'A race so different': Chinese exclusion, the slaughterhouse cases , and Plessy v. Ferguson.

This essay interrogates the black-white racial binary used to construct the concepts of freedom and citizenship within the U.S. It analyzes the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court use of language with a critical eye for text. Incorporating the close-reading skills developed to a great extent in English departments, cases about black and white, slave and free can be linked to the growing anti-Asian sentiment in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Never far from the justices' minds is the continuing inter-relationship between racial categories, labor, and the Constitutional rights of the Reconstruction amendments. Indentured servitude as a labor form in-between chattel slavery and free labor is discussed. The persistence of the legal classification of race and labor in the post-Civil-War afterlife of free labor ideology and its implications in the famous separate-but-equal ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson is examined. Also discussed are the unexpected and complex uses, by both the majority and dissenting opinions in the landmark Plessy ruling, of the figure of the Asiatic indentured laborer. The ways in which citizenship, as legal form and cultural concept, relies on a demand for assimilation, whose logic codes race as culture is highlighted.