Six years later, a similar outbreak of white rage erupted in San Francisco. On the night of July 23, 1877, 8,000 workers gathered outside City Hall to show support for the railroad strikes that had flared throughout the country that summer. By then, the city’s unemployment rate was as high as 25 percent. Hecklers cried anti-Chinese slogans. Hoodlums pummeled a Chinese passerby. “On to Chinatown!” someone shouted, and a mob of hundreds spun off from the crowd and went on a rampage. They sang and swore and screamed, “indulging in the wildest species of Indian yells,” wrote one journalist. They set fire to Chinese homes and cut the hoses of the firemen who came to extinguish them. They pried cobblestones from the street and broke the windows of Chinese laundries. They killed four Chinese people, and inflicted $20,000 in damage before a combined force of city police, state militia and armed citizens finally dispersed the angry mob.

Seven years after Harte’s attempt to satirize anti-Chinese prejudice, San Francisco’s Chinatown was burning, and he bore some portion of the blame. Worse, Harte’s poem hadn’t just aided racists in California; it also emboldened them at the national level. When “The Heathen Chinee” first appeared in 1870, the “Chinese question” had been primarily a western issue. But, thanks to Harte, Easterners who had never seen a Chinese person carried Ah Sin around in their heads.

It didn’t take long before California’s “problem” became a national one. In 1875 Congress passed the Page Act, the first of many laws aimed at restricting Chinese immigration. The following year, both the Republicans and Democrats added “Heathen Chinee planks” to their party platforms, wooing voters with bigoted rhetoric. The culmination came in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act imposing a 10-year moratorium on the entry of Chinese workers and forbidding the naturalization of Chinese residents already in the country—restrictions later extended and made permanent, and not fully repealed until 1943.

Surely Harte couldn’t have anticipated all of this. But, however well-intentioned, satire can get away from the satirist. And Harte didn’t protest too loudly, preferring to enjoy the huge benefits of the poem’s success. When, in 1871, Harte left San Francisco to test the market for his talents in the East, Twain marveled at the success of his colleague, who, Twain wrote, “crossed the continent through such a prodigious blaze of national interest and excitement that one might have supposed he was the Viceroy of India on a progress, or Halley’s comet come again after seventy-five years of lamented absence.” Before long Harte became an exclusive contributor to the Atlantic Monthly for the unimaginable sum of $10,000 a year, making him the most highly paid writer in America.

If Harte felt guilty about his racially fueled success, however, he didn’t show it. In 1876, he wrote a baggy, bewildering stage play about the Gold Rush called Two Men of Sandy Bar. Its most popular character was a Chinese laundryman played in yellowface, who, despite being onstage for only five minutes, made audiences howl with laughter by saying things like “Me no likee” and bobbing across the boards in clogs and a coolie hat. This popular laundryman soon became the title character of another play, named Ah Sin after the hero of “The Heathen Chinee,” co-written by Harte and his old friend Twain. This time, however, Ah Sin was a mishmash of Chinese stereotypes: a liar, a thief and an imbecile who yapped in pidgin, got mocked and beaten and frequently humiliated himself. Gone were Harte’s subtle irony and good intentions.

Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1860s. | Online Archive of California

America has come a long way since Bret Harte’s time, but many of the same prejudices remain—and Harte’s experience points to the pitfalls of using irony to combat them. If he hoped his own progressive record would preserve his work from being misread, he was wrong. If he assumed he would be able to tread the thin line between ironic and unironic prejudice, he was wrong again.

Bret Harte’s story helps explain why Asian-American activists like Suey Park, creator of #CancelColbert, are so keen to create a public debate about something that is almost never publicly debated: why Asians are considered safe targets for racial humor. Jay Caspian Kang at the New Yorker says the answer has to do with “the perception that [Asians] will silently weather the ridicule.” I’d add another reason: Asian success—the very thing satirized by Harte’s poem. The unspoken logic goes like this: Because Asians graduate from college at higher rates than other ethnic group (including whites) and earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group (including whites), racism against Asians isn’t as real as other racisms. It’s silly, not sinister.

History shows otherwise. Anti-Asian racism isn’t a softer form of prejudice—it’s one of the most destructive social diseases to have ever infected the American body politic. Suey Park and her supporters aren’t being overly sensitive to the satirical use of stereotypes. They’re teaching people what those stereotypes mean by calling attention to the long legacy of violence and dehumanization they represent. They’re saying that racism doesn’t simply disappear if you make fun of it—that sometimes, you have to take it seriously.