The Chinese Exclusion Act was openly racist, explicitly race-based and economically destructive. So naturally, the Trump White House is furious that the Smithsonian described it accurately. Catherine Rampell examines the administration’s brazen attempt to whitewash history.

And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint (including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor). Chinese immigrants were an easy scapegoat for a variety of local troubles, and economic uncertainty and racism became mutually reinforcing. [https://lnk.thebulwark.com/4fjxRiX](https://lnk.thebulwark.com/4fjxRiX)