of race in the United States, but it is limited. If one is not perceived as black, then one supposedly does not clearly suffer from racism. But groups can experience race and racism in ways different to blacks or whites. Historian Gary Okihiro (1994) asks, rhetorically, if “yellow” (i.e. Asian) is “black or white.” The answer, of course, is neither. Yet, due to the power of the black–white binary, Asian Americans are framed as either like whites or like blacks. For example, historically, Asian Americans have been defined legally as nonwhite. In addition, Asian Americans have been stereotyped as morally deviant and explicitly compared to African Americans. For instance, Chinese were depicted in newspaper cartoons in the 1800s as like blacks (Newman 2006). At other times, Asian Americans appear like whites, even “out-whiting whites” in their educational attainment or household incomes. Similarly, they are residentially integrated with whites for the most part, unlike African Americans.
Yet even as they are compared to whites and blacks, they fit neither category completely. Claire Kim (1999) moves beyond the black–white binary without losing its applicability to Asian Americans. According to Kim’s notion of racial triangulation, Asian Americans experience racism along two dimensions: degree of cultural and social valorization and degree of civic inclusion into the nation as full citizens. These two dimensions operate separately but are interdependent. Asian Americans can be highly valorized, akin to whites, or lowly so akin to blacks. Yet, even when Asian Americans are respected relative to African Americans, they can be excluded from the nation. Asian Americans are often considered “forever foreign,” despite how long their families may have been settled in the United States. Moreover, Asian Americans’ exclusion becomes stricter during times of economic, political, or military threat from Asia.
The “yellow peril”
Once we think outside of the black–white binary, we can better recognize the main stereotypes impacting Asian Americans – the “yellow peril” and the “model minority.” The “yellow peril” casts Asians and Asian Americans as economic, political, biological, and sexual threats to the West, wanting to take it over. When the “yellow peril” stereotype is active, Asian Americans are not only foreigners but low on the valorization scale. The stereotype is based in Orientalist framing of Asians (broadly defined) and extended to Asian Americans as the opposite of the ideal westerner (Said 1978). As the westerner is rational, kind, clean, and sexually decent, the Oriental is irrational, conniving, dirty, and sexually deviant. The West needs to depict the Orient in this light in order to construct itself in its desired image. Critics of this analysis argue that European and American imaginings of the Middle East and Asia were more heterogeneous and complicated than Said suggests (Macfie 2000). Still, Orientalism proved to be a compelling discourse incorporated into much of the West’s imaginings of Asia. The threat from Asia was military, economic, sexual, and cultural.
As an extension of Orientalism, in the last century and a half the American citizen has been defined over and against the Asian immigrant legally, economically, and culturally. These definitions have cast Asian immigrants, both as persons and as populations, to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, unintelligible elements to be marginalized and returned to their alien origins. “Asia” has always been a complex site upon which the manifold anxieties of the United States nation-state have been figured: such anxieties have represented both Asian countries as exotic, barbaric, and alien, and Asian laborers immigrating to the United States from the nineteenth century onward as a “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants.
The “yellow peril” stereotype is not always at play but arises when the United States is at war and/or when there is a “crisis of capital,” meaning when capitalist interests are not clearly dominant either domestically or globally due to competition and rising costs (Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng 1994). With the majority of US wars in the past hundred years being with Asian and Arab countries, Asian Americans have borne the brunt of racism as the supposed “foreigner within.” Even if US-born, fluent in English, and so on, Asian Americans can be targeted as foreign threats. It does not need to be a literal war for Asian Americans to be targeted as a threat. The economic contests with Japan in the 1980s made Japanese Americans and those assumed to be Japanese the targets of resentment, including the murder of Vincent Chin as discussed below. The coronavirus also appears as a threat akin to war, with the number of dead compared to wartime deaths, America declaring war on the coronavirus, and President Trump calling himself a “wartime president.”4 Like all formal or informal wars that involve Asia, Asian Americans become unnecessary casualties to hate.
During uneasy security and economic times, an external agent, such as the “yellow peril,” unites “real Americans.” Asia and Asian Americans come to represent the morally suspicious threat to the virtuous and benevolent United States. Orientalist racializations of Asians as physically and intellectually different from whites predominated, especially in periods of intense anti-Asian labor movements, culminating in institutionalized discrimination, such as immigration exclusion acts and laws against the naturalization of Chinese in 1882, Indians in 1917, Japanese and Koreans in 1924, and Filipinxes in 1934. The stereotype also comes up when whites feel under threat from Asian Americans in other ways, such as if Asian culture feels too prevalent in their geographic areas (Cheng 2013).
Gender and sexual constructions of the “yellow peril”
The “yellow peril” also poses a sexual threat. Asian-American men, much like black men, seek to “take” white women, either by seducing them with their mysterious powers or by raping them (Nguyen 2002). In either case, the purity of white women is in danger. Nor are Asian-American women considered more benign. In film and on stage, Asian-American women are often portrayed as conniving prostitutes, “dragon ladies,” or other temptresses whose true motivations are disguised as they try to seduce white men (Espiritu 2007; Shimizu 2007). In contrast, white women appear attractive but responsible. White men and women benefit from these sexualized stereotypes popular in media and everyday consciousness.
The aberrant sexuality of Asian Americans can cause the “yellow peril” to become a terrorist. Recent terrorizing episodes have been caused by “Orientals,” ranging from 9/11 Arab hijackers to the Korean-American murderer at Virginia Tech, Seung-hui Cho. These men have been framed as sexually repressed (Brandzel and Desai 2008). As befitting the “yellow peril” (or “brown” peril in the case of Arabs), their sexual frustration and deviance fuels their already unassimilable nature, which explodes in acts of violence. As Brandzel and Desai write of Cho:
This inability to achieve proper masculinity and heterosexuality may lead to dangerous excess, one that can threaten the object of its desire – namely, white women. Hence, the charges of stalking that were associated with Cho characterize him not only as deviant and inadequate but also as threatening. In this case, Asian American men can also be framed through a sexualized narrative of deviance, evoking the historical threat of the “yellow peril” ready to harm white femininity with contamination and miscegenation by the uncontrolled nonnormative sexuality of the Asian American men. (2008: 72)
In other words, Asian Americans threaten the security, economy, and morality of other Americans due to their foreign, untrustworthy, and morally inferior nature. This racial formation does not make them synonymous with blacks but instead as anti-American, in contrast to the prototypical Americans, who are presumably white. So, Asian-American racial inequality becomes framed as Asian American versus white, but does not map onto black–white relations directly.
The “model minority”
The seeming opposite of the “yellow peril” threat is the “model minority,” the other dominant stereotype of Asian Americans. When not seen as threatening to the nation, Asian Americans are upheld as “out-whiting whites” with their high scholastic achievements, low incarceration rates, residential
