Anglo Americans who asserted the central problem was any immigration that reduced numerical predominance of Anglo Americans. In the immediate post-Reconstruction period, this sentiment found a focused expression in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act’s barring immigration or naturalization of members of “the Chinese race” (C. McClain 1994: 155-156). Legal definition again explicitly linked race to civil rights.

Investigating how the Chinese Exclusion movements were involved in the reinventions of whiteness offers a number of opportunities for historical archaeologies of racial categories. It allows expanding inquiry beyond an artificially-constrained binary of black and white (also Almaguer 1994; Hanley-Lopez 1996). The ties Chinese Exclusion movement legislation created between race and civil rights both instituted and reaffirmed racial identities intrinsically linked with opportunities and restrictions that had material consequences. As Bell (2005) found, some of these material consequences were played out through architectural layout and other orderings of the spaces of daily life, and are therefore highly suited to archaeological investigation. Additionally, an urban environment’s pluralistic social setting, diverse land uses, and often fluctuating real estate values may make cities key sites for investigating creations of whiteness.

Harrison (1995: 50) shows the need to rehistoricize the concept of race requires greater anthropological engagement with particular historical contexts. The work of Bell (1995), Orser (1998), Smedley (1993, 1998) and others (e.g. Battle 1998) draws attention to the need for archaeological investigation of architectural and other spaces to proceed with attention to the legal and other contexts that structured their use. Additionally, to assume all those being subsumed under the category of white participated in, or equally participated in, processes of internal definition and external differentiation would peremptorily foreclose investigation of the racial creation processes. This dissertation demonstrates that anthropological study of the creation of racial categories also requires utilizing available historical materials to investigate the actions that particular individuals and groups took in order to define, redefine, and naturalize “race” in terms of the assurances or denial of civil rights—and other prerequisites for economic and political success—that members of each racial category supposedly could expect. In subsequent chapters I show how attention to evidence of these actors’ motivations and the consequences of their actions provides historical context necessary for accurate investigations of the creation of whiteness.

Organization

This dissertation develops one approach in a historical archaeology of the complex social phenomenon of racial identity formation. To develop the context for examining the Chinese Exclusion movements, I examine the traditional account of their rise and mainstream establishment, which holds that poor and unemployed workers, and particularly Irish immigrants, steered decades of national immigration policy. In Chapter 2, I examine whether available historical evidence supports what I heuristically-term the Irish Laborer Hypothesis.

Archaeological testing of this hypothesis is facilitated by spatial information and artifactual evidence recovered in archaeological excavations of portions of four California cities’ Chinatowns. In Chapter 3, I review the results of archaeological research into the historic Chinatowns of Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Riverside. Attention to the studies’ design and results emphasizes that the research has produced important findings, yet the recovered extant archaeological sample of deposits, and especially of deposits with closely defined geographic and temporal associations, is actually quite small. Results of previous studies highlight recovery of intact deposits in areas where archaeological remains were thought to have been obliterated, and the significant potential for future excavations to investigate chronologically-controlled deposits that will allow geographical comparison and diachronic studies. In a result useful for landuse planners, graphical representation of the extant archaeological sample of California Chinatowns in comparison to the Chinatowns’ documented histories underscores that any potential archaeological remains of historic Chinatowns would have legal significance under both the California Environmental Quality Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.

In Chapter 4, I focus on Oakland’s early development and historic officially-designated Chinatown locations. I review results of compliance archaeology investigations of sites associated with historic Chinatowns. Further investigating primary source materials, including those indicated in the work of a strong line of community historians, allows discovering new data about Oakland’s historic Chinatowns, their residents, and mainstream white businessmen and politicians’ discourse about and actions upon those Chinatowns. Archaeological and other spatial data allows the second portion of testing the Irish Laborer Hypothesis, and it is again found to be not supported by the evidence. I find examining spatial data and other material evidence in the context of local actions sheds light on the processes of internal definition and external differentiation (Bell 2005: 447) that individuals employed in creating whiteness in the second half of the nineteenth century. The data demonstrate the physical structure of cities and neighborhoods influenced and was influenced by social dynamics, and provides material evidence revealing how people interacted with each other in day-to-day life. Eliminating reliance on the empirically-unsupportable Irish Laborer Hypothesis opens new avenues for investigating social relations in California’s early multicultural setting.

In the concluding chapter, I discuss the anthropological concepts of acculturation studies and ethnic boundary maintenance, and how they have been applied in archaeological practices. I analyze how the implementation of acculturation studies in archaeology of historic sites associated with Chinese Americans has frequently drawn on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century stereotyped associations between the concepts of acculturation, assimilation, and cultural essentialism. I discuss instances in which archaeological investigations of historic sites associated with Chinese Americans have unconsciously perpetuated nineteenth century racial stereotypes, or otherwise used methods that hinder effective analysis and interpretation. I address developments in anthropological theory that emphasize the utility of approaches that examine the actual creations of social identity through acts of daily practice, an approach which avoids imposing assumptions of essentialized identity. Combined with the diachronic perspective of archaeology, a practice theory approach is especially suited to making sure ethnic identity is not “perceived as hereditary, permanent, and unalterable,” a problem Smedley (1998: 700) notes was exacerbated by the creation of “racial science.” Instead, focusing on daily practices with the diachronic perspective of archaeology allows understanding processes of identity formation, ranging from creolization to the extreme of racial formation projects. Pauketat (2001:87) observes that investigating questions of identity formation, culture change, and other social phenomena, can only be made possible through “the cumulative, painstaking, data-rich, multiscalar studies of proximate causation,” or historical events. This study contributes to what Pauketat (2001: 73-74) identifies as part of a new paradigm emerging in archaeology, “historical processualism.” In the conclusion, I build on the theoretical insights from practice theory and theorists working to rehistoricize anthropology to enumerate data-gathering imperatives (Pauketat (2001:73) and effective practices in developing a Chinese American archaeology.