Anti-Asian violence: A long history has a new chapter

Repression and violence against Asian people are as American as apple pie. The roll call of events is a long one. The Anti-Coolie Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Pigtail Ordinance, the October 1871 Los Angeles pogrom, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two stand out. The purpose of this article is to look at the new phase of anti-Asian racism in this country. Former President Trump led an incessant chorus that Covid 19 was the “Kung Flu”, the “China Flu”, or the “Wuhan Flu.” This created the atmosphere for a wave of physical attacks on Asian Americans that continues today.

Forms of anti-Asian racism

Racism brings with it racist ideology. The particular focuses of racist ideology change with both the times and with the specific ethnic group that is being targeted. There have been a number of themes in anti-Asian racism historically. Let’s take two examples. The first is the hyper sexualization of Asian American women. The idea that Asian women are “submissive” or “mysterious” has long been a part of right-wing fantasy. The Japanese geisha girl or the prostitute during the Vietnam war are familiar characters in depictions of Asian women. This is a way of dehumanizing Asian people as a whole.

The second is the concept that Asian Americans are the “model minority.” This is the trope that Asian Americans work hard, “play by the rules,” maintain family discipline, and wish to “get ahead.” This leads racists to claim that “their place in line” has been taken by Asians who are getting rewards that should be reserved for “real Americans”.

The virus and inter-imperialist rivalry

The claim that Covid 19 is the fault of Asians is the new refrain in anti-Asian racism. Trump began to sound this note in a series of rallies in the spring of last year. Trump frequently spoke of China causing the pandemic and about how right he was to curtail travel from China. When challenged on the racist nature of the term “China virus,” Trump’s representatives stressed the importance of blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak of the virus.

There’s a clear reason why this was so important to them. Chinese capitalism is the main international rival to the United States. The US ruling class is engaged in a long term struggle with the Chinese ruling class for international economic dominance. This means that the inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China is going to dominate world politics and economics in the coming period. The US government, under both Trump and Biden, wishes to stoke anti-Chinese sentiment in order to create a domestic base of support for their foreign policy.

The fact that the first known cases of the coronavirus actually did emerge in China gave Trump a golden opportunity to ratchet up his rhetoric. When leaders make charges and give reactionary speeches, it’s inevitable that some supporters will take things one step further and go into physical action. The charges and speeches create the atmosphere in which some will feel emboldened to move on to street violence.

Violence

The Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate website provides a wealth of information on recent attacks on Asian Americans. They use the date March 19, 2020 (the beginning of the pandemic) as a starting point for their study. There were reports of 6,603 incidents between the beginning of the study and its end on March 31,2021.

6% involved physical violence.
Verbal harassment was reported in 65.2% of situations.
Women were the target 64.8% of the time.
The locations are important. 37.8% were in streets and parks while 32.2% were in businesses.
The changes over the period between 2020 and 2021 should be looked at. Physical assaults increased by 64%. Vandalism and graffiti increased by 130%.
In order to record the hate incidents accurately, Stop AAPI Hate has had to use some striking categories: “Coughed At/Spat Upon,” “Barred from Establishment,” “Barred from Transport.” It speaks to the seriousness of the situation that such disgusting categories even exist.
Some of the personal statements quoted in the report give a vivid sense of what Asian Americans have been forced to deal with during the past year.“My elderly mother (65 years old) was waiting for the subway. Someone tried to push her off the platform down into the train tracks. She screamed and a fellow bystander chased off the perpetrator. The Good Samaritan stood nearby my mom until she boarded the train safely. (Boston, MA)”
“My boyfriend and I were walking back home through the back alleyway attached to our complex. Two white men, who park back there and live nearby, tried to hit us with their car. We jumped out of the way and they missed us by inches. They then stopped and yelled out of the window at us “Go back to China!” three times along with profanity.(Beverly Hills, CA)”
“I was at work, minding my own business and using the restroom, when one customer came up to me. As I turned around, he caught a glimpse of my eyes and began with the racial slurs. Eventually, as I was leaving, the customer spat on me. He even said things such as “Go home and take the COVID with you.” (Muskegon, MI)”

A pattern emerges from this data. The majority of attacks are by strangers in public locations, often targeting women, frequently referencing the coronavirus, and escalating to physical violence on occasion.

Atlanta Spa Shootings

The most vicious recent examples of anti-Asian violence were the March 16 shootings at three massage parlors in Atlanta. Robert Aron Long killed eight people, six of them Asian women. Long’s mind was a toxic mixture of any number of far right ideas: extreme misogyny, racism, and Christian fundamentalism to name a few. His idea, that Asian women were lying in wait to seduce him and he had to kill them to prevent this, is the embodiment of the concept of the hyper sexualization of Asian women discussed earlier.

A disgusting footnote to the murders was the statement by Cherokee County Sherriff’s Department Captain Jay Baker. He said that Long had “a really bad day.” A bad day is when you’re locked out of the house or the car breaks down, not executing eight people! Interestingly, journalists looking into the background to Baker’s statement of callous disregard found that he had posted pictures online of t-shirts with the slogan,”Covid 19 imported virus from Chy-na.” Baker’s outlook is a clear consequence of the anti-China Covid campaign.

Wuhan Institute of Virology

Many might wish to say that it was Trump’s particularly vicious form of racism that created the context for the most recent spate of attacks against Asian Americans. Now that Trump is no longer in office to stoke the fire, some would say the worst is behind us. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There are a number of ways in which anti-Asian racism has continued—and could become reinvigorated.

The news is increasingly taking up the issue of the origins of the Covid virus. It is obviously helpful for science and medicine to know as much as possible about the development of the virus. Most scientists believe that a zoonotic transfer (the transmission of a disease from an animal host to a human) occurred, probably facilitated by increased human proximity to animal habitats. The location may well have been a Chinese “wet market.”

It is considered very unlikely, but not one hundred percent impossible, that an accidental leak might have occurred at a medical lab in Wuhan. So far little evidence supports this theory, but it would be foolish to say that the Chinese government is morally incapable of a Chernobyl style cover up. The danger is that, instead of a responsible scientific inquiry, we will have media hysteria about supposed Chinese crimes. It would be easy to see racists getting stoked up on anti-China rhetoric from TV and social media coverage of the investigations and then engaging in yet more street harassment and violence against Asian people.

Democratic Party

It should be understood that the campaign against China is a bi-partisan campaign. Biden will conduct this campaign in a more subdued and sophisticated way than Trump did. But the Democratic Party is totally committed to protecting the interests of US capitalism when they come into conflict with the interests of Chinese capitalism. This will necessitate continuing denigration of China.

An excellent recent article in Speak Out Now! quotes the Council on Foreign Relations as saying, “the United States should, in a measured way and through a bipartisan consensus, educate the American people regarding the nature and duration of China’s challenges to U.S. vital national interests.” The same article draws attention to CNBC’s coverage of Biden’s April 28^th Congressional speech where he said, “We are in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.”

CNBC accurately notes, “Taking a tough stance on China, rather than engagement, has become one point of agreement between Democrats and Republicans in an increasingly politically divided country.”

A Biden supporter might interject at this point and say, “We’re not going to engage in racist rhetoric like Trump. The CFR quote said ‘in a measured way.’ We have no wish to see far right thugs attack Asians on the streets.”

This view leaves out the unintended consequences of xenophobic and anti-foreign rhetoric. When you start trying to win support for a campaign against another country, you inevitably will have to persuade your audience that the people of the other country are the enemy. Some are bound to be persuaded to fight the other county with more than just words.

The June 23, 1982, murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit is a clear example of this process. As the US automobile industry declined in the early 1980s, the United Auto Workers blamed competition from Asian car makers. They wished to see protectionist legislation against Asian imports. The UAW therefore started a campaign to get such legislation passed. A number of high profile photo ops were organized in which workers were given sledge hammers to destroy Asian imports. Anti-Asian slogans rebounded across Detroit.

What happened next was no surprise. A Chrysler supervisor and his laid-off autoworker step-son got into a strip club brawl with an Asian American man, Vincent Chin. The Chrysler employee blamed Chin for people being out of work in Detroit. The situation escalated into Chin being beaten to death with a baseball bat.

The UAW leadership in the early 1980s was bureaucratic and class collaborationist. But they weren’t the Proud Boys or the Aryan Nation. They had no wish to see Asian people be murdered. But once you let the nationalist or racist genie out of the lamp, you can’t control what happens next. You create an overall atmosphere in which the potential for direct violence can breed. This is precisely the danger in the government’s anti-China statements.

Socialist Response

Our response is the exact opposite of this. We wish to create an overall atmosphere in which potential right-wing attackers feel isolated, demoralized, and vulnerable. Our objective is to create a situation where racists feel that their actions will not be supported by those around them.

To put it in straightforward physical terms our goal is that the attacker be unsure if other people on the street will support them or run to the Asian victim’s defense. We want the Asian potential victim to be confident that passers-by and witnesses will be on their side and that their self-defense will be supported

Of course, we are not going to be on every street corner whenever a racist thug might go into action. What we can do is to create an overall political atmosphere for the defense of Asian Americans. We can do this by vigorous demonstrations whenever there is a threat. We can do this by denouncing the anti-China campaign. One of the personal statements, quoted earlier in this article, from the Stop AAPI Hate site spoke of a “Good Samaritan” who physically defended an Asian American woman on the Boston subway. Our aim is for the racists to know that there are“Good Samaritans” waiting for them on every subway stop and street corner.