Body as disease

ABSTRACT

The essay is a reflection on my experience of isolation on campus as my body was marked as a carrier of disease. Locating the essay in the literature about fears of Asian Americans as an alien presence and a yellow peril threat and on the work on microaggressions in academia, I understand my colleagues’ avoidance as rooted in racialized fears of COVID-19. This demonstrates the problems of colorblind racism and the limits of allyship. Through connecting the BLM protests and COVID-19, the shared risk to Black and Asian American bodies becomes highly salient, and it points to an opportunity for Black-Asian solidarity that can present a substantive challenge to White supremacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Microaggression
• colorblindness
• body as contagion
• Asian American
• threat

Early in March 2020, there was news that a case of COVID-19 had been confirmed in Teaneck, New Jersey. The city is in the same county as my home and my college. Days later, students told me that there was a case of COVID-19 in the city where I live. While the buzz about COVID-19 was in the air, I didn’t really feel it directly. At one point in my Media Literacy class, my students brought up news about anti-Asian racism that they’d been reading. My students expressed visceral frustration at their fellow U.S. Americans’ ‘ignorance,’ and I felt affirmed. Their arguments seemed heartfelt.

Days later, several faculty members gathered for what turned out to be a packed meeting. Because of my socialization in my high school band, I’m usually early to meetings. I shuffled in, and I found a seat on the left side of the room – the space was organized with tables placed together to form a large rectangle. I sat in the middle of the left side, not too close nor too far from the speaker. It was right in my sweet spot. When a Black American colleague entered, he sat two seats to my left, and we struck up a short conversation while maintaining some distance. As the room packed in, people filled the room, and as more entered, it became obvious pretty quickly that this was going to be standing room only. All of the chairs were filled except the chair to my left and my right.¹

I know that some people had chosen seats for any number of good reasons, so this is not a specific call-out of all or particular colleagues. Rather, it’s to acknowledge that given the overflow capacity of the meeting and my location in the room, I know that enough of them had chosen to avoid me. Even for my colleagues, learned men and women of letters, I had been stigmatized. Realizing the racialized fears that my body signified, I joked to a colleague across the room who I thought would sympathize with what I was experiencing. I gestured to the empty seats and said, ‘Do people think I have the virus or something?’ Instead of a show of solidarity, she, a White woman, returned an awkward, forced laugh.

To reiterate, I know it’s too ungenerous to say that racialized fears were true for everyone, including for her. There could be any number of reasonable choices that colleagues made about where to sit, but this is also part of the problem with racism, at least of this microaggressive variety. I can’t know with certainty who, but I know that some of my colleagues had made conscious choices to avoid me, particularly as seating became scarce. I also know that my friends and my anti-racist colleagues didn’t care enough in the moment to notice or to take action. This is hurtful in its own way. As Yamada (2003) writes, Asian American invisibility creates psychic turmoil, and this was true for me as I felt hypervisible for those who would avoid me and invisible from those who might help. This paradox is much like the ways race operates within fantasies of postracism – people pretend to be colorblind but their sense-making is deeply shaped by perceptions of racial difference (Bonilla-Silva, 2010).

Though this is true for all people of color, I think it works out in particular ways for Asian Americans. We are oftentimes thought of and some think of ourselves as adjacent to Whiteness, its lapdogs that assure White people of their benevolence and their guard dogs that protect White people from charges of racism. Because of this perception – White-constructed and in some cases internalized – we are sometimes rendered visible to Black and Latinx Americans as agents of White supremacy, particularly with the racial politics of the model minority (Hamamoto, 1994; Wu, 2002). Yet, as people of color, who also are oppressed by White supremacy, we are often unseen, most obviously in the linguistic construction of ‘Black and Brown.’ Our oppression is often ignored or misunderstood because generalized, misleading statistics of Asian American household income suggest we’re all doing well (Tuan, 1998). The racializing of Asian Americans hides within group differences and place-specific differences. For instance, according to the Urban Institute, in 2014, Asian Americans in New York City had the highest poverty rate of any racial group at 29% (Tran, 2018). Even if the racially lumped statistics didn’t obscure, race isn’t reducible to class.

From our White neighbors, co-workers, and friends, we become hypervisible in unexpected moments that reveal the depth of racial thinking and exoticizing animus, but we can’t call them out on it without being severely disciplined because that punctures the myth of colorblindness. White Americans read this as a betrayal when we bark and bite back at our second-class treatment and make obvious the operations of White supremacy. So, Asian Americans are often alone – seen but unseen. My hypervisibility and invisibility became clear in that moment even among my anti-racist colleagues, some of whom may have placed their anxieties over their progressive racial commitments. They feel like allies in the abstract, but when our real bodies are at risk, I was made to feel like a liability, a racialized contagion.

I was bothered by that moment, but I had put those feelings aside until a listserv message where a White man colleague forcefully argued about the harms of anti-Asian racist sentiment. Well, if we were going to vent, then I’d share my own experience, and I shared that story of isolation, of racial stigma. I didn’t say it in that way in the email, though; writing it publicly would open me to accusations of being ‘hostile’ or ‘non-collegial.’ But, this stigma from colleagues, many of whom see themselves as ‘colorblind,’ revealed that they certainly saw race in that moment. It’s funny how colorblindness gets cast aside whenever it doesn’t suit White people and becomes a banner when it does. This reveals, of course, the lie of colorblindness, the prosaic claim that White people do not invest racial meaning in their decisions (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). The moment is not a postracial one but rather than a racially cloaked one. In colorblind racism, it is not race that we are blind to; instead, we blind ourselves against self-reflexive racial awareness.

Yellow contagion and the lie of colorblindness in the academy

The most enduring stereotype of Asian Americans, particularly Chinese American men, is the ‘yellow peril’ (Ono & Pham, 2009). This can manifest in different ways in popular culture, such as the emasculated mastermind who plots to destroy the world (Hamamoto, 1994; Oehling, 1980), e.g. Dr. No, Fu Manchu, the Mandarin; de-individualized hordes that threaten to overrun Western society while bringing inscrutable, bizarre, and immoral practices (Hamamoto, 1994; Shim, 1998); or, as relevant to this case, as carriers of filth and disease (Hamamoto, 1994; Renshaw, 2016). These beliefs reinforce the idea that Asian Americans are an alien presence that do not and cannot belong in (White) America (Lee, 1999). In the previous SARS crisis, it was referred to in the press as the ‘Asian disease’ or even as the ‘yellow peril’ (Leong, 2003), raising not only xenophobic fears but also racialized ones. These racialized fears of the alien also get manifest in the ways Asians and Asian Americans are often not distinguished. Palombu-Liu (1999), for this reason, coined the term ‘Asian/American’ to refer to this essentialist, reductionist understanding. Recently, Nakayama (2020) also pointed out that Whiteness does not recognize differences in various Asian ethnicities nor does it recognize our locations – foreign-born, foreign-located, or local.

Despite the fact that colleagues knew I was teaching on campus that semester and living in the same region that they were, despite the fact that they knew I am Asian American rather than Asian, despite the fact that many knew my ethnicity is Korean rather than Chinese, my racially marked body signified the threat, and I was avoided as the colloquial expression goes ‘like the plague.’ I want to believe that consciously they would know their fears to be irrational, but the racialization of my body was threatening enough that when allyship required overcoming these irrational fears, I was left alone – a common sense of alienation for faculty of color (Harris, 2012). Ironically, as the New York Times had later revealed, it was not Asian/Americans in New York City but primarily European tourists and U.S. Americans traveling from Europe, who had brought COVID-19 to the region (Zimmer, 2020), so if race was an indication of dangerous bodies, it would not be mine but my White colleagues who would signify the greater threat. But, White bodies aren’t ever presented as abject. Instead, when White people get COVID-19, just like when they suffer drug addiction, it’s a public health crisis, not a cause for racialized alarm. White Americans are not immune from COVID-19, but they are immune from the deleterious effects of racist stereotyping. Their bodies are not the site of contagious threat but of innocent victimization. They’re to be pitied, not hated. They’re not spat on, punched, or insulted for their racially (un)marked bodies.

As Holling (2019) argues, it’s important to document these moments of microaggression in the academy to create a shared record of harms endured by faculty of color. In a conceptualization of ‘academic microaggressions’ in communication studies (Lee & Hopson, 2019), I can’t quite locate the type I face in it because I’m not seen as lacking academic merit (see also Presumed incompetent edited by Muhs et al., 2012); rather, I’m seen as intellectually competent but emotionally deficient, lacking humanity and human value – the cyborg, a common trope about Asian Americans (Bui, 2020). This kind of dehumanization overdetermines the mind while devaluing the ‘soul,’ the imagined site of emotion, warmth, and morality. While being perceived as a vessel for diseases is not typically associated with robots, it shares in common its dehumanizing quality. It tells me I lack worth and that I’m a managed threat.

In the months between writing my essay and now, the extant pandemic of anti-Black White supremacy has become especially salient after the brutal killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin and his three complicit police partners, which re-ignited Black Lives Matter protests. It’s nearly impossible not to consider the connections. In police brutality and killings, fears of Black people result in disproportionate state violence; with COVID-19, disgust for Asian/American people and bodies are manifest in anti-Asian violence. Usually, disgust for Asianness is linked to metaphors of indigestion and strangeness, which are used for racist mockery or for broadly political purposes, e.g. restrictions on Asian immigration (Edwards et al., 2000). Common stereotypes of the ‘yellow peril’ have included our supposedly inscrutable, bizarre practices and culinary habits (Hamamoto, 1994; Lee, 1999). Asian/Americans are constructed as abject through popular culture stories of eating rodents, pets, and other dirty, unusual, or sympathetic animals (Han, 2007). Indeed, it’s commonly believed that COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan wet market with the butchering of bats, despite more recent studies that debunk this theory (Letzter, 2020). It’s not surprising, then, that beliefs about strange foods is linked to the origin myth of the virus, and that disgust became transferred to what my body signified – Asians as the virus.

Resources

Jason Oliver Chang, an Asian American historian, has put together a Google doc titled ‘Treating Yellow Peril: Resources to Address Coronavirus Racism.’ It can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-DLnAY5r-f4DRLZgndR_Bu47nqHVtAOKem5QRmbz7bg/edit. It’s an extraordinary resource that includes a mechanism to report anti-Asian hate incidents, press releases, class assignments, statements decrying anti-Asian racism, and news about anti-Asian racism related to the racialization of COVID-19. There is no better omnibus resource for educators, journalists, and activists. For readers interested in learning more about the intersection of the yellow peril and disgust for Asian/American bodies and culture or who would like to assign accessible readings for students, I would suggest a few short readings in the popular press as starting points. The first article succinctly points out that yellow peril fears have been rooted in the belief that Asians are disease threats, a racist discourse that emerged all too easily into popular resentments and fears: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/05/coronavirus-reawakens-old-racist-tropes-against-chinese-people/. The second set of articles refutes racist COVID-19 memes that mocked the Chinese as ‘barbaric’ and ‘strange’ for eating bats. https://mashable.com/article/coronavirus-chinese-eat-bat-asian-racism/. https://www.eater.com/2020/1/31/21117076/coronavirus-incites-racism-against-chinese-people-and-their-diets-wuhan-market.

The final article with embedded video humorously points out that even safe ingredients, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG) have been problematically racialized as ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’ despite being a common ingredient in many commercial and fast foods: https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-05-28/msg-chinese-restaurant-syndrome-truth.

To deepen interracial solidarity, the Crosscultural History Solidarity Education Project created a page called ‘Black/Asian Solidarity’ (https://crossculturalsolidarity.com/black-asian-solidarity/). It has curated numerous links to articles, op-eds, blogs, podcasts, videos, and book recommendations that argue for Asian American solidarity for Black Lives Matter and that discuss historical and contemporary solidarity between Black and Asian communities. Finally, for Asian American readers who are having trouble talking about their support for Black Lives Matter with their parents and grandparents, the Letters for Black Lives website has open letters written in several different languages with reverse translation into English that can be used as templates. This can be found at https://lettersforblacklives.com/2020/home.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Srividya Ramasubramanian for inviting me to contribute to the Quarantined Across Borders webpage and for accepting this essay to be adapted for this special issue of JACR. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve the essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There was one other Asian American faculty member at the meeting. Colleagues at the meeting might note that he was seated next to others. His experience differs from mine in two ways. First, he entered the meeting late when there were few seats available, so he chose where to sit. His colleagues would have had to actively avoid him by getting up since they were already seated. It is not my argument that the aversion was this consciously intentional. Second, he entered the room with his friends so at least one of them sat with him.