Historical context paints a darker picture: in 1849 and 1850, Chinese immigrants entered the United States, fleeing conflicts at home. American citizens were initially grateful for these new “industrious members of the community,” but this sentiment soon turned into resentment amongst lower-class whites, who saw them as labor competition. This racism was soon codified into law: in 1854 Asians were prohibited from testifying in court and were excluded from the Naturalization Act of 1870 (Starkey). The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act went as far as to suspend all immigration of Chinese workers (Lee).
The threat posed by Chinese immigrants soon led to the emergence of a racist ideology called “yellow peril.” The propaganda campaign took form in 1895, when German Emperor Wilhelm II presented to other European monarchs an allegorical painting of Archangel Michael standing on a cliffside, warning Christian warrior-goddesses against the ‘danger from the East,’ represented by a glowing, mysterious Buddha in the distance (Ziyi). Zeng Ziyi, writer for Chinese news outlet CGTN, propounds that by characterizing East Asians as an imminent threat, the painting served to “justify Germany’s entry into the West’s colonial conquest in China.”
Existential fear of Asians gaining power over Western nations has since persisted in subtler ways and has embedded itself into political and cultural discourse. Today, with the coronavirus, we see a resurgence in yellow peril sentiments. Ziyi claims that the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was manufactured in a Wuhan lab and intentionally released to harm the US has been supported by members of the Trump administration in order to invoke the same psycho-cultural fear as the yellow peril campaign. In an article for NBC News, health researcher Matthew Lee highlights the irony of anti-Asian racism, noting the duality between views of the Asian community as both a “model minority” among people of color and “perpetual foreigners” who pose a threat to stability and order. The sentiments that drive these two contradicting stereotypes—the model minority myth and yellow peril—come from the same place of intolerance and xenophobia, demonstrating that both negative and positive stereotypes can be detrimental to minority communities.
Cathy Park Hong describes how reactions to the coronavirus have “burned away any illusions that East Asians are almost white,” and revealed the dynamics of systemic racism toward Asian Americans. While Black and Latinx individuals in New York are dying in higher proportions due to lack of access to healthcare resources and other factors, many continue to blame Asians for the virus rather than holding our broken systems responsible (Hong). She explains that “White supremacy ensures that once the pressure of persecution is lifted even a little from one group, that group will then fall upon the newly targeted group out of relief and out of a frustrated misplaced rage that can never touch, let alone topple, the real enemy” (Hong). Systemic racism, according to Hong, aims to keep minority groups separated. The model minority myth and other racist stereotypes have therefore served as tools to preserve racial hierarchies, while appearing to allow for equal access and societal progression.
Through the model minority myth, Asians in the US are often viewed as having achieved more academic and professional success than other minority populations. This positive stereotyping allows for anti-Asian racism to seem like “punching up,” or attacking those in positions of privilege or power, often in the name of comedic effect (Labacz). In reality, this veil of superiority serves only to preserve white supremacy. The rise and spread of the coronavirus has torn down this veil and revealed underlying biases and prejudice in the form of overtly racist physical and verbal attacks. By deconstructing the model minority myth and revealing hidden yellow peril sentiments, COVID-19 has shown us that racism can take a variety of nuanced forms, and that tackling societal disparities requires not just a bridging of social and economic gaps, but also a greater understanding of ethnic diversity and respect for different cultures. Asian Americans are not a disease. Racism, on the other hand, most definitely is.
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