Daily Inspiration Quote by Iris Chang

“Special interest groups” sounds polite, almost procedural, the kind of phrase that belongs in a civics textbook. Chang uses it to expose something uglier: racism laundering itself through the language of policy. The line’s force comes from that contrast. She doesn’t start with the overt bigotry; she starts with the respectable machinery that makes bigotry effective - organized lobbies, local power brokers, the people who know how to turn resentment into legislation.

The context is late-19th-century California, where Chinese immigrants were concentrated in visible numbers and scapegoated during economic downturns. Anti-Chinese agitation wasn’t just a diffuse prejudice; it was a political project. Labor leaders, nativist politicians, and business interests alternately exploited Chinese workers and then branded them as a threat. Chang’s “really wanted” underscores motive over rhetoric: public arguments about wages, morality, or “assimilation” were often cover stories for a more basic goal - protecting a racial hierarchy under pressure.

Her second clause, “because that was where the racial tension was the greatest,” is doing two things at once. It acknowledges the regional specificity of the backlash (California as the epicenter) while indicting the national outcome: a local panic metastasized into federal exclusion. The subtext is damningly contemporary: immigration law isn’t only shaped by abstract national principles; it can be captured by the places where fear is hottest and power is most organized. Chang is mapping how prejudice becomes policy without ever needing to announce itself as prejudice.