orientalism and the yellow peril a brief look into the cornerstone of racism

BY J. FAITH MALICDEM @johannafaith

Faith Malicdem is a freshman studying journalism at Emerson College and is Overachiever’s Editorial Intern. She is also the creator and curator of the PieFace Column. Aside from writing, Faith has many creative endeavors, including film photography and music-making. She hopes to further media coverage on mental health as well as music and the arts. THE PIEFACE COLUMN: https://www.piefacecolumn.com/

in Edward Said’s first chapter of Orientalism, “Latent and Manifest Orientalism,” the emergence of the Oriental culture–a cumulative impression of the East projected by the West–is delineated and broken down to assist scholars and Asians and non-Asians alike in critiquing the harmful and warped iteration of Asian culture. The Yellow Peril is an extension of Orientalism, as it projected a prejudiced characterization of Asians, misleading the Western public to believe that Asians were foreigners who posed a threat to Western ideals, cultures, and the economy. In the name of capitalism, the exploitation of Asian immigrant labor has had astronomically harmful effects on the politicized development of race relations, labor ideologies, and immigration legislation alike in America.

The study of history, culture, and academia in Western countries have revolved around Eurocentric ideologies and the white perspective, allowing for the portrayals of Eastern and non-white cultures to be taken into the hands of European scholars to formulate impressions of what these cultures consist of, and what they represent. Said’s critique of Orientalism addresses the relativity of Oriental studies, as the sector is, after all, a mere “school of interpretation” of what Eastern culture is, rather than being a school of true fact, involving the input of Eastern scholars who practice and live the Oriental culture (Said, 1978, p. 203). According to Said, because Orientalism is an imposed product of political force, all Europeans who have contributed or referred to the concept of Orientalism are inherently racist, imperialistic, and ethnocentric (Said, 1978, p. 204). Unfortunately, as aforementioned, the study of history, culture, and academia have been so heavily influenced by Eurocentric ideologies and standards that the Orient has stood to be a reference point for European and white Americans idealizing westward expansion, capitalistic gain, and the idea of superiority on the basis of nativism.

Because hate, defensiveness, and superiority coincide with the fear of what one does not know, anti-Asian violence and hate crimes have occurred on multiple occasions in America, and are a direct result of Orientalism’s

widespread influence. In 1870, the exponential growth of Chinese migration to California in search of jobs as an industrial revolution ensued. In turn, the 1867 Anti-Chinese Union pledged to avoid employing the Chinese, and the union would later be absorbed into the Workingman’s Party of California within the next year. This party would rally and fight for the rights of the white laborer, particularly the Irish laborer, who was threatened by the affordable and subservient labor provided by Chinese coolies who would “defy the law… and utterly disregard all the laws of health, decency and, morality” (Okihiro, 1994, p. 35). This impression of Asians, in this particular instance, the Chinese, was derived from a mere impression of their people and culture was motivated by the fears perpetuated by job loss among the white working class. This can be identified as an effect of the Yellow Peril, which is known to represent a threat posed by Easterners, whether they are of South Asian, Southeast, or East Asia descent. The threat was undoubtedly thrust onto the overarching American impression of Eastern immigrants by the constant wedge driven between the white working class and Asian immigrant laborers by factory owners and workplace CEOs on both the East and West coasts of America.

The Yellow Peril was further imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which resulted in ethnic antagonism–or the outward acts of violence and mistreatment of subordinated peoples based on their ethnicity–and drove many Chinese workers from their jobs in agriculture and railroad construction simply due to the notion that they were a population that possessed all the “social vices,” with no regard for the freedoms and liberties of America’s culture, and with souls that resembled that of a “heathen” according to University of California, Berkeley professor, historian, and ethnographer Ronald Takaki in his narrative history novel Strangers from a Different Shore (p. 101). Orientalism and the Yellow Peril go hand in hand as they both derive from a white, ethnocentric viewpoint, and are perpetuated by Western capitalists seeking immigrant workers for two reasons: cheap labor costs and the redirection of the blame from CEOs to Asian workers when the white working-class ultimately loses their jobs.

As a result of the prioritization of capitalism upheld by the West, labor ideologies have largely circumvented the notion that the progress of civilization also meant the expansion westward to accommodate for new modes of production and agriculture, thus leading to widening trade opportunities. This ideology of productivity equals expansion and thus exploitation has had a direct impact on the culture surrounding labor in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Get labor first… and capital will follow” was the mantra sugar planters Hawaii followed that played an integral role in the arrangement of the 1875 Reciprocity Treaty which allowed for the exportation of sugar from the islands to the mainland (Takaki, 1989, p. 24). The hiring of Chinese laborers soon followed in a calculated manner, taking advantage of the less fortunate situations they may have been in in their homelands due to war and political turmoil, only to pay them low wages and pit them against white workers and native Hawaiian laborers.

On the east coast, the emergence of tensions between a dual economy in the South and traditional economy in the North displaced independent white laborers and artisans, and the Civil War’s push for monopoly capitalism encouraged the exploitation of racial minorities, as they were seen “as tools they used to undermine the white small producers and proletariat,” according to Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Ethnic Studies, Edna Bonacich in her academic paper, Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian