From the time the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived as laborers in the U.S. in the 1850s, Asian Americans have always been subject to racist violence. As a source of cheap labor to build railroads, Asian immigrants came to be seen as threats to white jobs and scapegoated as dirty and disease-ridden. The “yellow peril” ultimately led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first time the U.S. had ever barred a specific ethnic group from the country.
The brutality runs through more than two centuries of U.S. history, from the incarceration camps of World War II, when over 100,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and imprisoned because of xenophobic fears, to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, who died after being beaten by white men in a racially motivated attack in Detroit.
Yet while racial violence has been an undeniable part of the history of Asian Americans in the U.S., the pervasive “model minority” myth has helped to obscure it. That false idea, constructed during the civil rights era to stymie racial-justice movements, suggests that Asian Americans are more successful than other ethnic minorities because of hard work, education and inherently law-abiding natures. Racial-justice educator Bianca Mabute-Louie emphasizes the connection between this damaging stereotype and the violence we’ve seen on the news–videos featuring Asian-American elders shoved to the ground. “This contributes to erasing the very real interpersonal violence that we see happening in these videos, and that Asian Americans experience from the day-to-day, things that don’t get reported and the things that don’t get filmed,” she says.
Anti-Asian racism also surged during the pandemic in Britain and Australia, with incidents of discrimination and xenophobia reported last summer by Human Rights Watch in Italy, Russia and Brazil. The news from Atlanta landed hard in Asian communities already feeling extraordinarily vulnerable. “We’re all feeling a collective trauma at the moment,” says Mai-Anh Peterson, co-founder of besea.n (Britain’s East and South East Asian Network). “We know that this isn’t just a problem for North America.”
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