Most Chinatown businesses were small with their street front open, vegetables and groceries overflowing on the sidewalks. The Chinese cases prove no less. More Serious About Its Review of Legislative Purpose, V. Refuse to Affirm the Beliefs of a Majority Class, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. . 58) created a ten-year morato…, Chinese, subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages), which is also sometimes grouped with the Tai, or Thai, langu…, https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/legal-and-political-magazines/yick-wo-v-hopkins-1886, Chinese Immigration and Exclusion (U.S.), Nineteenth Century. Chinese Americans. Yick Wo believed city ordinances had been unfairly applied to him, so he challenged their constitutionality under the equal protection clause, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. but it could only be based on an equality of habits, acquirements, and tendencies. deny to any person within its jurisdiction [geographic area over which a government has authority] the equal protection of the laws." Brookfield, CT: The Millbrook Press, 1993. [O]nce a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order . Reminding the Court nearly two hundred Chinese laundries located in similar structures had been denied licenses by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Wo proceeded to charge the Board with seeking to wipe out the city's Chinese laundry business. . But it is a significant defeat that we do not all remember the tragic circumstances that brought Yick Wo to the U.S. Supreme Court. More ominously in terms of checks and balances, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court and five of the six associate justices elected that year were candidates of Kearney's Workingmen's Party, and some remained on that court as late as 1892. In fact, if the laundry ordinances were lawful, the supervisors could prohibit almost any person from conducting any business on his own property. In United States v. Lee Yen Tai, the Court refused to rule that a later, more Chinese-friendly treaty abrogated a previous statute that permitted easy exclusion of Chinese immigrants. . The California court conceded that all such legislation is subject to abuse by officials without the capacity and integrity essential to a proper administration of the trust reposed in them, but the court seemed reluctant to invalidate any law because of the lack of these virtues. Politicians and legislatures were only too happy to affirm this notion that the material prosperity of America belonged to Whites, even if they were not willing to do the dirty work the Chinese would do to earn it. Jennifer Gratz, who was denied admission to the University of Michigan undergraduate program, demonstrates this unwritten expectation that the opportunities available from government belong to Whites by right if only they work hard. Racial discrimination claims brought under the equal protection clause do not reflect a similar pattern. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1991. 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