White Washing in America
Meher Mann
The surge in anti-Asian violence seen over the last year is a terrifying, but unsurprising development in what has been a long and untold history of Asian Americans. While Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric during the pandemic certainly stoked the flames of racism, there is a far deeper and more structural pattern of racism that has afflicted Asian American communities since as early as the 19th century. Crucial to this history is the often strained dynamic between Asian and Black communities in the United States, one that has been repeatedly exploited in order to perpetuate a racist status quo that ultimately only benefits white Americans.
Anti-Asian racism in the United States can be traced back to nearly 150 years ago when Chinese immigrants first began moving to California during the Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants accepted half the pay given to White workers and did backbreaking and historically unrecognized work building the Transcontinental Railroad. They were politically and economically disenfranchised through a series of Californian laws that prevented them from owning land, forced them to pay a “Foreign Miners Tax,” and barred Chinese American citizens from voting. Irish immigrants, feeling threatened and undercut by Asians who were willing to work for low wages, launched xenophobic attacks and labeled them a “yellow peril,” insinuating that Asians were unclean and carried exotic diseases. This sort of rhetoric spurred the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924—both of which directly targeted Asian immigration. It most resolutely culminated in the signing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which mandated the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
During and after World War II, many Asian Americans grew concerned about growing racial animosity and began to assimilate to white standards in order to blend in. They developed a reputation for being reticent and hard working, resulting in the creation of certain “positive” stereotypes, which only serve to turn minority communities against each other. One such example is the model minority myth, which goes a little like this: despite racial prejudices, Asian Americans have maintained their two-parent family structures, placed enormous emphasis on hard work and education, and achieved great success in STEM fields and academia. If they can achieve so much, why can’t the rest of the minorities?
For one, this myth is incredibly incorrect. By painting millions of Asian Americans with the broad brush of universal success, we ignore members of Southeast Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities who have not experienced the sort of socioeconomic success as East and South Asians. While Asian Americans are the wealthiest minority group in the United States today, they also have the widest income gap of any racial group. This stereotype continues to permeate through American culture today, especially through insensitive caricatures of Asian Americans on TV shows and movies. Despite being advertised under the broad umbrella of “Asian American representation,” these media depictions overwhelmingly focus on the experiences of East and South Asians. These incomplete representations are part and parcel of the model minority myth, which disregards the role that selective recruitment of highly educated East and South Asian immigrants plays in shaping the model minority narrative. And, it ignores the reality that Asian Americans were historically given few options other than to assimilate to white adjacency in hopes of securing a safe and stable life in the United States.
Asian Americans are not a monolithic group, and it is dangerous to treat them as one. Regardless of the relative harmfulness of a stereotype, all stereotypes ultimately lend themselves to the “othering” of certain communities. As Professor Catherine Choy from the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies department puts it, "They are stereotypes of Asian Americans as either subhuman or superhuman, but never quite human, and certainly not American."
At the root of such arguments is the idea that if the Asian minority could excel in the U.S., then there was no reason that other minorities, and particularly Black people, couldn't excel too. This is a flawed comparison that seeks to generalize many completely different American experiences. We cannot falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-Black racism; the discrimination faced by Asians in the United States is different than the systematic dehumanization that Black people endured during slavery and continue to endure today. The model minority myth perpetuates the idea that there is a “good minority” and a “bad minority”; the “good minority” just so happens to align with standards of whiteness far more than the latter group. It was never meant to uplift Asian Americans, but rather, delegitimize the struggles of African Americans.
An interplay of white supremacy and capitalism lies at the root of many of these tensions between Asian and Black communities. This ideology is predicated on a racial hierarchy, in which one group must always be at the top, and another always at the bottom. In line with Western and Eurocentric standards, being white guarantees you the ability to sit atop America’s ruling class, while having darker skin often relegates you to the bottom of the hierarchy.
In this Black-white paradigm, Asian Americans have had to assimilate somewhere in between, buying into notions of racial hierarchies and white supremacy, and ultimately, internalizing racism against their own communities. What this constructed hierarchy leaves out, however, is that no one except those at the very top win. Despite the relative success of many Asian Americans in the United States, they remain “forever foreigners'' in the eyes of many. White people will prop up Asian Americans through the model minority myth only as long as it perpetuates the white supremacist hierarchy that keeps them in the ruling class. But, as soon as Asians are perceived as a threat—during economic recessions in the 19th century, during World War II, or now, during the pandemic—they are accused of harboring exotic diseases and become targets of racial violence.
Studies indicate that Black Americans feel a sense of economic competitions with new immigrant communities, many of whom first look for employment in economically disadvantaged areas. As a result of the aforementioned racial hierarchies, immigrants encounter a system that reserves the most coveted opportunities and resources for white Americans, culminating in zero-sum thinking for everyone else. This sense of economic competition among Black Americans often leads to anti-immigrant sentiment and racism.
We can observe similar patterns throughout history. Irish union workers in the late 19th century were pitted against Asian workers by their employers and politicians, who were concerned about the two groups joining forces in solidarity and presenting a more legitimate challenge to their status quo. When the United States ended the quota-based system of immigration in 1965, there was an influx of hyper-selected, highly educated and skilled Korean immigrants into the country. Upon arrival, they were unable to replicate their former socioeconomic statuses due to a number of racial barriers and discrimination. Left with few choices, many of them opened small businesses—which was often only feasible in economically disadvantaged and predominantly Black neighborhoods. During a time when it was nearly impossible for Black people to receive financing and loans for their own businesses, this understandably exacerbated bitterness between the two groups. Of course, the root cause of these tensions was not that Korean people were taking away financing from Black people—there was more than enough capital to go around. These problems stemmed from the racism that was embedded in our financial institutions, explicitly meant to prevent the upward mobility of those Black Americans.
Similarly, many communities suffering during the pandemic today have been manipulated into scapegoating Asian American communities by people such as Donald Trump, who has referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” and the “Kung-Flu.” Instead of directing blame towards the government’s lack of preparedness, moral ineptitude, and inability to assist Americans who are struggling during the pandemic, our leaders would rather fall back on racial tropes.
As news and social media have circulated videos and stories about recent anti-Asian violence, much coverage has been given to the few attacks perpetrated by Black people, and the historic tensions between Asian and Black communities. It is more important now than ever to keep in mind that these tensions are the result of political, cultural, and economic structures entrenched in white supremacy, which seek to divide and conquer. This surge in anti-Asian sentiment is not new. If anything, the unfamiliarity many have with the matter underscores how the model minority myth has kept this racist reality out of the public consciousness for so long. So, when we search for a quick answer that will explain why this violence is happening—the same way America quickly blamed Asians for the pandemic—many people’s first instinct will be to scapegoat Black people, or claim that these attacks weren’t racially motivated.
In light of last summer’s Black Lives Matter movement, there has been increased awareness surrounding issues of racial violence, and I have been heartened to see displays of mutual support across Black and Asian communities. We must continue in the same vein of solidarity as we look for solutions to these extraordinarily nuanced issues. One such issue is safety: certain segments of the Asian community have called for increased police presence as a relatively straightforward solution to the violence they are facing, while Black activists have understandably disagreed. The answers to our problems today do not have to draw upon existing structures that have been historically divisive and violent. Instead of adopting the same ineffective measures that we have for decades, we should look towards new grassroots systems that will alleviate inequality, open up economic opportunities and resources in an equitable way to historically disadvantaged racial groups, and continue to foster interracial relationships and solidarity movements. This pandemic, as cruel and unkind as it has been, has given us an opportunity to examine America’s history of systemic racism and injustice that has largely gone ignored. America’s future then, will hinge on how our communities—and all Americans—choose to close the fissures created by systems that have adversely affected us all.