COVID-19 and Other Excuses: Anti-Asian Sentiments in US History
March 2021
As Asian Americans live in a heightened danger of anti-Asian attacks in the US, similar periods in American history provide lessons that can help mitigate fear and combat racism.
When 29-year-old Andy Liu learned that the tragic shootings at three Atlanta spas left eight people dead, six of whom Asian, it was another heavy straw on the proverbial camel’s back. In San Francisco, where he grew up and lives, it seemed like new cases of anti-Asian attacks were coming out every day for more than a month. The day before the shootings, an Asian man was stabbed in the face and another hit in the head multiple times. The day after, an elderly Asian woman was punched by a young white man, but struck back and sent him to the hospital. The video of her crying while berating the attacker got Liu tearing up. “That Asian lady could be my mom,” he wrote in a message.
While Liu was growing up, his mom often encountered racially-based verbal assaults. She would just laugh it off and say “that doesn’t do anything to me.” A part of the Asian culture, he believes, is the attitude that “if you can’t do anything about it, then don’t worry about it,” which was why he didn’t fret when Jeremy Lin was called “Coronavirus” on the basketball court. After reporting on the sport for almost a decade, the incident seemed normal to him. “This is a part of the US culture,” he said with resignation, “and the African American-dominated NBA might not be any different.” But Liu did worry in light of the physical attacks against elderly Asian people. The scariest part was that his mom and grandma wouldn’t listen to his plea to avoid going out. “They would just keep doing their own thing. Asian moms are very stubborn,” he said, not afraid of making sweeping generalizations. He also had some visceral anger and confusion. “A guy hitting a guy, pretty common. But this is like hitting a kid or hitting a woman. It’s so bad,” he said, hardly containing his emotions. “Why is this happening and who’s doing it?”
When the violent attacks against Asian Americans became news headlines at the end of January, Ellen Dionne Wu wasn’t surprised. She even predicted the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes at the onset of the pandemic. The history professor at Indiana University thinks of racist stereotypes against Chinese Americans as one of the genes that make up the DNA of American culture. This gene sometimes gets expressed based on the current circumstances. The stereotype that the Chinese are dishonest, untrustworthy and sneaky “is an assumption that keeps getting reproduced in American culture, generation after generation,” Wu said. “In the US society, it’s only really white people who have the luxury and freedom to be recognized as individuals. Asians are seen to have an eternally foreign nature that casts the entire racial group as suspicious.”
“During economic hardships, you can expect to see a lot of pointing fingers and blaming foreigners or immigrants,” Professor Wu said. Chinese laborers were accused of undercutting wages in the 19th century, said to subsist on a diet of “rice and rats,” leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A century later, Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit, as the result of Japanese auto imports being blamed for the mass layoffs in the American auto industry. The two men who committed the murder were fined $3,000 and didn’t spend one day in jail.
Melissa Borja was a child of that time, quite literally. She was one month old when Chin lost his life at the age of 27. Born and raised two hours north of Detroit at its height of anti-Asian sentiment, she recently asked her Filipino parents about their lives after Chin’s death. “They were concerned about their safety, but didn’t necessarily think someone would attack them when they were getting groceries,” Borja said. They did, however, have a white family member married to a Filipino American man. Her car got spray-painted around the same time, and it read “Jap-lover.
“What’s happening right now is very much of the moment and very much deeply rooted in American history,” Borja said of the recent anti-Asian attacks. A professor at the University of Michigan, she focuses on Asian American history in her research. “It’s not the first time that immigrants have been treated as threats, or scapegoated in times of political, social, and economic turbulence.” A lot has changed for the Borjas over the last four decades since Chin’s death. Her parents responded to the tragedy primarily by assimilating and not wanting to cause trouble. But they’ve come to realize that staying quiet isn’t an effective response to racism and got involved with racial justice work while raising a daughter who would end up being an activist-scholar.
Borja’s current research focuses on the anti-Asian hate documented since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and their media coverage. Despite the Black and brown faces of crime suspects that have been circulating in the media and on social media, the perpetrators of verbal and physical assaults are disproportionately white people, not to mention that the politicians who have been using stigmatizing phrases such as “China virus” are almost all white. “Any sort of claim that Black people are behind the recent surge in anti-Asian violence and racism is really faulty and not based on facts,” Borja said, before continuing to list examples of Asian and African Americans showing up for each other’s fights against racism. To her, the tension between the two groups is often overdrawn, and deflects from the core issue, “which is white supremacy and the fact that white people have really been the drivers of the violence against Asian Americans.”
While Andy Liu can’t convince his mom to refrain from going out, he is tweeting at his 17,000 followers to bring awareness to anti-Asian crimes. He also knows that awareness isn’t enough to bring about meaningful change. “I wish the Asian American community was more politically active,” he said wistfully. But as Professor Wu would quickly point out, the stereotype that Asian Americans keep their heads down is far from reality. “There have been more and more signs of political engagement, and the only reason behind the media coverage of the recent hate incidents is Asian Americans calling attention to them and working in newsrooms as journalists.” After the Atlanta shootings, she hopes that the victims’ stories will be told to honor their lives. “The long-term goal, of course, is to ensure the safety and dignity of all.”