As an extension of Orientalism, in the last century and a half the American citizen has been defined over and against the Asian immigrant legally, economically, and culturally. These definitions have cast Asian immigrants, both as persons and as populations, to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, unintelligible elements to be marginalized and returned to their alien origins. “Asia” has always been a complex site upon which the manifold anxieties of the United States nation-state have been figured: such anxieties have represented both Asian countries as exotic, barbaric, and alien, and Asian laborers immigrating to the United States from the nineteenth century onward as a “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants.
The “yellow peril” stereotype is not always at play but arises when the United States is at war and/or when there is a “crisis of capital,” meaning when capitalist interests are not clearly dominant either domestically or globally due to competition and rising costs (Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng 1994). With the majority of US wars in the past hundred years being with Asian and Arab countries, Asian Americans have borne the brunt of racism as the supposed “foreigner within.” Even if US-born, fluent in English, and so on, Asian Americans can be targeted as foreign threats. It does not need to be a literal war for Asian Americans to be targeted as a threat. The economic contests with Japan in the 1980s made Japanese Americans and those assumed to be Japanese the targets of resentment, including the murder of Vincent Chin as discussed below. The coronavirus also appears as a threat akin to war, with the number of dead compared to wartime deaths, America declaring war on the coronavirus, and President Trump calling himself a “wartime president.”4 Like all formal or informal wars that involve Asia, Asian Americans become unnecessary casualties to hate.
During uneasy security and economic times, an external agent, such as the “yellow peril,” unites “real Americans.” Asia and Asian Americans come to represent the morally suspicious threat to the virtuous and benevolent United States. Orientalist racializations of Asians as physically and intellectually different from whites predominated, especially in periods of intense anti-Asian labor movements, culminating in institutionalized discrimination, such as immigration exclusion acts and laws against the naturalization of Chinese in 1882, Indians in 1917, Japanese and Koreans in 1924, and Filipinxes in 1934. The stereotype also comes up when whites feel under threat from Asian Americans in other ways, such as if Asian culture feels too prevalent in their geographic areas (Cheng 2013).
Gender and sexual constructions of the “yellow peril”
The “yellow peril” also poses a sexual threat. Asian-American men, much like black men, seek to “take” white women, either by seducing them with their mysterious powers or by raping them (Nguyen 2002). In either case, the purity of white women is in danger. Nor are Asian-American women considered more benign. In film and on stage, Asian-American women are often portrayed as conniving prostitutes, “dragon ladies,” or other temptresses whose true motivations are disguised as they try to seduce white men (Espiritu 2007; Shimizu 2007). In contrast, white women appear attractive but responsible. White men and women benefit from these sexualized stereotypes popular in media and everyday consciousness.
The aberrant sexuality of Asian Americans can cause the “yellow peril” to become a terrorist. Recent terrorizing episodes have been caused by “Orientals,” ranging from 9/11 Arab hijackers to the Korean-American murderer at Virginia Tech, Seung-hui Cho. These men have been framed as sexually repressed (Brandzel and Desai 2008). As befitting the “yellow peril” (or “brown” peril in the case of Arabs), their sexual frustration and deviance fuels their already unassimilable nature, which explodes in acts of violence. As Brandzel and Desai write of Cho:
This inability to achieve proper masculinity and heterosexuality may lead to dangerous excess, one that can threaten the object of its desire – namely, white women. Hence, the charges of stalking that were associated with Cho characterize him not only as deviant and inadequate but also as threatening. In this case, Asian American men can also be framed through a sexualized narrative of deviance, evoking the historical threat of the “yellow peril” ready to harm white femininity with contamination and miscegenation by the uncontrolled nonnormative sexuality of the Asian American men. (2008: 72)
In other words, Asian Americans threaten the security, economy, and morality of other Americans due to their foreign, untrustworthy, and morally inferior nature. This racial formation does not make them synonymous with blacks but instead as anti-American, in contrast to the prototypical Americans, who are presumably white. So, Asian-American racial inequality becomes framed as Asian American versus white, but does not map onto black–white relations directly.
The “model minority”
The seeming opposite of the “yellow peril” threat is the “model minority,” the other dominant stereotype of Asian Americans. When not seen as threatening to the nation, Asian Americans are upheld as “out-whiting whites” with their high scholastic achievements, low incarceration rates, residential integration, entrepreneurship, and emphasis on family unity.
This apparently positive portrayal has more going on than a representation of imagined social trends. This stereotype has gained currency because, like all stereotypes, it fits various preconceptions and racialized ideologies. First, it works to denigrate Asian Americans, even as it purports to praise them. The “model minority” is cast as subservient and obedient. While the “model minority” appears highly valorized, s/he remains a foreigner. According to the stereotype, their Asian, often Confucian, upbringing enables their success, rather than other sociological factors often cited for influencing children’s mobility, such as parents’ education level, networks of support, and so on. For this reason, Asian Americans can be successful but not considered assimilated enough to be seen as everyday citizens, much less civic or corporate leaders.
The “model minority” myth works not only to limit Asian Americans but also to uphold dominant ideologies of the United States race relations discussed above. The fact that a minority can achieve in the United States supports the American liberal notion of an open, meritocratic society that does not discriminate against minorities or have imperial ambitions (Bascara 2006). The United States instead is enlightened and color-blind. The stereotype also contributes to a laissez-faire racism, whereby groups have strong cultural proclivities that, rather than structural conditions, shape their place in the racial and economic hierarchies (Bobo and Smith 1998). Within this logic, the fact that Asian Americans as a minority can achieve means that any group can, even African Americans. The “model minority” stereotype gives the credit for a group’s success or failure to its culture, not to its structural conditions (e.g. family income level, degree of forced segregation, historical disfranchisement, etc.). So African Americans and most Latinxs presumably deserve blame for their relative lack of mobility. A quote from a December 1966 issue of US News and World Report illustrates this point: “At a time when Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racial minorities, one such minority is winning wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work . . . not a welfare check” (1966: 6). It is not a coincidence that the “model minority” stereotype became popular during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when African Americans called out the United States as a racist nation, a counter-discourse of the United States as supportive of minorities was marshaled. The “model minority” demonstrated