John A. Macdonald, “the Chinese” and Racist State Formation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1885, John Alexander Macdonald took the right to vote away from men racialized as Chinese on the grounds that they were biologically different from “Canadians” and that their presence threatened “the Aryan character” of Canadian society. Through the 1885 Electoral Franchise Act, Macdonald was seeking to consolidate colonial expansion into the west by constituting the federal polity around the owners of private property, i.e., of land that had been converted from the collective control of Indigenous people. As elsewhere in the world, European colonialism in Canada involved taking control of Indigenous people’s territories and converting it to the private ownership of European colonizers. Making ownership of property the key to membership in the federal polity explains Macdonald’s initial support for giving the vote to women. It also explains why his legislation gave the vote to Indigenous people who met the property qualification. For Macdonald, ownership of private property was the final proof of an individual’s acculturation to colonial dominance. Property-owners from China, by contrast, threatened European dominance in British Columbia. Basing exclusion on alleged biological difference made it inescapable and permanent. The 1885 Act was thus a key moment in forming the racist state in Canada. Indeed, the strong opposition to Macdonald’s introduction of biological racism, including in the Canadian Senate on the part of his own appointees, underscores the significance of this change, one that would have consequences for racialized and excluded groups for many years to come
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".