{"id":11882,"date":"2021-04-07T23:37:11","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T06:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=11882"},"modified":"2021-04-09T07:39:48","modified_gmt":"2021-04-09T14:39:48","slug":"post1-136","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=11882","title":{"rendered":"“Atlanta shootings: anti-Asian bias is not new”, Le Monde diplomatique"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Mari Uyehara<\/span>, Paris, April Edition<\/p>\n

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The ideas claimed to be behind the Atlanta spas shootings have a long history, going back to the Page Act of 1875, which blocked Chinese female migration to the US for decades and stigmatised Asian women.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00c9tienne Ronjat, Chinese women in San Francisco, from William Hepworth Dixon, \u2018The White Conquest\u2019, Il Giro del mondo, vol 5, no 16, 1877<\/div>\n
\u00c9tienne Ronjat \u00b7 DEA \u00b7 Biblioteca Ambrosiana \u00b7 Getty<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

W<\/span>hen<\/span> a 21-year-old white male shot eight people at three Asian massage spas in Georgia on 16 March\u00a0(1<\/a>)<\/span>, the killings seemed to be the culmination of violence after a year of Covid-19, with its racist propagandising about the \u2018China virus\u2019 and \u2018kung flu\u2019 and a sharp spike in street harassment and attacks against Asians across the US.<\/p>\n

The shooter, named as Robert Aaron Long, is accused of killing eight people, including two women of Chinese descent \u2014 Daoyou Feng, 44, and Xiaojie Tan, 49 \u2014 and four of Korean descent \u2014 Soon Chung Park, 74; Suncha Kim, 69; Yong Ae Yue, 63; and Hyun Jung Grant, 51. A witness at one spa told South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo that before opening fire, the suspect shouted, \u2018I\u2019m going to kill all Asians!\u2019 Only 4% of the population of Georgia are Asian, yet all three targets were Asian-owned, and the shooter drove 27 miles, approximately 40 minutes, to get from the Chinese-owned Woodstock spa to the two Korean-owned spas in Atlanta.<\/p>\n

In a press conference, Captain Jay Baker, the spokesman for the Cherokee County sheriff\u2019s office, said the suspect \u2018does claim it\u2019s not racially motivated\u2019, and had explained that he had a \u2018sexual addiction\u2019 and the spas were a \u2018temptation\u2019 he wanted to \u2018eliminate.\u2019 Baker noted it had been \u2018a really bad day for [the suspect]\u2019.<\/p>\n

The way the law was written, you had to certify that you weren’t a prostitute. How do you prove a negative?Mae Ngai<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That the shooter\u2019s interiority and humanity were given space while the bodies of his victims, six of them Asian women, were reduced to empty vessels for his rage was contemptible, but not without precedent. The pattern goes back to the arrival of Chinese migrants to the US, a violent anti-Asian movement, and a law that elevated and legitimised bigotry against Asian women.<\/p>\n

The Page Act of 1875 was the first to restrict immigration in the US. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 often gets most of the ink, the Page Act set exclusion in motion at the federal level by branding Chinese women as sex workers, then a prevalent stereotype, and barring them, as well as Chinese contract labourers, from immigrating to the US.<\/p>\n

Chinese women debased<\/h3>\n

It helps to understand the world in which the Page Act emerged. At the time, only 4% of Chinese immigrants were women, but in their brief time in the US they had been hypersexualised and exoticised, and marked as sex workers and disease vectors, debasing forces on white manhood, morality, and health\u00a0(2<\/a>)<\/span>. This made them useful to the larger project of ending Chinese immigration. The passage of the Act furthered that project, and with it the end of open borders.<\/p>\n

The law \u2018was using this kind of moral panic about prostitutes to stave off any kind of population accretion through reproduction\u2019, says Mae Ngai\u00a0(3<\/a>)<\/span>. And it succeeded. In 1870 there were 13 male Chinese residents in the US to every female; that ballooned to 21 to one by 1880, and it didn\u2019t dip below 12 to one until 1920. Many immigrant groups started with higher ratios of men, but the gender balance equalised over time, while the skew for Chinese Americans endured for a century, mostly because of the Page Act.<\/p>\n

Chinese residents had come to the US in significant numbers since 1849, following the gold rush in California. They worked in mining camps, often as cooks or washing clothes, and later in railroad construction, agriculture and manufacturing. Violence in the frontier West was not rare, but violence against the Chinese was pervasive and political: lynchings, arson and bombings, stabbings, and shootings all in the name of establishing a \u2018free white republic\u2019, and often initiated by European immigrants \u2014 a pattern that extended to other Asian immigrants. At least 168 Chinese communities were driven out of the West in the mid-1880s, according to Beth Lew-Williams\u2019s The Chinese Must Go!<\/p>\n

In the 1830s, before the Chinese began to arrive, the tabloid press published lurid accounts of \u2018bizarre Chinese customs\u2019 and \u2018sexual aberrations\u2019, especially polygamy. Chinese women became the target of politicians and civic leaders dedicated to shaping a white Christian republic. Sex workers of many nationalities came to the West, but local authorities focused their attention on the Chinese; health professionals and moral leaders, with a growing body of pseudo-science, framed Chinese women as a unique danger, as temptresses and carriers of virulent venereal diseases. Gynaecologist J Marion Sims, president of the American Medical Association, warned that a (made-up) \u2018Chinese syphilis tocsin\u2019 was fuelling an epidemic.<\/p>\n

\u2018Disease and moral death\u2019<\/h3>\n

By the 1850s, the California legislature had begun trying to halt Chinese immigration and segregate those already there, levying heavy fines on steamship companies for transporting unmarried \u2018lewd and debauched\u2019 Chinese women. In 1870 California Senator Cornelius Cole told the San Francisco Chronicle<\/i> that the women \u2018spread disease and moral death among our white population\u2019.<\/p>\n

The challenge for men like Cole was that the Burlingame-Seward Treaty of 1868 between the US and China guaranteed free immigration between the countries, enabling all Chinese immigrants who were travelling of their own free will (not coerced or indentured) to enter the US. To get around this clause, Representative Horace Page crafted a federal bill to \u2018end the danger of cheap Chinese labour and immoral Chinese women\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Page Act excluded contract labourers and so-called Mongolian prostitutes,\u2019 says Ngai. \u2018Contract labourers and prostitutes were considered, by definition, to be not free persons and therefore did not fall under the treaty\u2019s allowance for free immigration.\u2019 Since Chinese migrant men were voluntary immigrants not indentured labourers, the law did not prevent them from continuing to migrate, despite a widespread myth that Chinese men were slavish \u2018coolie\u2019 labourers. But Chinese women were effectively banned.<\/p>\n

\u2018The way the law was written, you had to certify that you weren\u2019t a prostitute,\u2019 says Ngai. \u2018How do you prove a negative?\u2019 Any Chinese woman attempting to enter the US was asked by white male consuls whether she was a prostitute. Wives of merchants, and, later, women from other privileged categories could still migrate, but not easily.<\/p>\n

The Act also banned citizenship for Chinese men and women who married white American citizens, building on the miscegenation laws directed at Black people. About half of male Chinese immigrants to the US were married, but popular media caricatured them as homosexual (perhaps because white male masculinity felt threatened by competition from foreign labour) or as predators on white women, and Chinese women as prostitutes who could reproduce with Chinese men (threatening the white republic) or white men (defiling blood lines).<\/p>\n

\u2018Great demoralisation of youth\u2019<\/h3>\n

Page claimed the women were \u2018brought for shameful purposes to the disgrace of the communities where they settled. And to the great demoralisation of the youth of these localities.\u2019 It never occurred to such men that women engaging in sex work were merely making a living by meeting an economic demand, driven entirely by paying male customers.<\/p>\n

Such details as we know of the Atlanta shooting suspect fit the history. He has been described as \u2018big into religion\u2019; Asian women were deemed an existential threat to white Christian rectitude. He does not seem to have been able to see the dead women as human beings with families who loved them, and who worked so hard that some slept at their place of work for weeks at a time, barely seeing those families. From what has been quoted of his statements, he could only fetishise them as immoral abstractions.<\/p>\n

As in the 19th century, the stigmatisation of sex work has cast a pall over working-class Asian women in general. With little real information about the victims\u2019 actual jobs, some people recycled old, degrading jokes on social media, leaning on racialised and gendered tropes. We know a few facts: Hyun Jung Grant, who worked at Gold Spa, was a single mother of sons, Randy, 22, and Eric, 21; Xiaojie Tan, a licensed massage therapist and owner of Young\u2019s Asian Massage, had one daughter, Jami, 29.<\/p>\n

The civil rights era helped dismantle the absurdist laws that once prevented Asian immigrants from entering into American society. But Page\u2019s spirit lives on in the bigotries that conceptualise Asian women as debauched and diseased, irresistible and spiritually corrupting temptations. In this view, saving the soul of a white American male remains a noble prerogative, while irredeemable working-class Asian women are considered a contagion to be removed.<\/p>\n

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(1<\/a>)\u00a0<\/span>He started at Young\u2019s Asian Massage in Woodstock, near Acworth, then drove to Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa, across the street from each other in Atlanta.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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(2<\/a>)\u00a0<\/span>See Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: the Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans<\/i>, Random House, New York, 2007.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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(3<\/a>)\u00a0<\/span>Mae Ngai, professor of History and Asian American Studies at Columbia University and author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America<\/i>, Princeton University Press, 2004.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mari Uyehara<\/em><\/p>\n

Mari Uyehara is a culture and politics writer based in Brooklyn. A longer version of this article was published in The Nation<\/a> on 22 March 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n

LMD English edition exclusive<\/em><\/p>\n

Le Monde diplomatique<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By Mari Uyehara, Paris, April Edition The ideas claimed to be behind the Atlanta spas shootings have a long history, going back to the Page Act of 1875, which blocked Chinese female migration to the US for decades and stigmatised Asian women. \u00c9tienne Ronjat, Chinese women in San Francisco, from William Hepworth Dixon, \u2018The White […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11882"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11882"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11893,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11882\/revisions\/11893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}