In her reflection on her essay “The Novel Strain of Anti-Asian Discrimination,” Anavi Jalan states: “My first draft was 5 pages, and while it could’ve been considered an acceptable or complete essay, it didn’t include all the ideas that I wanted to express, and my argument and conclusion weren’t fully articulated. I attempted to flesh these out in my second draft, and ended up adding 2 more pages to better explain the central idea of my paper and supply more evidence for my argument.”
Below are the first and final drafts of Anavi’s essay. The new material that Anavi decided to add in the final draft is in bold. How does this new material help to substantiate or deepen the writer’s argument? See if you can name three different ways the additional content clarifies the essay’s larger idea.
Draft 1: The Novel Strain of Anti-Asian Discrimination
COVID-19, or the disease caused by novel coronavirus strain SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China in early December 2019 and has since become a pandemic, spreading across 185 countries and causing over two hundred thousand deaths as of April 2020. As the disease began to spread outside of Asia and into European and American populations, xenophobia and anti-Asian discrimination in these countries began spreading just as rapidly. Though the virus knows no ethnicity, Asians are now being collectively viewed as carriers of the disease, and are consequently facing racially-driven verbal and physical abuse. All over the world, people of Asian heritage are indiscriminately being harassed, spat on, and denied service in public spaces like banks and coffee shops. Cathy Hong describes some of these attacks in her piece for the New York Times Magazine: a group of teenagers in London punched and kicked a young Singaporean man while “shouting about the coronavirus”, a man in Texas stabbed and cut a Burmese-American family that included two young children, and a man in an elevator told an Asian woman, “Don’t bring that Chink virus here.”
In the United States, this racial targeting during a crisis is nothing new; however the response from the government is significantly different from what we’ve observed in the past. New York Times correspondents Sabrina Tavernise and Richard Oppel Jr. note that unlike after the September 11 attacks, when President George W. Bush pushed for American Muslim tolerance in wake of Islamophobic hate crimes, President Trump and his Republican allies choose to use language that is inciting racial attacks, with an unnamed White House official even allegedly calling it the “kung flu”. Interestingly, this isn’t the first case of Asian Americans being viewed as carriers of disease. Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies Eiichiro Azuma notes that in 1899, Honolulu’s Chinatown was burned down “due to the perception of Chinese Americans carrying bubonic plague” (qtd. in Baker). In 1900, San Francisco had also targeted Chinese and Japanese populations, ordering a Chinatown lockdown and forcing those communities to get immunized (Baker).
In 2015, following the emergence of illnesses with the names ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’, the World Health Organization announced new guidelines for naming infectious diseases, stating that “disease names should not focus in on geographic locations, the names of people or animals or particular cultural traits” (Carlson). Dr. Keija Fukada, assistant director-general for health security at the WHO, warned against this naming system due to the “unintended negative impacts” it may have by “stigmatizing certain communities and economic sectors (qtd. in Carlson). Despite these guidelines, President Trump insists on referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus”, a term that does nothing to ease the racial tensions already ignited by the disease’s origin. After President Trump first used this terminology in March, the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council reported more than 650 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination within a single week (Hong), with member of the New York assembly, Yuh-Line Niou stating that “it’s fueling the xenophobia we’re seeing all over our districts” (qtd. in Carlson).
Professor of English Josephine Parker places the President’s use of “Chinese virus” within the “larger context of foreign policy and imperial contest”, proposing that this language is a highly deliberate tactic used in the United State’s “trade war with China” and “cyberwar with China” (qtd. in Baker). She believes that anti-Asian racism is not only tolerated, but accepted in part “because it’s so instrumental” to the “terrain of warfare that’s really active right now” (qtd. in Baker).
This direct, overtly aggressive display of racism against Asian Pacific Americans has drastically shifted the position of APAs in American society from invisible to hyper-visible. Prior to COVID-19, APAs often experienced ethnic discrimination in subtler, more obscure forms, such as through microaggressions and political discourse. A study conducted by researchers at Columbia University highlights some of these common microaggressions, such as feeling ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ in their own land, being assigned positive stereotypes related to intelligence and quantitative abilities, experiencing a ‘denial of racial reality’ or dismissal of Asian racial discrimination, feeling invalidated and invisible due to the minimization of interethnic differences between different Asian communities, exoticization of Asian women and feminization of Asian men, and the negative perception of Asian cultures in comparison to white cultures (Sue et. al). Asian Americans are often perceived to have relative privilege with respect to other minority groups, and this perceived advantage allows anti-Asian racism to be more overlooked and tolerated than other forms of discrimination. This artificial perception of Asian superiority comes about through the ‘model minority’ myth.
The ‘model minority’ myth attributes various positive stereotypes such as work ethic, mathematical and musical intelligence, and economic prosperity to the Asian population at large and characterizes Asian Americans as a “polite, law-abiding group who have achieved a higher level of success than the general population” (Blackburn). It emphasizes the collective and erases individuality. The myth was originally created by a conservative white majority in the 1960s “to oppose the activism of the civil rights movement” as “evidence to deny or downplay the impact of racism and discrimination on people of color” in the US (Blackburn), and is an idea historically rooted in anti-Blackness. But today, along with it being wielded to minimize the struggles of other racial minorities, this myth is also used to gloss over the discrimination and oppression faced by certain ethnic groups within the Asian American population. Not only does the model minority myth ignore individual differences, as well as diverse ethnicities and cultures by lumping all Asians into a singular group, but it neglects the current discrimination APAs face within the workplace, academic institutions, and other social settings, and attempts to erase the history of systematic racism inflicted upon Asians in the US. While other minority groups can point to more explicit reflections of discrimination such as economic statistics and acts of violence as evidence of it being persistent and institutional, many in American society perceive Asian Americans as exempt from this, which historical context proves is a false assumption.
Associate Editor for the Undefeated, Brando Starkley, provides this historical background in “Why We Must Talk About the Asian-American Story, Too.” When Chinese immigrants first began flowing into the United States in 1859-60 while fleeing conflicts at home such as the Red Turban Uprisings and the Taiping Rebellion with plans to take advantage of the California Gold Rush, their initial warm welcomes soon turned into resentment amongst lower-class whites, who saw them as white-collar labor competition (Starkley). This racism soon began to be codified into law, with Asians being prohibited from testifying in court in 1854, the inclusion of Africans but exclusion of Asians from the Naturalization Law of 1870, and more bluntly, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended immigration of Chinese workers for 10 years.
The threat posed by Chinese immigrants soon led to the emergence of the racist ideology of ‘yellow peril’, which presented itself through depictions of East Asians as dangerous to the Western order and colonialism. Today, with the coronavirus, we see a resurgence in ‘yellow peril’ sentiments, which when placed alongside the ‘model minority’ myth shows us how positive stereotypes can be detrimental to minority communities. In an article for NBC News, health researcher Matthew Lee highlights the ironically dualistic nature of anti-Asian racism due to the simultaneous wielding of the Asian community as a “model minority” over other people of color and as “perpetual foreigners” who pose a threat to stability and order.
Through the model minority myth, Asians in the US are held in a position of artificial superiority, in order to make anti-Asian racism feel like ‘punching up’. In reality, this veil of artificial superiority has been serving to keep Asians socially inferior, and allows for the hidden preservation of white supremacy. The rise and spread of the coronavirus has torn down this veil, and revealed underlying biases and prejudice in the form of visual, omnipresent racial abuse.