The reason for this barbed wire in the streets of San Francisco was simple—it was a quarantine of Chinese people who were thought to be infested with bubonic plague. The reasons for this were simple and racist—given that the Chinese were seen from (at the very least) the 1860’s to be an “inferior” and “degraded”¹ race, living in close quarters and in fair squalor at times (given the wages that they were paid and the abuses they suffered from the Chinese Exclusion Acts), and given the codified racist sentiments against them, it was seen that these people were capable of spreading the diseases via their very presence and “vapors”. (At least one of these “three graces” of “malarium”, “small-pox” and leprosy were seen as coming directly from Chinatown in San Francisco. See notes #1 for source.)

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