The recent pandemic has brought to light many underlying problems in American society. The healthcare system is deeply flawed, deep-rooted systemic racism is still apparent in the police force, and recently, there has been a rise in hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans. In fact, over the course of the pandemic, there have been a total of 3,800 hate crimes targeting Asian Americans. But how far back does this racism date, and why is it so deeply rooted in American culture?
The first wave of Asian immigrants came from China during the 1850s. They were looking for jobs in California during the gold rush. However, this influx of immigrants also sparked anti-Asian sentiment in many white Americans who believed that these new immigrants were taking their jobs. Their name for this phenomenon was the “Yellow Peril.” Some Americans went as far as to form the Asiatic Exclusion League, a violent organization that destroyed property owned by Asian-Americans, going as far as lynching them. Even the government harbored anti-Asian sentiments, and many fought for the exclusion of all Asian immigrants, or as they called them, the “filthy yellow hordes.” Chinese people were ruled ineligible for citizenship, and Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, barring all Chinese people except for students and businessmen from immigrating to the USA. Negative stereotypes like dog-eating, small eyes, or remarks on genital areas became normalized, and racial slurs like “chink” and “chinaman” became much more mainstream. Then in 1886, the Rock Springs Massacre left 28 Chinese miners dead in a racially motivated attack. A similar event happened when robbers killed 31 Chinese miners in Snake River, Oregon.
Violent attacks against Asian Americans continued in the 20th century. As more immigrants from other Asian countries arrived in the USA, Congress passed the Oriental Exclusion Act, which barred immigration from most of Asia. Many authors even began to write anti-Asian literature, like G. G. Rupert’s “Yellow Peril” and Carl Burgos’s “Fu Manchu,” which perpetuated many of the stereotypes which are still present today The immigration quotas for nearly all Asian countries was zero. In 1941, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor during the start of WWII, many Japanese-Americans were treated with unfair suspicion and ridicule, and eventually, they were forced into internment camps surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire. Over 110,000 Japanese-Americans were detained, and over 1800 died in these camps. The horrible treatment of Asians still persisted. Vincent Chin, for instance, was beaten to death by his two white coworkers. Chinese-Americans, like Chin, were killed purely because of suspicion of being communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era.
As the 20th century progressed, the status of Asians in America gradually increased. In an attempt to use the success of Asian Americans as a way to discredit the struggles of other minorities, the model minority myth was created. Although the stereotype has some degree of truth to it, the stereotype ignores the massive wealth disparities in the Asian population and completely invalidates the centuries of systemic racism other minorities have struggled with, and still struggle with, in the present.
Many Asian-Americans are still affected by the discrimination and laws of the past, even today. The recent Coronavirus pandemic and hateful rhetoric from Donald Trump, using words like “Kung-Flu” and “China Virus,” only served to enable people’s feelings of fear and hatred. The recent shooting of eight people in Georgia is just the most recent in a series of attacks against Asian-Americans over the past year. This pattern of hatred will persist unless the scars of past events can heal.
asians are cool