[As I draft this
series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United
States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior
epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know
more about where things stand in early May.]
On the long
history of associating illness with foreign and immigrant communities.
First things
first: by challenging, as I did in my Saturday
Evening Post column, our
president’s and his supporters’ attempts to brand Covid-19 as the “Chinese
virus” (a central goal of theirs, at least as of the March moment in which I’m drafting
this post); and linking that trend, as I will in this post, to longstanding and
discriminatory historical narratives, I don’t mean to minimize the frustrating ways
in which the Chinese government seems to have covered up the initial outbreak
and spread of the epidemic. While of course our own American government did the
same for crucial early months (really all
of January and February), that doesn’t at all elide the Chinese government’s
responsibility for the world’s early failures to recognize and respond to the
virus in ways that might have limited its scope and effects. All of that is
part of the story of this pandemic—but none of it has much if anything to do
with why so many xenophobic Americans insist on calling the disease the Chinese
virus.
How do I know
that, you might ask? Because Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans have been
linked to illness in xenophobic and bigoted fears and narratives for nearly two
centuries now. The 19th and early 20th century “Yellow
Peril” narrative featured many distinct types
of anti-Chinese sentiments, but these fears of illness (and
accompanying images of Chinese
immigrants and Chinese American communities as unclean and the like) were
consistently central to that narrative. Indeed, some of the most common arguments
in favor of our earliest national immigration restrictions (which just happened
to be our earliest national immigration laws of any kind), from the Chinese
Exclusion Act to the Immigration
Act of 1917 to the 1920s Quota Acts, were those which accused Chinese
immigrants (and gradually those from many other nations as well, but Chinese
Americans quite clearly comprised the origin point for the links between these
fears and national immigration restrictions) of carrying
incurable diseases such as smallpox and the bubonic plague.
That narrative
became an enduring basis for broader anti-immigrant sentiments and narratives throughout
the 20th century. Take for example Texas Congressman John
Box’s 1928 arguments on the floor of the House of Representatives for
extending the 1924 Quota Act to cover the Mexican American border; Box argued
that “Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched,
ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that
the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped
at the border.” Box traffics in some dozen xenophobic stereotypes in that one sentence,
but I think it’s no coincidence that at least three of his eight adjectives (“dirty,”
“diseased,” and “unclean”) are closely linked to narratives of illness and
contagion (while two have to do with literacy/knowledge and two with
class/poverty). Quite simply, there’s no way to understand the long history of
anti-immigrant sentiments in American society, culture, and laws without a full
engagement with the centrality of disease fears and narratives to those
perspectives—and thus no way to disentangle our current moment’s fears and
xenophobia from all those interconnected histories.
Next epidemic
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?
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