Asian Americans as racial contagion

ABSTRACT

The convergence of racism against Asian Americans and the tightening of borders to prohibit and control the entry of Asian immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, though distressing, is not unprecedented. It is in fact a repetition of a historical pattern where exclusion or restriction of Asian immigration and racist scapegoating of Asian Americans converge and surge during periods of public health crises in the United States. Yellow Peril narratives, Orientalist tropes of ‘filthy, backward and morally depraved’ Asians, and racialized discourses about disease, migration, and belonging, which have historically played a crucial role in the cultural production of Asians as a racial contagion, have reemerged in the context of COVID-19, although the specific discursive conditions and impact are not always identical. Nonetheless, reduced to their bodies, which in turn are ethno-stigmatized (by their presumed connection with China), Chinese Americans and Asian Americans are being invested with the epidemiological properties associated with COVID-19 – infectious, contaminating the air around them, and contagious. While Asian Americans are being viewed as an embodied form of the contagion that needs to be expelled, Asian immigrants are being projected as a potential risk and as a future threat that needs to be contained. The anti-Asian racism during COVID-19 illuminates the through lines of white supremacism and virulent nativism that are integral to the foundation of the United States and its past and present imaginaries of ‘American’ national identity, culture, and security. Asian Americans are being reminded, yet again, of the precarity of their belonging within the white American nation, and their vexed condition redirects our attention to the need for a more contextualized analysis of the complicated entanglement of ideologies of liberal multiculturalism and racial capitalism with those of settler colonialism and white supremacy in the current socio-political moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American
• racial contagion
• immigration
• white supremacy
• pandemic
• racism

Disclosure statement

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

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 Actual numbers are estimated to be much higher, given the historical trend of underreporting hate crimes.

2 In a White House memorandum dated 26 January 2021, President Biden acknowledged the ‘significant harm’ caused to AAPI communities by hate crimes during the pandemic and issued guidance to the Department of Justice to collect hate crime data and assist with the reporting of anti-AAPI hate incidents (see Biden Jr. 2021 in references).

3 On 24 February 2021, President Biden issued a proclamation revoking the Trump administration’s ban on the issuance of immigrant visas wherein he noted that immigration bans do not advance the interests of the United States. However, the prior administration’s ban on employment visas like the H-1B remains in effect and are set to expire on 31 March 2021.

4 Chinese and Indian citizens routinely account for two of the five largest national groups that receive immigrant visas, making them lawful permanent residents of the United States (see Baugh 2019 in references). A majority of the H-1B visas are annually allotted to Filipino, South Korean, Chinese and Indian professionals (see Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers 2020 in references). Students from Asia make up the majority of international students in the United States with Chinese and Indian students accounting for almost half of them (see Announcements 2019 in references).

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Madhavi Mallapragada

Madhavi Mallapragada is associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on cultural studies of online media; immigration and Asian American popular culture; and race and media industries. She is the author of Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States (2014). Her current book project examines racial diversity and discourses of multiculturalism in US media industries since the 1990s.