2. Racism Against Asian Americans: Not Unique to the Coronavirus Pandemic

For a long time, racial discrimination against Asian Americans has not attracted enough attention in the United States. One reason is that the racial conflict between blacks and whites has been society's principal focus of attention, and the other reason is that the mainstream society always tends to cover up the suffering of Asian Americans in U.S. history. The Associated Press once observed that "Racism against Asian Americans has long been an ugly thread in the U.S. history."

The suffering of Chinese Americans is just the epitome of the discrimination and persecution against Asian Americans. In the mid-19th century, as the then U.S. economy was in badly need of cheap laborers, Asian people started immigrating to the United States, but in the late 19th century, some politicians and media deliberately stigmatized Asian Americans as "Yellow Peril," and deluded the mainstream society into believing that they constituted "racial threat," "economic threat" and "health threat" to American whites, sparking off a surge of hatred toward Asian Americans in the United States and making them suffer from long-time prejudice, exclusion, and racial violence. In 1854, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Asian Americans were not and could not be citizens in a case, and such restrictions on Asian Americans' access to citizenship were not finally abolished until around the 1940s. The earliest record of organized violence against Asian Americans was in 1871, when a group of whites rushed into an Asian community near Los Angeles' Chinatown, shooting and hanging 21 Chinese Americans to death, burning down the community, and driving the residents out of the city. The severe prejudice against Asian Americans eventually led to the prohibition of Asian immigrants in the United States: Chinese immigrants were restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Japanese immigrants began to be restricted from 1907 to 1908; and in 1924, all Asians were forbidden to immigrate to the United States. The scapegoating of Asian Americans in a public health incident is not something new in U.S. history. For example, during the smallpox outbreak in San Francisco in the 1870s, Chinese Americans were falsely called the "culprits."

The United States has never compensated for or reflected on the sufferings it has caused to Asian Americans, and even tries its best to cover up or blur relevant facts. As such, the deep-rooted malice toward Asian Americans in U.S. society can never be eliminated. In the United States, Asian Americans are portrayed as outsiders in racial conflicts; the mainstream society denies the history of racial discrimination against Asian Americans and refuses to admit that there are racist attacks against Asian Americans at present. Erika Lee, a Chinese American historian, published her speech at the Congressional hearing on violence and discrimination against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. She said, "As shocking as these incidents are, it is so vital to understand that they are not random acts perpetrated by deranged individuals. They are an expression of our country's long history of systemic racism targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders." The UN Secretary-General António Guterres has also expressed his profound concern over the rise in violence against people of Asian descent across the United States. He said, "Thousands of incidents across the past year have perpetuated a centuries-long history of intolerance, stereotyping, scapegoating, exploitation and abuse."

The racial discrimination against Asian Americans that has continued to the present time is probably a built-in and natural product of American colonialism, and it also reflects a mindset of the United States: bullying the weak. Asian Americans are in a weak position in U.S. society, which makes them vulnerable to racial attacks. Such weakness is mainly caused by the following reasons. The first one is the small population of Asian Americans in the United States. The total population of Asian Americans is about 24 million, accounting for about 6 percent of the total U.S. population, and being significantly outnumbered by whites, African Americans and Hispanics. The second reason is the huge internal differences among Asian Americans. Asian Americans include immigrants and their descendants from dozens of countries in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. These countries differed from one another in cultural traditions, economic status, political systems, religious customs, and languages, resulting in stark differences and disparities among Asian Americans. The third reason is that Asian Americans are never a cohesive group. Although they are perceived as Asian Americans by mainstream society, most of them think of the term as an imposed label. They simply do not agree that they belong to the same Asian ethnic group. Numerical inferiority, internal differences, and lack of coherence and political involvement make it impossible for Asian Americans to unite in resisting racial discrimination against them. Such weakness makes them more vulnerable to racist attacks.

The identification of Asian Americans in the United States makes them the target of racist exclusion. The growing racial discrimination against Asian Americans may also be related to the upsurge of xenophobia in the United States, as its mainstream society has long defined Asian Americans as "outsiders," or sometimes, as "colonial others." This definition is based on two reasons. Firstly, the growth of the Asian American population is largely due to immigration rather than natural growth, which means a large number of Asian Americans are born outside the United States. Secondly, most Asian Americans keep a certain distance from the mainstream society and culture of the United States. Therefore, xenophobic expressions such as "get out of our country," "return to your own country," "get out of here," and "you don't belong here," are frequently heard during the racist attacks against Asian Americans. Racists in the United States even regard this false identification as a reasonable support for launching racist attacks against Asian Americans, and their actions are widely recognized by U.S. society. Just as an Asian American actor named John Cho observed, "The rise in anti-Asian attacks (during the coronavirus pandemic) only reminds Asian Americans like me that our belonging is conditional. One moment we are Americans, the next we are all foreigners, who ‘brought' the virus here."