“Difficult Problems Solving Themselves”
The “expendability” of Black and Asian bodies in the face of national crisis
On May 6th, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, which became the first federal immigration law banning an entire group of people from entering the United States based on their ethnicity. This “Asian ban” prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering the country, and Chinese nationals from becoming naturalized citizens.
A quick Google search of “Chinese exclusion” will yield a plethora of images and political cartoons of the “yellow peril” genre. You will see reptilian “Chinamen” drawn with slanted eyes and trailing queues, being physically abused and verbally denigrated.
Today as I write this, people of Asian descent are again being yelled at, spat on, punched, stabbed, and harassed in person and online, and Asian-owned small businesses have withered on the vine due to fear of the coronavirus. The phenomena is so widespread that an estimated thirty percent of Americans have witnessed anti-Asian hate incidents.
Unlike in the late 1800s, at the root of these attacks is not just internalized prejudice but also the belief that Asian people, specifically Chinese people, are responsible for the virus. Conservative media outlets and elected officials,
including President Trump, have taken part in spreading disinformation, instituting an immigration ban and using anti-Asian and anti-China rhetoric to deflect blame away from themselves for their mishandling of the pandemic. The FBI has warned that instances of anti-Asian violence are projected to increase, yet neither the CDC nor nor the DOJ have done much to curb these incidents.
This misdirection campaign is also a disservice to other communities of color who are bearing the brunt of the pandemic itself and who require the federal government’s attention now more than ever. The numbers are bleak: Black people comprise one third of COVID-19 cases and deaths nationwide, and are four times as likely to know someone who has died of COVID-19. Latinos are also disproportionately affected in several states, including Utah, where their rate of infection is more than twice their share of the population. Tribal communities have also been hit hard: Navajo nation alone has a rate of infection surpassed by only New York and New Jersey. And Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities have infection rates 2-3 times their share of the population in several states.
They, as well as poor and working class Asian communities, have been left to wrestle with a healthcare system that is not only overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases at present, but which has often proved unaffordable, inaccessible, and culturally incompetent even under normal conditions. Furthermore, these patients’ will to survive is at odds with a healthcare industry that ultimately stands to profit from their sickness, and worse, is protected by our political superstructure.
The anti-Asian violence we’re experiencing shatters the illusion of the “model minority” status that some Asian American groups have been conferred. Public sentiment has shifted so quickly and dramatically against Asian Americans that the relative privilege some of us have enjoyed has been partially nullified since now, just going out in public poses a personal safety risk. Under the coronavirus regime, it doesn’t matter how much money you make, what your immigration status is, or whether you’re even Chinese. If there were any time for Asian Americans to demand justice and equity, it is now.
“The anti-Asian violence we’re experiencing shatters the illusion of the “model minority” status that some Asian American groups have been conferred. But the soaring rates of infection among other communities of color, namely Black communities, demands an answer to the more fundamental question about whether decades-long government negligence of certain communities constitutes its own form of violence. ”
But the soaring rates of infection and death among other communities of color, namely Black communities, demands an answer to the more fundamental question about whether decades-long government negligence of certain communities constitutes its own form of violence. The pandemic lays bare the fact that we, as immigrants and people of color living in the U.S. at this moment in time, are not inherently valued as “essential”, except when working as healthcare, food service, or delivery workers. Even then, we are faceless and no less immune to the discrimination and injustice that surrounds us.
Living in the Trump era doesn’t help this outlook. But taking a sober view at how migrants of color have historically been treated first and foremost as units of labor (either kidnapped or contracted), it makes more sense why it can often seem like we live and die at the discretion of law enforcement and our economic system. Within the dual philosophies of capitalism and white supremacy, we’re not worth a penny more than what we’re told, and we’re certainly not worth saving. Each racial group operates under different rules, but ultimately, our lives and the lives of our families come second to the preservation of a white capitalist vision.
A powerful illustration of this concept can be found in German-American political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s pieces, which draws parallels between the plight of Black and Asian labor in 1879. At the time, some Chinese laborers in California, experiencing dwindling employment prospects and mounting racist attacks by white laborers, left California for the East Coast. White laborers, viewing the Chinese as competition, had barred them from working in factory jobs. They were concerned that a growth in the Chinese population would undermine the country’s status as a “white nation for white men”.
Meanwhile, Southern plantation owners had been importing Chinese coolies to drive down costs and retain control over the newly-freed Black workforce: “‘Give us five million of Chinese laborers in the valley of the Mississippi,” wrote a planter’s wife, “and we can furnish the world with cotton and teach the negro his proper place.’” This divide-and-conquer strategy, along with Black voter disenfranchisement, violence, and lack of economic opportunities, drove many freedmen to move northward or westward -- to California.
Nast’s drawing, “Difficult problems solving themselves”, shows this forced migration taking place: Asian and Black laborers both moving to “greener pastures”, switching places in hopes of escaping violence and poverty, only to find more exploitation and racial animosity awaiting them.
To be certain, anti-Black violence and systemic exclusion has been a constant and unrelenting reality in our country since its founding, while anti-Asian violence has fluctuated in response to events such as the Gold Rush, the decline of the auto industry, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and now, a global pandemic. Politicians, both Democrat and Republican, often embraced or denounced such discrimination based on what was politically expedient. For example, in the late 1800s it was California Democrats who drove the anti-Chinese movement, while Republicans tended to be pro-Chinese due to the cheap labor Chinese immigrants provided for businesses.
But between unbridled police brutality, gun violence, and massive failures in our healthcare system, Black people have been dying in huge numbers due to the more insidious, systemized violence of government indifference, as well as the more traumatic, physical violence that indifference engenders.
The Trump administration believes that by scapegoating Asians and Chinese people for this global pandemic, the responsibility of the U.S. government for the deaths of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Americans can be partially obscured. Trump not only dodges culpability for his mismanagement, but also downplays that getting serious about science, not being “tough on China”, is the most effective way to keep more people from dying. Lastly, it diminishes our country’s international credibility, inching us ever closer to foreign conflict -- the greatest source of violence there is.
In this moment, it’s important not to forget that what we’re up against is not simply a disease, but the most pervasive, malignant, and cynical forces within our society. Not to unite and act against those powers would be to make ourselves vulnerable in ways heretofore unimaginable. There’s no longer any way to shield ourselves from the truth. Somewhere in our collective subconscious, we can imagine the nefarious rich and their racist stockholders watching this anarchy from their overseas vacation homes, with the smug assurance that at least they, the wealthy and powerful, can never really die. To them, what happens to us doesn’t matter. We’re just “difficult problems solving themselves.” It’s up to us to let them know we’re not going anywhere.
