Which I wish to remark

And my language is plain

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny

In regard to the same

What that name might imply,

But his smile it was pensive and child-like,

As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third;

And quite soft was the skies;

Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William

And me in a way I despise.

- The first three stanzas of Bret F. Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James”, (Overland Monthly, September 1870, 287-288)

The controversial front page of the July 21 issue of the New Yorker depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as terrorists or subversives is by no means the first such instance of satire being interpreted wrongly, and with long-ranging consequences, in American history. While the New Yorker is claiming that the cover was a satirical jab at the smears propagated by conservative pundits and on the internet, responses from the public range from belief in the smears to rage at the smearers. But ultimately, satirizing the smears merely gives attention to the outrageous claims and helps cement the claimed connection between the Obamas, Islam and terrorism.

A history lesson may be in order. Controversy surrounding satirical publications and misconstruals thereof is by no means a new phenomenon. One example of this is that in 1870, the aspiring poet and writer Bret F. Harte, who was an occasional collaborator with and regular rival of Mark Twain, published “Plain Language from Truthful James” in the Overland Monthly, a pioneer Californian periodical which he edited. This (quite terrible) poem, which became universally known as ”The Heathen Chinee”, narrates a game of cards between Ah Sin and Bill Nye from the point of view of another participant. Nye sets out to cheat the hapless Chinese at cards, but Ah Sin double-crosses him by not only being better than Nye at his own chosen vocation, but also a better cheat by virtue of his inscrutable nature. Beaten in his own game, Bill Nye, who represents the Irish-dominated, anti-Chinese working class associations of California (“Anti-Coolie Clubs”), resorts to the other game he excels at: violence on a flimsy pretense, that the labor of Chinese immigrants means the ruination of white Americans.

Achieving incredible notoriety in the blink of an eye, Harte’s poem was reprinted and widely discussed across the nation and in the United Kingdom for decades afterwards; innummerable references to the poem may be found in the media of the day. A few contemporaries and later scholars argued that Harte intended the poem to be a jab at Irish anti-Chinese laborers in California. The editor of Scribner’s Monthly, for instance, was certain that the poem was “the finest satire of the Californian enemies of the Chinaman that was ever uttered.”. But the poem’s ambiguity allowed middle-class opponents of Chinese immigration to misread it as an anti-Chinese tirade.¹Most readings of the poem for several decades took it at face value as an anti-Chinese screed. In this way, ”The Heathen Chinee” as a trope became indelibly linked with American popular perceptions of Chinese immigrants for more than half a century, and was not infrequently referred to in Congressional debates over the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and successive amendments, which as the first race-based exclusion policy in the history of the United States formed the basis for American immigration policy for the next 80 years.

It is in this context that the New Yorker’s satirical depiction of the Obamas as terrorists and Muslims is troubling. The New York freely admits that the depiction is satirical, but as in the case of ”The Heathen Chinee”, pieces intended to be satirical jabs at other people’s prejudices through exaggeration are misconstrued as serious expressions of those prejudices, or at the very least give them currency by repeating them. It’s a safe bet that the smear campaign is having some effect – consider that the Obama campaign dedicates a website to refuting the rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim infiltrator, was not born in the United States, is not a patriot, that Michelle Obama is a racist, etc. – and by giving these claims such prominence, the New Yorker is definitely not helping defuse the situation. This was likely not the New Yorker’s intention, but precedent is against them.

To appreciate the dangers of satire in a politically volatile situation, I invite you to re-read the extracts of the 1870 poem, above, substituting ”Obama” for ”Chinee” and ”Ah Sin”. Which would you spot at first glance, the satire or the similarities to the heavy-handed smear campaign against the Democratic candidate?

As an aside, it is interesting to note other similarities between the smear campaign against Barack Obama and the context in which ”The Heathen Chinee” was written. Anti-Chinese agitators between the 1860s and well into the 1900s maintained that the Chinese were Chinese body and soul. They were, in effect, irredeemably Chinese. Suffused with Chineseness, they were incapable of progress. They could not be raised up to be part of the American nation, but would infiltrate and undermine the nation from within. (Interestingly, this argument was borrowed by anti-Japanese agitators in the late 1890s, presaging the exclusion of Japanese immigrants in 1907). A similar claim is being pushed when Obama detractors claim that he is secretly a Muslim. They equate their claim that he was raised as a Muslim with their claim that he is, and forever will be, despite spirited public disawovals and two decades’ membership of a Christian church, a Muslim; and furthermore that this is incompatible with Americanness. ”The Heathen Obama”, indeed, has history against him.