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IN PLESSY v. FERGUSON (1896), one of the most famous Supreme Court cases establishing the division of black and white race in America, Justice John Marshall Harían was the lone dissenter from the majority decision to uphold a Louisiana statute requiring segregation on trains. For this, he has often been heralded as a brave advocate of racial equality who overcame his own past as a slaveholder. However, he has also been remembered correctly as an overt racist who defended the color-blind Constitution because he was certain that the "dominant" white race was in "no danger" from just "eight million blacks."1 His peers felt differently, recognizing the right of legislatures to separate the races physically as long as "political equality" was maintained. As Eric Sundquist has observed, the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson gave birth to the years of judicially sanctioned Jim Crow laws and "racist fears" that Harían had foreboded, and during which William Faulkner's most famous novels were written.2 Indeed, Joe Christmas, the personification of racial ambiguity in Light in August, can be read as a fictional descendant of Homer Plessy, the seven-eighths-white man capable of "passing."
Plessy is a landmark case, one continually studied and cited today. Yet very few scholars examine or even know the reasoning behind Harlans dissent, reasoning that is almost always excised from abstracted or condensed versions of Harlans opinion. Harlans dissent posits the Chinese as a separate group - one not accepted into citizenship - and contrasts them with citizens of all colors. His other judicial opinions consistently ruled against admitting even American-born Chinese to citizenship.3 Part of his objection to "the statute in question" in the Plessy case was that it allowed "a Chinaman [to] ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race [may not]."4 With the intrusion of new colored races into legal consciousness in Plessy, defining the opposition of colored and white, citizen and noncitizen, had become more complicated.5 No doubt this logic is expurgated partly as a nod to political correctness, but its omission erases the complex role that the Chinese played in Southern race relations, as well as the novel perspective that they offer.
Like the key legal decisions that shaped the...