Making Maps into Racial Matter: Fire Risk and Anti-Chinese Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

This essay looks to maps produced in connection with a series of anti-Chinese laundry laws in San Francisco to add to our understanding on the changes to legislative racial discrimination in the US West immediately after Reconstruction. These laundry laws led to the Supreme Court ruling in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), which established that laws with discriminatory effects were still unconstitutional even if the law itself did not feature any discriminatory language. Debate on the legacy of Yick Wo frequently questions how racial discrimination has persisted in spite of this Supreme Court ruling. Much of this discussion privileges legal analysis. This essay uses archival documents that are contemporaneous to but not directly connected with the legal case to show how the wider ecosystem of structural racism changed so that the law's power to address racial discrimination was diminished in this period.