The 'Curse' of the Chinese: How Seattle's Elite Tried to Buy Their Way Out of Racism
In May 1882, a local editorial argued that property owners should refuse to rent or sell land to Chinese immigrants, claiming they were bad tenants and a financial drain on the city.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A suggestion about the Chinese here at home will be in order. In this city there are at present but few of this race, but that there are quite enough no one who has the good of the town at heart will deny. Later in the year it is more than probable there will be a great accession to the present numbers, or will be if a foothold can be obtained. Now the easiest way to keep them out is to refuse them room. If no one will rent them houses, and no one will sell them ground, they will go elsewhere.
They are bad tenants and bad neighbors. Houses run down rapidly under their occupancy, and ground depreciates in value. They injure all business adjacent, and are a curse of the worst kind wherever allowed to thicken. Their opium habits are alone enough to condemn them, to say nothing of their carelessness in handling fire, their assaults upon the labor of our own race, etc.
If property owners will study their own interests the number of Chinese at present here need not be noticeably increased. On the contrary they are allowed to swarm as in Portland and San Francisco, we may expect to have at least two thousand next winter, who, if they find employment, will take the bread from the mouths of a like number of white men, women and children.
This 1882 editorial reveals how economic anxiety was weaponized against Chinese immigrants in Seattle long before the formal exclusion laws took full effect. By framing racism as a matter of 'property interests' and 'tenant quality,' local elites attempted to normalize segregation through private market pressure rather than just legal mandates, a tactic that echoes modern debates over housing discrimination and NIMBYism.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.