Abstract

This essay tracks Asian/American movements through the COVID-19 pandemic and through the discipline over time. Using a listing methodology with attention to space and place, we historicize how discourses of disease, contagion, and infection have been used to fuel yellow peril rhetorics in the service of anti-Asian racism since at least the 1850s, drawing connections between this history and contemporary anti-Asian racism in public spaces, in the discipline, and in academia. We conclude by revisioning how we move through disciplinary spaces, encouraging a situated recursive spatial movement as a way to advance an ethic of care and community.

Introduction

Wednesday, March 17, 2021, 12:35 PM, Twitter

I’m seeing a pattern of messaging even from within the community that treats anti-Asian violence as recent or even recently growing in numbers. Just bc data is finally being collected and it is being reported on in major news outlets doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening before.

Anti-Asian violence has been part and parcel of the making of this country, and as others have noted it’s important to recognize that context from which current events emerge. The difference, perhaps, is it seemed like people either didn’t care or it was normalized.

And although anti-Asian rhetoric during the pandemic contributed to recent events, there’ve always been ways people justified and dismissed violence against Asians, esp Asian women. Erasing this and other parts of our history is a violence as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not in the mood to rehash the many examples in recent and past history that I know of. Look it up if you care to.

Also, just gonna say that I’m betting that most if not all Asian women in this country have lots of firsthand experience of being hypersexualized, objectified, and violated. It’s a fact of life. I’m just wondering since when did anyone care.

The epigraph above was tweeted out a day after the March 16, 2021 shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, where six of the eight people killed were Asian women. As three Asian/American women, we were each hit hard by this tragic incident and its aftermath that was ordinary in some ways and exceptional in others. What was ordinary was the story of resentment and racio-misogynist violence enacted against Asian/American women—violence that some of us have seen and heard about our whole lives. What was exceptional was to see the widespread attention to Asian/American issues in popular media. What was exceptional was how people finally seemed to care what we thought. As the tweet reflects, at least for some of us, it was jarring to see an aspect of our lives acknowledged, loudly, seemingly everywhere, after having been ignored and invisibilized for so long. It was unsettling to have so many eyes on us after so much of our experiences and realities had been deemed irrelevant. On one hand, it was as though we finally had an opportunity to be heard, albeit not on our own terms or timeframe. It felt like this was our chance to say what we needed to say—a chance that would likely not always be available to us (who knows when we will be deemed irrelevant once again?). As three Asian/American women invested in Asian/American rhetorics and histories, we felt a responsibility to speak up about all the things that most people have yet to understand about Asian/America. Most people in this country know very little about Asian/American history. On the other hand, the experience was unnerving. Why should we be at white America’s beck and call after having been ignored for such a long time? Why should we perform and display our trauma for all to see when it would very likely lead to little change? 

It was in this context and amidst these dueling sensibilities that we came together to discuss what we might contribute to this issue of Reflections. It was on the heels of the March 16 Atlanta shooting, and amidst constant media reports of increasing incidents of violence against Asians, especially the elderly, in New York City, the Bay Area, and elsewhere. It was also during the COVID-19 pandemic and the anti-Asian rhetoric that followed, which no doubt exacerbated resentment against Asians. Each of us experienced some version of shock (though not surprise) at the turn of events, and each of us were grieving in our own ways. We came together to write this article as a way to make sense of these events and our experiences of them as Asian/American women as well as to redress widespread ignorance and misinformation about Asian/American issues. We took notes during a series of generative conversations that we had brainstorming what we could write about. Upon reflection, those notes inventory the important and urgent things we wanted to say but realized we couldn’t fully expound upon in one essay: 

We wanted to talk about histories of colonialism, the globalization of labor, the narratives of model minority, yellow peril, perpetual foreigner. 

We wanted to talk about the long history of everyday racialized violence against Asians, both abroad and within the United States, and how this violence gets justified and dismissed.

We wanted to talk about how racism and misogyny intersect for Asian/American women who must deal with hyper-sexualization and objectification. We wanted to talk about the emasculating Dragon Lady apparently hidden within the small female body. 

We wanted to talk about rhetorics of disease and contagion and its relationship to racialized violence. And even though recent rhetoric has focused on deadly viruses infiltrating the United States from elsewhere (Asia and Africa, in particular), we wanted to point out the legacy of colonialism and its concomitant spread of plague and smallpox, and how it has informed how the West came to understand disease and the “Other” as inseparable phenomena.

We wanted to talk about the paradoxes of Asian/America as rendered within the white U.S. imagination: as threatening but vulnerable and weak, necessary but disposable, invisible yet hyper-visible, not Black but not white, intimate but foreign, mobile yet immobile. 

We wanted to challenge white supremacist logics that render both supposedly “dangerous” Black men and “submissive” Asian women as threatening and thus warranting the violence against them. We wanted to talk about how these seemingly paradoxical images are embedded within complex racialized and gendered histories and grounded in white supremacist logics. 

We wanted to talk about the need to research local Asian/American histories, particularly for those who are invested in community-engaged work. We wanted to talk about how Asian/American models of collective leadership, community/coalition building, and activism are obscured by narratives about us as model minorities and perpetual foreigners.

Through our discussions we found that one way of tying together several strands from our conversations was by connecting discourses of viral movement to perceptions about Asian/American movement, migration, and change across space and place. We noted the resounding cultural narrative that metaphorizes Asians as the virus and the shared language of attack, hijacking, and threat used to describe both how the virus moves as well as how Asian bodies move. Thus, this essay focuses on understanding the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to anti-Asian racism and Asian/American (women’s)^[1]We include “women” in parentheses because although we identify as women, and although some of the things we are talking about are relevant to Asian/Americans in general, many are specific to … Continue reading experience in terms of movement. In other words, we are interested in how movement of the virus is interpreted and the implications of such cultural interpretations, including how they have historically been used to impose restrictions on the movements of minoritized people. In addition, the concept of movement has generative potential. It offers a way of talking about how we move through this country (as in the tweet above), through the discipline, and with/in/among/through communities as well as how our movement is restricted. Movement also makes us think of political and social movements such as the Asian American Movement (AAM) and its commitment to an antiracist, anti-imperialist framework for understanding Asian/America and systemic racism and to building solidarity across Asian ethnicities, across racial groups, and across national boundaries. The work of the AAM was also essential for centering Asian/American voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing. We suggest, then, that “movement” offers a way of revising how we think about communities and who and what we’re accountable to, as we will discuss further below.

To track these movements and responses to these movements we use lists. As we realized the standard narrative form was insufficient to capture what we wanted to say, we found ourselves pulled to the list as form and method in this essay. We found ourselves needing, wanting to catalog, to inventory, to take stock of the landscape of anti-Asian/American violence as well as the complex and multilayered aspects of Asian/American agency, resistance, and community without imposing a clean, coherent narrative onto them. Our listing methodology is further informed by methodologies used by race-conscious scholars to present realities that center Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) perspectives, that have been referred to as the critical race theory methodology of counterstory (see, for instance, Martinez 2020), witnessing, testimonial, or “bearing witness” (see, for instance, Kynard 2015, Green and Robinson 2021), “pushback” as “a response to the hidden transcript of whiteness” (Ore 2017), and antenarrative (see, for instance, Jones, Moore, and Walton 2016). Aja Martinez (2014) describes counterstories as a way of juxtaposing different versions of reality. “Stock stories” are dominant narratives that uphold existing power structures by purporting to be neutral and objective and thus reified as the norm. As a methodology, Martinez (2014) argues, counterstory “serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help strengthen traditions of social, political and cultural survival and resistance.” In other words, “counterstory functions as a method for marginalized people to intervene in research methods that would form master narratives based on ignorance and on assumptions about minoritized peoples” (Martinez 2014). We deploy the list to illustrate the recurrence and repetition of certain key events, themes, memes, traumas, and metaphors. While they remain unresolved, we insist that these lists, these issues, occurrences, and themes are woven together. Moreover, they serve to disrupt stock interpretations of Asian/American people and push back against master narratives about Asian/Americans and the issues that affect us.

As a methodology, our lists can be read as a partial catalog of counterstories that we were not able to tell in the space of this article. We ask that these lists be read as, in the words of Jacqueline Jones Royster (2000), “traces of a steady stream” of counterstories yet to be fully told. To list is also to move, an inclination towards one side or another, a leaning in or towards. Likewise, through the practice of listing, we find ourselves steered in the direction of Asian/American (women’s) knowledges and ways of knowing in the hopes that we might move the discipline further in the direction of social justice for all. List, in older usages, indicates a border, a strip of cloth or ground, or a boundary, as region or territory, and as place of combat or contest (Oxford English Dictionary). All these denotations and connotations apply in our attempts to examine anti-Asian/American violence in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. What borders and boundaries must we cross, and what presuppositions must we contest? In this essay, we observe how Asian/American bodies are made to move or are restricted from movement, and how these movements are woven into larger histories of movement and non-movement. We close by considering the implications of our analysis for the academy and the discipline of rhetoric and community writing/literacy studies, encouraging readers to move differently within their own universities and communities.

Historicizing Anti-Asian Racism and Pandemic Rhetorics of Infection

Current manifestations of anti-Asian racism, hate, and violence, given further fuel by the COVID pandemic, echo “yellow peril” rhetorics that have a deep racist history. Projected onto Asian/American bodies, in the words of Lisa Lowe (1996), are “a series of condensed, complicated anxieties regarding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence of the national body; the invading multitude, the lascivious seductress, the servile yet treacherous domestic, the automaton whose human efficient will supersede American ingenuity.” These racist tropes packaged as “yellow peril” not only mask the plague of white supremacy but also target Asian/American bodies as a site for managing perceived threats. The perception of Asian/Americans as potentially “infecting” or “invading” the nation dates at least as far back as 1854 when a national cholera epidemic heightened scrutiny of the living conditions of Chinese settlements, most notably Chinatowns. As Nayan Shah’s (2010) work shows, Chinese people were feared as spreading cholera due to living conditions repeatedly categorized by “excess—of their number, of their living densities, of the diseases they spawned.” Shah documents the rhetorical process by which the Chinese community became conflated with disease in the national imaginary of the 1800s, illustrating how scientific data, medical discourse, public health reports, journalism, and travel writing all converged to create a “common sense” logic about Asian/American bodies. This logic of yellow peril, was used to rationalize a supposed need to restrict the movement of dangerous and threatening Asian bodies, and helped justify a series of Asian exclusion laws, including the 1875 Page Act, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1898 territorial colonization of the Philippines, the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, and the 1935 Filipino Repatriation Act.

Connecting the restriction of movement of Asian bodies to the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to note that the regulation of Asian bodies has historical roots in the age of empire, during which Euro-Western conquest was further justified through the concomitant development of germ theory. As Kevin Ko (2020) argues, the “nexus of empire and epidemiology” plays a central part in the history of anti-Asian racism as theories of human disease focused on the role of germs, bacteria, viruses, and other microbes led to increased attention on “filth, bodies, and bodily habits … and thus racial targeting and scapegoating of bodies.”^[2]Popular culture in the mid-19th century reflected and reinforced the pathologizing of Chinese laborers in the West. Chinese cultural habits and foodways (among other things) were derided in minstrel … Continue readingEuro Western assumptions that immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America “live[d] in filth and squalor with little bodily discipline” were used to support legal and cultural actions that dictated or restricted their movement beyond the kinds of movement necessary to fulfill the labor requirements of the U.S. economy. According to Ko,

This led to a new and powerful racialization of disease in the US and Europe. White people laid claim to being inherently cleaner, more disciplined, more modest, and more scientific than their brown, Black, or yellow counterparts who were seen as dirty, undisciplined, immodest, promiscuous, and unscientific and ultimately incapable, in fact, of governing their own bodies and homes, let alone their own societies.

As such, epidemiological discourse of empire justified and legitimized “intrusions of European and American” power around the globe (2020). Thus, to this day, discourses of disease and yellow peril rhetoric continue to work in tandem to justify restrictions on the movement of Asian/American bodies within the United States while simultaneously legitimizing the colonial expansive movement of white American bodies into yet “foreign” Asian/American spaces.

We see the enduring power of these racialized medical logics in the resounding fear of the coronavirus, its contagion, of the power of the virus to be communicated cell to cell, person to person through social systems.^[3]For posthumanist explorations of the “viral,” this also includes the spreading of a virus, code-by-code through a technological system (Clough & Puar 2021). In the biological model, not only are viruses transmissible, they are also mutable. With every replication comes the chance of mutation, a strategy that makes the virus’s movement and spread all the more threatening—the chance that the mutation will afford the virus a reproductive advantage increases exponentially, resulting in variant forms of the virus that are more resistant to treatment or vaccines or that are more easily communicable or cause more serious disease. 

White American anxieties of how viral diseases move and mutate are, once again, mapped onto Asian/American bodies. In his analysis of the 1854 cholera epidemic, Shah (2010) observes a marked shift “from attributing the health threat to collective Chinese behavior to denouncing the Chinese as the very embodiment of the disease” (emphasis original). We see the same pattern playing out in more recent acts of anti-Asian violence. The unabashed and malicious association of the coronavirus with China and with Chinese people (who are often made to stand in for all Asians) has fueled racist and xenophobic sentiments in the U.S., exemplified and amplified by Donald Trump’s use of derogatory terms like “China virus” and “Kung flu.” Recent attacks publicized in the media have been explicitly motivated by a conflation of Asian bodies with the virus. Attackers in separate incidents were heard shouting things like:

“China boy. You’re infected.”

“Asians are dirty.”

“Disease spreader.”

“You are the virus.” 

“Chinese virus, go back to where you came from”

“Asians need to be put in their place”^[4]Excerpted from the list of verbal attacks reported and listed in the article by Cai, Burch, and Patel (2021).

In many incidents, it was not enough to just punish bodies. The attackers felt compelled to add proclamations like, “You are the virus.” Individuals were hailed as “Chinese virus” and addressed as “COVID-19.” And in one instance, the attacker shouted “Chinese!” as if that itself was a sufficient insult. Each individual was treated as if they were personally responsible for the pandemic: “It’s all your fault” and “You are the reason we have coronavirus” (Cai, Burch, and Patel 2021, emphasis added). At the same time, the victims are made to represent all Asians, and the attacks signal the attempts to attack and subdue all Asians—the ultimate threat made clear in graffiti on an Asian-owned business that read, “kill all Chinese people.” In this logic, killing all Asians would rid the country of the coronavirus. Just as likely, the coronavirus pandemic provided the excuse for latent anti-Asian racism to be expressed, to assert that Asian bodies are engaging in transgressive behavior—as existing and moving where they don’t belong and as needing to go back, be put back, in their rightful place. These performative pronouncements of Asian bodies as dirty, as infected, as human embodiments of the virus are rooted in long histories of racism and ridicule, legitimated by scientific and medical discourses that frame us as threatening the health of the nation. 

A similar instance where fear of disease created an excuse for controlling the movement of so-called outsiders is taken up by Melissa Autumn White (2012). White analyzes the way national boundaries and technologies of control and surveillance were asserted against Mexican migrant workers in Canada during the H1N1 pandemic in 2006. To White, the need to control outsiders made the national border manifest in ways it hadn’t been before. And so, a generative dynamic is revealed when we see how the “outsider” creates the borders that insiders feel the need to claim, define, and protect. There is an important constitutive, interactive role that the immigrant plays upon the definition of the national body, especially through the flow of immigrant labor.

Likewise, medical discourse often reduces the complicated processes of viral transmission to a single militarized metaphor conveying attack, invasion, defense, and conflict—for instance, a virus “hijack[s]” a “healthy” cell (Cohen 2016). After infection, we are told, the body mounts an immune response in which antibodies and T-cells “attack” the virally-infected cells. The use of military metaphors in Western biomedicine dates back at least to the 17th century (Nie et al. 2016). Rather than replicating this language, we acknowledge how biological and medical models of the virus and the immune system have historically been shaped by larger cultural rhetorics of war—further instantiating the twin developments of empire and epidemiology.^[5]See, for example, Emily Martin’s (1991) study of how shifts in medical narratives of “the romance” between the egg and the sperm coincides with shifts in gender norms over time. In the case of the COVID pandemic, situating the “particular discourse of the Chinese/Asian viral threat” within broader contexts “like the U.S.-China trade war” is essential, as Lok Siu and Claire Chun have argued (2020). Medical language that frames our immune system as needing to rally in order to “attack” any “foreign” material that is invading our body is influenced by cultural, geopolitical narratives, like that around trade and NAFTA, and further reifies the protectionism/antagonism contradiction at the heart of the (trans)national imaginary.

The ways medical military metaphors have shaped public perceptions of how the immune system rallies to “fight” for a healthy body is well documented in Emily Martin’s (1994) study of mass media representations of the immune system over a twenty-year period (1960–1980). She finds the “portrait of the body conveyed most often and most vividly” is that of “a defended nation-state, organized around a hierarchy of gender, race, and class.” Moreover, these mass media representations perpetuate the assumption that identifiable boundaries exist between the self and the Other (i.e., the body and those things that don’t belong in the body). The immune system, able to identify and guard the clear boundaries between itself and those things deemed foreign and hostile, is a powerful metaphor deeply entrenched in U.S. discourse. And while these metaphors help reduce complex biological processes into terms more legible to a wider lay populace, Martin (1991) cautions us of the lasting social consequences; when these cultural narratives are “being written in at the level of the cell,” they become naturalized, making it harder to recognize, challenge, and alter them.^[6]Scholars in a special “Viral” issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) follow Donna Haraway’s post-humanist tradition to re-deploy the virus and the viral metaphors as broader “forms of … Continue reading

In the same vein, pandemic rhetorics linked to anti-Asian violence dehumanize us. Asian/Americans and our diverse histories are made incomprehensible. The common processes by which we came to the United States—foreign wars, colonization, and U.S. strategies for pursuing global power and creating a flexible labor flow— are reduced to a simple, single narrative. The military metaphor of viral infection is mapped onto Asian/American bodies as the vector. We continue to be framed as stealthy, dangerous foreign bodies invading the white national(ist) body. Moreover, to position Asian/Americans as the virus is to position the white body as the body of primacy, the body that matters, the body that needs protection from attacks of foreign invaders. The projection of this military narrative onto Asian/American bodies is both ironic and infuriating. It is our lands, our national bodies, our communities, our families, and our physical bodies that have all been the site of military invasion, colonization, and appropriation. Interrupting how the medical rhetoric of disease and infection is projected onto Asian bodies requires an attention to both (trans)national and local histories and an interrogation of historical narratives that propagate problematic assumptions about migration and movement. Foreign wars, colonization, and strategies for filling United States labor shortages are some of the common reasons Asians reside in “America.” And yet the immigration myth that people come to the U.S. to create a better life for themselves is powerful and enduring because it’s not wholly untrue. For example, although many Filipinxs migrated to the U.S. under colonization in search of better lives, we are not often taught why this better life could not be pursued in the Philippines as their economic, educational, and political structures were impacted by three and a half centuries of Spanish and U.S. colonization. Indeed, the migration of the first Chinese workers to the United States in the mid nineteenth-century was prompted by the Opium Wars instigated by European powers to lay claim to China’s trade. “We are here because you were there” is a common phrase that Asian/Americans have used to respond to questions like “Where are you from?” or “Why are you here?” Such responses position migration narratives within larger contexts of flow with longer histories of movement with colonialism in mind. 

History, in our own teaching, research, administrative, and personal life, has been a way to highlight what Lisa Lowe (1996) calls “the contradictions of Asian immigration, which at different moments in the last century and a half of Asian entry into the United States have placed Asians ‘within’ the U.S. nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet linguistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as ‘foreign’ and ‘outside’ the national polity.” In other words, while Asian/American bodies are hyper-visible as “Other,” our histories and relationships to “America” are often invisible. To be Asian/American is to be both hyper-visible and invisible, which is why the metaphor of the coronavirus as a stand-in for Asian bodies (being both potentially anywhere and undetectable) echoes and endures. One way to interrupt the viral underpinnings of yellow peril rhetoric is to historicize it and thus to re/vision it within a larger context of movement and flow. We are not a virus, a disease, or a symptom. It has become evident to us (physically, mentally, intellectually) and our communities that metaphorizing Asian/Americans as the virus has justified a vigilante “justice” to punish and curtail our movement, to create an environment of terror where Asian/Americans aren’t afforded the freedom of moving in public spaces without harassment. 

As new attention has been paid in the national media about Asian/American communities, it is increasingly evident that we are no longer “contained” in Chinatowns, even as those community spaces have spread across the country. Census data shows that the Asian/American population was the fastest growing population, growing 81% between 2000 and 2020 (Budiman and Ruiz 2021). Asians are everywhere: in the American South, the Midwest, the Southwest, as well as the East and West coasts.^[7]Budiman and Ruiz (2021) explain how Asian/American populations have “increased in every state and the District of Columbia over the past two decades.” See also Gebeloff, Lu and Jordan’s article … Continue readingAnd so if we are seen as embodiments of the coronavirus, it seems we certainly have fulfilled the white nationalist fear of invasion, infection, and spread. Not surprisingly, the epidemic of violence has followed. An April 3, 2021 New York Times article listed all the reported physical and verbal attacks (up to that point) on children, adults, and the elderly of a range of ethnicities across the country. The victims of the attacks ranged from a two-year-old who was stabbed to a 68-year-old man to a pregnant woman as well as families with their small children witnessing the attack. We include the list, in full, here to illustrate the extent of the violence that, except for the two or three widely reported incidents, have largely gone unnoted. 

San Diego | A young family
Chicago | A 26-year-old lab technician
Martinsville, Ind. | A Korean-American doctor
Albuquerque | A freshman in college
Syracuse, N.Y. | A videographer
Manhattan | A 23-year-old student
Manhattan | A 59-year-old man
Fresno, Calif. | A California family
Queens | A 47-year-old man and his 10-year-old son
Midland, Texas | A family with a 2-year-old baby
Manhattan | A woman on the subway
Miami Beach | An elderly woman
Chicago | A 60-year-old man on a jog
San Diego | An Uber driver
Brooklyn | A 26-year-old on a subway
San Angelo, Texas | A 23-year-old exchange student
Bronx | A 52-year-old woman
Cleveland, Ohio | A Thai-American woman
Queens | A 37-year-old woman
Edison, N.J. | A 55-year-old woman
Queens | A 36-year-old woman
Manhattan | A 30-year-old man
Manhattan | A 30-year-old nurse
Stevens Point, Wis. | Grocery shoppers in Wisconsin
Manhattan | A 36-year-old woman
Philadelphia | A couple at a stoplight
Seattle | A couple
Philadelphia | A 32-year-old attorney
Albany, N.Y. | A 27-year-old Korean shop employee
San Jose, Calif. | An elderly couple
Queens | A 23-year-old man
St. Petersburg, Fla. | A sports reporter
Carmel Valley, Calif. | A family celebrating a birthday
Mt. Tam, Calif. | A family on a hiking trail
Los Altos, Calif. | A U.S. Postal Service worker
Brooklyn | A man driving
Bronx | A 30-year-old woman
Philadelphia | A pregnant mother
Los Angeles | A woman waiting for her lunch
Newport Beach, Calif. | A Korean-American entrepreneur
Fremont, Calif. | A woman and her 10-year-old daughter
Los Angeles | A man in traffic
Washington D.C. | A tea shop owner
Manhattan | A man in a car accident
Pineville, N.C. | A real estate agent
San Diego | A man working out in a gym
Manhattan | A 32-year-old woman
Orange County, Calif. | A woman at a shopping mall
Seattle | A woman at a crosswalk
Seattle | A couple taking money from an ATM
Portland, Ore. | A 44-year-old woman and her son
Salem, Ore. | A 21-year-old student
Los Angeles | A woman walking down the street
Manhattan | A 27-year-old man
Los Angeles | A 27-year-old Air Force veteran
Seattle | A Japanese-American high school teacher
Manhattan | A 56-year-old man
Brooklyn | A woman in a parking lot
San Francisco | An Uber driver
Los Angeles | A Filipino Uber driver
Brooklyn | A gym manager
Miami | A woman riding a bus
Queens | A 25-year-old mother and her baby
Oakland, Calif. | A gas station owner
San Jose, Calif. | A 26-year-old woman
Manhattan | A young couple
Queens | A 13-year-old boy
Manhattan | A 41-year-old woman
Manhattan | A 68-year-old man
Manhattan | A 66-year-old man
Brooklyn | An Asian American laundromat owner
Manhattan | A 37-year-old woman
Manhattan | A 54-year-old woman
Los Angeles | A Korean man
Queens | A 35-year-old woman
Houston | A Korean-American beauty store owner
Manhattan | A 65-year-old woman
Manhattan | A 37-year-old woman
Manhattan | A 65-year-old woman
Brooklyn | A 28-year-old man
Los Gatos, Calif. | A woman of Filipino descent
Manhattan | A 44-year-old woman
Los Angeles | A 35-year-old actress

As we confronted this litany of violence and reflected on the verbal assaults and the rhetoric that accompanied the physical violence, we asked: Are these incidents attempts to stop the virus’s spread? Are they evidence that people have found an excuse to act on a simmering resentment against Asian/Americans, fueled by popular media and viral channels of misinformation? And how many other attacks have gone unreported? Closer to our institutional homes: How often have we stopped to think about how these histories and events affect our Asian/American students and colleagues on a daily basis? How might they affect the way we move across campuses and the communities that surround post-secondary educational institutions and beyond? How often have we stopped to think about how these histories and events affect and should matter to non-Asian/American students and colleagues as well? What does it mean to intervene? How might this impact the way we approach community engagement? How do these questions challenge the way we think about how people move through space and across borders, especially within conversations about community engagement?

Moving from Histories of Anti-Asian Racism to Everyday Anti-Asian Racism in the Discipline and the Academy

Building on how metaphors of viral movements are imposed onto the movement of Asian/American bodies, we consider here how such metaphors have influenced our own (and others’) movements as Asian/American women through the physical and virtual halls of academia. That is, we consider how our discussion of the virus and its conflation with Asian bodies might shed light on how Asian and Asian/American movements are “Othered” in the discipline and in our everyday work lives. For example, Asian/American scholarship is often treated as a foreign contaminant to the canonical body of the discipline. Because Asian/American scholarship potentially disrupts systems, the virus metaphor points to how its seemingly uncontrollable and unpredictable movement threatens how white supremacy structures the discipline. As former co-chairs of the Asian/Asian American Caucus, we have experienced and witnessed patterns in how Asian/Americans experience our discipline before, during, and (most likely) after the pandemic—if there is an after. The literal and metaphoric restriction of mobility reverberates through these patterns. These patterns may resonate with other scholars of color but manifest differently based on how our complex racialized, gendered, and other subjectivities are positioned within larger intersectional systems of white supremacist patriarchy—borrowing from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) discussion of intersectionality across Black women’s experiences.

As Asian/Americans moving through the discipline and the university, we have experienced and collected countless stories of the ways our movements are closely scrutinized. The mounting evidence tells a larger story about how our teaching is micromanaged, our bodies (dress, speech, hairstyle, etc.) regulated and our productivity and expertise dismissed and too often viewed as a threat to white privilege and success. Asian/American women are often told they are productive but that the quality of their work is below an implicit, ambiguous standard. This not-quite-white projection onto Asian/Americans is also evident during job searches when we overhear racially loaded feedback on Asian/American job candidates, even when these candidates are advanced in their careers. These stock stories are unfurled below to expose their denotative meanings: 

“You are intimidating. You’ll make others look bad if you are that productive.”

“You are productive, but it’s not just quantity but also the quality of your work that matters.”

“You’re doing too much.”

“You’re not friendly enough.”

“You’re not welcoming to [white] students.”

“You’ve produced more than the senior faculty on your evaluation committee, but it’s still not enough.”

This incomplete list of counterstories indexes larger patterns of shared experience that show how systemic power is wielded and white supremacy maintained, as evidenced in a number of contributions by Asian/American women in collections of essays about women and race in academia.^[8]Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy (2020), Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Eds., Gutiérrez Y … Continue reading Taken together, these statements map onto several racialized tropes, reflecting a pattern where Asian/American movement through the ivory tower and the discipline is a threat that must be harnessed and kept under control. When mapped onto the racialized stock stories and interpretations of Asian/Americans, we become the: 

• Model minority that mimics but never quite meets white standards.
• Overachieving model minority that’s gone too far and is now a yellow peril and threat to white success.
• Cold and unemotional Asian robot that is hyper-productive but unfocused and lacking critical thought.
• Infantile and inept Asian who needs to be chastised by a white authority and told what to do.
• Not-quite-white Asian body who is not submissive or deferential enough to white students and colleagues.
• Asian body that must know its place and be kept in line.

These are but a few real examples that exemplify larger, pervasive patterns of anti-Asian racism in the field and that are quite clearly yoked to larger cultural and historical anti-Asian discourses. We note that these comments may be heard similarly and differently by members of many different minoritized groups. That said, it is imperative that we recognize how our varied histories and contexts affect how we hear these comments, and not just in theory. If we understand that context and history matter to how we speak to audiences, we should acknowledge how, due to lack of understanding of Asian/American contexts, our white colleagues have often dismissed such comments as innocuous or even complimentary (as we’ve had many well-meaning white women colleagues do, often in the context of mentoring us—helping us to more appropriately move about our spaces and profession). Without an understanding of these histories, academia will undoubtedly further anti-Asian racism in teaching, mentorship, community engagement, review of scholarship, and so on. 

With the militarized metaphor of viral movement in mind, how do the above comments leveled at Asian/American scholars reflect the ways that our predominantly white colleagues manage anxieties about minoritized faculty moving into spaces that are ostensibly theirs, out-performing them, or as threats to how they see themselves and the academy where they have already been guaranteed privilege? Heard against the history of yellow peril and model minority rhetoric—of invasion and infection—these comments express a fear that Asian/Americans will invade and infect the discipline, making it unrecognizable and foreign to those who feel ownership of it and entitled to be centered in the discourses, methodologies, and movements of the discipline. It’s an attempt to reclaim, to reterritorialize, to maintain the boundaries of a disciplinary body that privileges white ownership. These racial micro- and macro-aggressive comments are one way to manage these anxieties and to uphold these disciplinary territories.

Moreover, critical frameworks used by Asian/American scholars are often seen as inappropriate and irrelevant movements into the discipline while white scholars who are doing research on Asian/American topics are praised. Theoretical frameworks from other disciplines are at times seen as relevant while critical race theory or ethnic studies frameworks are often seen as not appropriately contributing to disciplinary conversations deemed important, or at other times supported in name but not in action, particularly when used to challenge the status quo. Asian/American women are so often viewed with a sense of suspicion or the assumption that we need to be told what’s what and thus made to conform. We are treated as deviations and threats to white standardized ways of being and knowing, and we must manage the feeling of constantly being encountered as incapable, inept, incompetent, and undisciplined, thus being told that our understanding of reality must be wrong. And this pattern relates to yellow peril rhetoric which treats any yellow version of reality as a threat and danger to white ways of being—except when our ways of knowing are appropriated for white gain and to reassert the status quo. To be a yellow peril is to not have anything significant to offer the larger group/place/institution. We are approached as needing to be taught how to move through the discipline rather than seen as able to move the discipline in new directions. Or, it is suggested that we need to be shown how to move through the discipline in ways that don’t threaten others’ status, academic territory, or beliefs.

• An Asian/woman graduate student is told by her white professor that she doesn’t understand her own topic related to Asian American rhetoric. 
• Another Asian/American woman graduate student’s colleagues cannot distinguish her work as a study of Asian/American community activism as opposed to a study of Asian rhetoric. 
• A pre-tenured Asian/American scholar is told to learn her history and referred to a book that she’s already read. 
• A flagship journal editor moved into the space of the Asian/Asian American Caucus to invite emerging scholars to submit manuscripts and then tells them: “your argument is not clear” or “this argument has already been made” or “how is this different from what so-and-so has argued?” It seems they aren’t asking themselves how the argument being made is not clear to them as a white reader, how the argument being made is actually different from those made by others.
• An Asian/American faculty member is introduced at their department reception, but the chair is unable to represent their scholarship accurately despite the many materials made available for the chair to draw upon. The white faculty member in the same cohort is lauded for their scholarship because they focus on postcolonial studies. 
• An Asian/American scholar working toward tenure is told they need to publish in more “flagship” journals. 
• Our names are often mispronounced, or we are mistaken for the other Asian/American woman in the department, in the college, in the discipline, not entirely unlike how yellow peril rhetoric treats Asians as one massive all-look-same yellow horde. 
• An Asian faculty member tries to have a conversation with her dean about the racism behind student comments about her accent in course evaluations. The dean responds by suggesting that she take a class to “correct” speech “defects.”
• Asian/Americans are not only rendered invisible as teachers and scholars but also made invisible as campus leaders and administrators. Asian/Americans are not seen as ready and capable of leadership, and they are less likely to be chosen to lead committees, university-wide initiatives, departments, or colleges—even more so if they are Asian/American women or read as feminine. 

And in those few instances when Asian/Americans are in administrative, leadership, or other highly visible positions, the messages strike a slightly different tone, but with similar underlying messages:

• You are too ambitious; you are moving (or rising?) too fast. (You’re not ready to be a leader. Slow your roll.)
• You are too entitled (You don’t “fit” in. You offend people. Don’t expect others to help you.)
• You may not want to pursue an administrative track. Administration may not be for you. (You’re not leadership material. Know your place.)
• An Asian/American woman administrator’s boss asks her to organize her files and do other secretarial work. The administrator replies that perhaps the boss’s secretary could actually handle that work. 
• An Asian/American administrator is surveilled, and she feels her movements are micromanaged and controlled—when she gets in, when she leaves the office, as if she were an hourly employee who needs to “clock” in and out. 
• An Asian/American woman administrator relies heavily on support staff (mostly middle-aged white women) who resist her authority: an assistant storms out of her office after being assigned a task, a staff member rolls her eyes as the administrator speaks.
• A staff member asks a brand new Asian/American administrator, “Aren’t you supposed to be in this meeting?”—a meeting that wasn’t on her calendar. The administrator runs to the meeting only to interrupt a highly sensitive meeting between the provost and deans. The administrator looks, at best, clueless and unprofessional, or at worst, brash, disrespectful, and entitled, in front of upper administrators.

Asian/American women in leadership positions often have to move out of their home units to look for mentors, usually other women of color, who can help us develop our administrative ethos and who can listen and legitimate gaslighting experiences. Along with the added work of locating appropriate mentors and building relationships with those across campus, we suffer from a lack of appropriate mentoring within our own discipline or the administrative/academic unit we are expected to lead and in which our success is evaluated. Oftentimes, outsiders are expected to simply assimilate, something our forever foreign Asian bodies can never quite do or want to do. We are certainly not invited to help change or revitalize programs and practices. While cross-disciplinary partnerships can be productive, this arrangement nevertheless fractures possible solidarities and efforts at change. 

In many cases, we may be the only Asian/American academic in our department, even as Asian/Americans are perceived as being “overrepresented” in the university. There are always too many of us, even when there is only one of us. 

An Asian/American woman scholar—the only one in her very large department—is told that the department won’t hire an Asian/American woman finalist for a tenure track position in the same field because the candidate “duplicates” the work the Asian/American woman scholar is doing. 

The lump sum of Asians at any given institution is frequently used to make the case that Asians are not a minority and thus do not need resources. As a result, we are excluded from discussions about support for minoritized (“underrepresented”) students. There is often no recognition that we may at times be quantitatively represented yet underserved as it is well known that aggregated data on Asian/Americans conceals the historical, social, and economic demographics of and intersectional differences within Asian/American communities and populations. Disaggregated data is more likely to reveal the disparities between, for example, East Asian/Americans and Hmong/Americans in terms of economic status and educational opportunity.

At times, there are many Asian/American faculty in STEM and business fields, but there are far more Asian/American men than there are Asian/American women who are more often in non-tenure track positions, and there are few of us in the humanities, let alone any with an ethnic studies background. It is no surprise, then, that students can and often do graduate with a four-year degree without ever encountering content focused on Asian/American experience, art, or meaning making. It is also not a surprise that there is broadly a lack of understanding of the history, culture, and experience of Asian/Americans, especially as it pertains to the local institution both on campus and within the surrounding city/community. 

We move across the university and into our local community looking for a cohort, a community, support. We often make efforts to build community, a form of labor that is not recognized by our departments until a crisis like COVID-related anti-Asian racism makes it imperative that the university recognize this other pandemic and take a stand. We watch our white colleagues receive recognition for their community-engaged work, while our own efforts in Asian/American communities are dismissed as “mere service” or perfunctory because of our identities. If and when we are finally lauded, briefly, for our work in this area, it may be with no recognition that we’ve been doing this work all along. Although some institutions are truly shifting, we also see other forms of resistance across institutions and among many of our colleagues. 

We have listed in this section numerous examples (at least those fit to print) to demonstrate patterns of experience that speak to systemic racism against Asian/Americans within the academy, and, more specifically, the restriction of movement of the threatening, dangerous, and contaminating “Other.” We do so knowing that this kind of work, especially when done by BIPOC scholars, is dismissed as too “anecdotal” or “only” based on our personal experiences. Indeed, there is a prevailing interpretation by white readers that “personal” stories told by people of color are, by default, untheorized, ungrounded in the discipline, and simply reflect an individual’s idiosyncratic experience rather than a larger pattern or phenomenon. We are constantly exhorted to explain ourselves in ways that the dominant discipline might be able to hear us. Ironically, those who accept that the “personal is political” in racially unmarked situations are quick to deny it in the work of BIPOC scholars. For those who might find themselves wanting to dismiss our point (as so often happens), we ask how much research have you done on anti-Asian racism in academia and in U.S. colonial history? And why did you feel the need and the authority to so quickly critique our point, before attempting to learn, to understand?

Finally, we consider it important to contextualize the stories listed above in relation to existing work by BIPOC scholars that likewise demonstrates how racialized faculty are treated as threatening and in need of restraint. Counterstories of how BIPOC faculty experience the university and are treated as threatening can be found in Carmen Kynard’s (2015) “Teaching While Black: Witnessing and Countering Disciplinary Whiteness, Racial Violence, and University Race-Management,” and in more explicit and physically violent ways in Ersula Ore’s (2015) “They Call me Dr. Ore,” and (2019) Lynching. The willful misreading of BIWOC scholarship is also explained as “epistemological exclusion” in Carter-Tod’s “Why So Few of US: Addressing Larger Issues of Systemic Exclusions That Limit the Numbers of Black Writing Program Administrators,” and skillfully dramatized by Martinez (2014) in “A Plea for Counterstory” through her depiction of Alejandra, a Chicana graduate student, where she illustrates the “stock” story of faculty discussing whether Alejandra is qualified to continue in the Ph.D. program. While the experiences of Asian/American faculty that we list in this article (as well as those experiences not listed here) resonate with this work, it is also necessary to note that institutionalized racism affects different groups and subjectivities differently, based in large part on our distinct histories and experiences of racialization.

Re/Visioning How We Move through Disciplinary Spaces

To perceive anti-Asian racism and violence as only happening because of the COVID-19 pandemic and only happening outside of the locations we occupy in the academy denies how white supremacy has shaped academia and the discipline. Looking to the example of U.S. imperialism, we see how white supremacy produced colonial governing structures, new forms of political and educational institutions, and a series of myths to legitimate the displacement, exclusion, and violence required to defend those structures. By academically “documenting” the distinctions between colonizers and the colonized, North American universities, disciplines, scholars, and teachers bolstered their authority and defined who was worthy of inclusion in Western forms of government, power, and knowledge-making practices, indeed who was considered fully human. These forms of inclusion and exclusion governed not only (trans)national movement but also movement within predominantly white spaces in the United States. Many of these oppressive structures, and the cultural myths that helped legitimate them, still endure. And while rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies is a relatively “new” discipline in relationship to other academic disciplines—and one that often associates its emergence with the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s (even though historical and contemporary treatment of BIPOC faculty would seem to prove otherwise)^[9]See, for instance: History of the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English, Viva Nuestro Caucus: Rewriting the Forgotten Pages of our Caucus, and Building a Community, Having a … Continue reading—it is important to interrogate how the discipline restricts movement of racialized subjects within its confines. 

To think through next steps for challenging the discipline’s complicity in anti-Asian racism, we ask:

• In survey courses on rhetoric, methods, literacy, or writing pedagogies, how often do you assign Asian/American authors? Do you assign works by/about Asian people in more than tokenistic ways? Meaning, rather than just adding Asian/American scholars to the syllabus, do you actually use this scholarship to reimagine the course—and your understanding of the terms of the course, whether rhetoric, writing, movement, or something else—more broadly? And how often do you “keep us in our place” in the discipline (i.e., in a single week or unit on race and rhetoric)? Do you assign the same few readings, the same one or two Asian/American scholars, only those who are seen as “in conversation” with what you perceive as “the discipline”? How invested are you in up-and-coming scholars learning about the complexity of Asian (and other BIPOC) people as human beings with history and insights that are critically important to “dominant” understandings of rhetoric, writing, literacy, methods? 
• How many Asian leaders can you think of in the history of our field? How many Asian women or genderqueer leaders can you think of in the history of our field? How does lack of support for Asian women in leadership positions play into the stereotype that Asians are technically skilled workers and not leaders? 
• If you start to say to yourself, “there aren’t enough of them out there” or “we asked them and they said no,” then ask yourself why this might be the case. Are you looking for leaders who can fill the shoes established by white supremacy? Are you building a trustworthy and mutually beneficial relationship? And how are we as a discipline complicit in this supposed lack of Asian/American scholars in the field?
• How often do you not cite Asian (women) scholars when writing about issues critical to Asian/American experience? How often do you decide that a white scholar will be more appropriate or legitimate? Moreover, how often do you not cite Asian scholars when writing about disciplinary issues they have written about and intervened in?^[10]We refer readers to the principles articulated by Cite Black Women to recenter and acknowledge the intellectual history and contributions of Black women across time as a scholarly and pedagogical … Continue reading
• We urge readers to ask yourselves how much you know about why Asians are in your local area. How familiar are you with the history of Asians in your region? And how contextualized is your response in relation to larger histories of movement? 
• How much work do you really do to inform yourself about Asian/American history beyond the inadequate and limited grand narratives spoon-fed to you by the State and by corporate media?
• When you think about doing community engagement partnerships, how often do you think about the diverse Asian/American communities in your region? How often do you think about all you could and should learn—about rhetoric, about writing, about literacy, about citizenship, about professional writing—from members of the Asian/American community in your area?
• As you design community writing projects—even when not working directly with an Asian/American community—how might you call attention to and interrupt community or (trans)national narratives that perpetuate military language or frame disease, im/migration, labor, or foodways in ways that potentially normalize racist attacks?
• When you approach communities to begin collaborative projects, do you assume that those communities were not shaped by Asian/Americans or Asian/American transnational histories? Do you recognize, look for, or enter conversations with the Asian/American leaders in those communities? Do you perform the labor of interrogating how anti-Asian racism might be shaping those relationships and/or projects? In what ways are you committed to sustaining the resilience, coalitions, languages, and literacies of Asian/American communities?
• Then ask yourself if you’re truly prepared to work with Asian/American students and colleagues in a way that is supportive and that does not perpetuate anti-Asian violence, including racial micro- and macro-aggressions. Then ask yourself if you are okay with that. 

To prepare ourselves to do actual anti-racist work of dismantling white supremacy, academic units need to develop mentorship training that is informed by and infused with critical race theory for faculty, and there needs to be actual incentivization to encourage all faculty to adopt those approaches. There also needs to be a balance between recruiting BIPOC students and scholars and transforming institutional cultures in ways that do not enact further violence upon them/us. For instance, when onboarding new faculty, departments can and should incorporate education about local communities in ways that center BIPOC and other multi-marginalized perspectives, both in and outside of the university.

It is vital that community-engaged teachers and scholars educate themselves about how Asian/American history has shaped places, communities, and histories—even (or especially) when their presence is largely hidden. Teaching East of California^[11]East of California is a caucus that was established within the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) in 1991 to support teachers and scholars in regions east of California, where Asian … Continue reading often means, for example, that many students have not seen Asian/American histories or communities as relevant to their education or to their lives. Asian/American history or literature have not typically been part of the K-12 curriculum. In addition, many non-Asian students’ everyday spatial (or discursive—reading, writing, listening) movements do not include Asian/American communities.^[12]In July 2021, through the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History Act (TEAACH), Illinois became the first state to mandate that Asian American history be taught in every K-12 public … Continue reading Engaging transnational and local Asian/American histories reveals multiple entangled forms of rhetoric about Asian/Americans that negate our humanity and obscure our histories: the model minority myth, yellow peril and Asian invasion, the overrepresented minority, the perpetual foreigner. Historical perspectives that frame Asian/Americans as “yellow peril” hide the forces that prompted diasporic and migration movements. At the same time, the “model minority myth” makes invisible the many ways Asian/Americans have historically united and formed cross-racial solidarities to demand justice.

Coming back to our movement metaphor, we argue that academics should engage in a parallel form of the recursive spatial movement described by Terese Guinsatao Monberg (2009)—and to do so in ways that understand meaning and rhetoric as always contingent on time, space, and embodiment. Focusing on communities of color, Monberg proposes a “writing as the community” paradigm for community writing, which challenges the assumption that one has to cross borders to “encounter difference.” She argues, instead, for movement “within their own borders or communities, so they might listen for the deeper textures present in the place(s) they might call ‘home.’” As Monberg explains, a theory of recursive spatial movement “teaches students to move and dwell differently in a community they may already know,” and as such, we suggest that a parallel form of recursive movement can be undertaken by white scholars, allowing them to learn about their disciplinary and academic communities across the racialized boundaries that are often drawn, not to take up this knowledge and claim it as their own, but rather to better situate their own understandings of rhetoric, pedagogy, literacy, and community. For many Asian/American and other minoritized academics in particular, this kind of recursive spatial movement is something we find ourselves doing when we move into university spaces, as a way of finding a community of our own and as a way to make sense of the rhetorical landscaping—to borrow Jacqueline Jones Royster’s (2003) usage—of university spaces. She writes, “Highlighting landscaping as an interpretive process underscores the extent to which interpretive enterprises are contingent more generally on perception and more specifically on the limitations of perception.” We take note of the university landscaping (literally) and who upkeeps it; how the university represents itself and its histories; and how Asian/Americans are positioned in relation to the university, including the extent to which we, our histories, and our ways of knowing are reflected in university curricula, recruitment and retention efforts, and tenure and promotion practices. We encourage this kind of recursive spatial movement as a way to advance an ethic of care and community, even within our own disciplinary and local communities. What would the process of developing that look like for you?

This is what it looks like from our perspective to do this work. We continuously expend—just as we are doing now—a great deal of energy trying to make ourselves legible while also disrupting the stock stories and characters that are always operating in this dialogue. This is the invisible labor of contextualizing our work in relation to canonical sources familiar to predominantly white readers in order to render our points legitimate in their eyes, while also introducing sources unfamiliar to them to relieve them from the extra work it would take to “discover” this work on their own. Our labor is often performed on behalf of those who are least informed. Nevertheless, this work goes unrecognized and is not valued. In fact, our labor often serves to enhance and advance the careers of those already in power, who have even, at times, taken credit for ideas and perspectives that they never had to work for. They can then present themselves as a DEI insider, while continuing to keep us, as their informants, outside the sphere of influence and structural change and outside the boundaries of what counts as making new knowledge in the discipline.

Indeed, structural change too often relies on the labor of those already harmed and overburdened by disciplinary and academic structures shaped by the legacy and culture of white supremacy. Crucial to creating more just, equitable, and sustainable structures will be an explicit recognition of this work as creating new disciplinary knowledge. For example, innovative work has been done by the “Cite Black Women” movement and the collectives that wrote “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices” and the “CCCC Black Technical and Professional Communication Position Statement with Resource Guide.” These works intervene in disciplinary knowledge, processes, and structures in important ways. How will this work be cited, documented as evidence-based scholarship, and taken up widely in the discipline? Will the collaborative process of authoring this work be recognized as strong works of scholarship that triangulate data sources and methods and identify patterns? Or, will this collaborative work be devalued as a product that is not single-authored, or, worse yet, seen as “mere service”? Although it’s been sustaining for BIPOC scholars to collaborate on these projects and to mobilize our counterstories into building more just practices, this collaboration must also be seen by the discipline as necessary to the production of current, relevant, and thorough evidence-based work. In short, academic units need to dedicate real resources and intellectual space to BIPOC perspectives, including Asian/American perspectives, while also being open to the reality that those perspectives will and should transform existing institutions and power structures.

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