National Domestic Violence Awareness Project

18mr:

Not only do Asian Americans worry about surviving the virus, we also fear for our lives. Our loved ones are experiencing skyrocketing levels of unchecked hate and violence – over 100 hundred hate crimes a day. This violence is the latest iteration of Yellow Peril. It is a form of white supremacist settler nationalism that the U.S. pioneered to peddle racial fear and justify endless global war and the exploitation and expulsion of what they perceive as diseased and enemy Asians.

What we are experiencing in 2020 is tied to the violence of the mid-1800s when Chinese immigrants were targeted while risking their lives to lay railroad tracks. As a result of white suspicion and fear, the US passed racial bans on immigration and naturalization in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This law created a new gold standard in settler states and made Yellow Peril a core element of US national identity.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic fit the ready-made story of Yellow Peril in the US. Racist responses to the spread of the disease are consistent with a history of treating Asians as a foreign threat. Part of undoing the power of Yellow Peril is confronting the history of empire, capitalism, and white supremacy and building a vision of peace, justice, and health which celebrates and honors our interdependence.

Unmasking Yellow Peril is a collaboration between 18 Million Rising, the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at UConn, and Jason Oliver Chang, Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UConn. We seek to ground ourselves in the long history of Yellow Peril, uncover its many forms, and resist it in the time of COVID-19.

Yellow Peril has been here for more than a century, it’s time to unmask it.

Learn more about the history of Yellow Peril and download our free Unmasking Yellow Peril zine!