Wasn't it?
By 1941, it surely was less life-threatening to be Oriental in CA than Black in GA.
Seems like you are right , but it was a close thing for a while there.
By the summer of 1877 San Francisco had become a city of job-hunters–miners, farmhands, laborers of every kind, including the hated Chinese. feeling was keen against the upper classes, particularly the newly rich, who lived ostentatiously on "Nob Hill," and were accused of employing Chinese in preference to whites. Self-appointed orators who addressed the meeting of July 23 did not confine themselves to expressions of sympathy for the Pittsburgh strikers, but took full advantage of the opportunity to denounce the capitalists and the Chinese in fervid language. More meetings followed, and because they were held on the vacant sand-lot opposite city hall those who attended them were called "Sand-Lotters." The idol of the crowd was Denis Kearney, an eloquent but ungrammatical Irishman, who had a practice to wind up each of his harangues with the words, "The Chinese must go!" Soon a Workingmen's Party had taken form, through which the Sand-Lotters hoped to "cinch" capital, and drive out the hated Chinese. Kearney sometimes threatened direct action. "A little judicious hanging right here and now," he told one meeting, "will be the best course to pursue with the capitalists and the stock sharps who are all the time robbing us." Again, at a meeting held on Nob Hill itself, he told the railroad owners that they had but three months in which to discharge all Chinese laborers. "Remember Judge Lynch, he warned.
http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist6/kearneyism.html
