Harper Weekly Summary

Harper Weekly’s 1869 cover illustrates an Irish woman and a Chinese man in front of a church. Since they are in front of a church linking arms together, implies that they just married each other. The man’s appearance is Chinese ethnic because he has long black hair braided, slanted eyes, long pointy mustache, his pointy shoes, and shirt and pants culturally signifies Chinese culture. The woman is most likely Irish because they are standing in front of a Catholic church, and most Irish people were Catholic. In addition, her clothing has a close relation to what Irish women wore, especially the hat that she is wearing. Also, people were not used to seeing interracial couples. At the time, people had different points of view of Harper Weekly’s

Due to white men feeling that they are in a competition for women and wealthy white women feeling that interracial marriages are inappropriate, an anti-miscegenation law was made by 1944 in California to make it illegal for interracial marriages. Also, another law that passed against the Chinese was the Queue Ordinance, which allowed prison wardens to shave the heads or cut off long braids of the Chinese in 1873. Since white men were jealous of Chinese men taking their jobs and women, some white men took advantage of the law and shaved Chinese men’s’ heads to frighten and threaten the Chinese men. In addition, due to many people like John Bidwell, who took advantage of hiring Chinese over white men, white workingmen hated the Chinese. Most African Americans did not favor the Chinese. Although the white people both discriminated both, African Americans and Chinese, the African Americans still discriminated against the Chinese. For example, from “Driven Out”, “The black press frequently reinforced stereotypes of the ‘yellow peril,’ … ‘filthy, immoral and licentious according to our notions of such things’ … ‘grotesque appearance’ of the Chinese. …‘pig tail tobacco’”. Overall, the African Americans did not like the Harper Weekly’s 1869 cover because they did not like the Chinese in the first