Short Wave - The U.S. Has A History Of Linking Disease With Race And Ethnicity

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

(Encore episode.) The coronavirus is all over the headlines these days. Accompanying those headlines? Suspicion and harassment of Asians and Asian Americans. Our colleague Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch podcast, explains that this is part of a longer history in the United States of camouflaging xenophobia and racism as public health and hygiene concerns. We hear from historian Erika Lee, author of "America For Americans: A History Of Xenophobia In The United States."LEARN MORE:Check out Code Switch's full digital story and podcast episode.And here's a collection of NPR's coverage on the rise in violence against Asian Americans. Erika Lee's book "America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States"As always, reach out to the show by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey everyone, Emily Kwong here. While the investigation into the shootings in Atlanta is ongoing, the trauma of this event magnifies the rise in anti-Asian harassment, discrimination, and assault this past year. So we wanted to share with you an episode we did from March 2020, the start of this pandemic, with reporting from the NPR podcast Code Switch. It's about the historical origins of xenophobia in the U.S. and how it connects with the rise in anti-Asian discrimination today. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, everybody, podcast reporter and occasional host, Emily Kwong here. So, coronavirus has been all over the news, with new cases of the disease COVID-19 popping up around the world and in the United States. We begin with this, the deadly coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the U.S. Mounting fears surrounding coronavirus have forced some districts to cancel school. Growing chance, the coronavirus outbreak causes a global recession. And along with all of that coverage, all the headlines and photos, there's a growing anxiety. My family and I, we were going out to lunch.

Such that Asians and Asian Americans find themselves the targets of suspicion, discrimination, and harassment. They told my wife and son to get away. Get out of here, go back to China. People call us Corona. People ask us if we eat dogs. And this kid said, well, you're Chinese, so you must have the coronavirus. Coronavirus. It's probably coronavirus.

The woman then replied that she isn't racist, but she just doesn't want to get sick. These stories were all submitted to NPR's amazing Code Switch podcast. They did an episode on this. So we reached out to one of the co-hosts, Gene Demby. Hey, Gene. Hey, Emily. I got to be honest, my heart breaks listening to these stories because I I am Asian American. My dad is Chinese. And to see an entire group of people become the scapegoats for a virus, it just adds this layer of racial anxiety to what is already a serious public health concern.

Right. I mean, there's this long history in the U.S. of disease becoming linked to people's race and ethnicity. SARS was associated with Chinese people, you might remember. Ebola was associated with Africans. Irish as, you know, typhus carriers or. Jewish Italians and others from southern Eastern Europe as bringing tuberculosis. That's Erica Lee. She's a historian at the University of Minnesota and the author, importantly, of America for Americans, A History of Xenophobia in the United States. Historians have pointed out that in times of epidemics like this, that existing prejudices, existing ideas about certain groups get medicalized. So it's no way. mistake that certain diseases get attached to immigrant groups that are the perceived threat of

the time. So today on the show, how some people's fears of coronavirus have spurred harassment towards Asians and Asian Americans. And it's part of a very long history where disease gets entangled with xenophobia. Okay, so today we're talking about the suspicion and harassment of Asians and Asian Americans as the coronavirus spreads. And this kind of fear actually has a long history in the United States, right, Gene? A very long history. And actually, what we learned from Erica Lee is that the seeds of this discourse of China and Asia being unsanitary and crowded, those seeds were planted long before Chinese immigration to the U.S. You know, the teeming hordes of millions living in filth. And then as Americans who traveled to China and then came back to the United States,

States, they spread those ideas. Unfortunate. Yep. Right on brand for the U.S. though. Yeah. So, right. In the mid-1800s, you have the first waves of Chinese immigrants coming over to find fortune in the California gold rush. And they also become a source of cheap labor, working as farmhands, building our railroads, etc. And eventually this becomes a source of tension. Exactly. So when the domestic economy takes a downturn, different immigrant groups start competing for these previously undesirable jobs. And you start saying harassment, even massacres of Chinese workers. But Erica says that the idea of Chinese immigrants being dirty in disease, that's still with us.

We know from the very beginning, as Americans in general are starting to debate the so-called problem of Chinese immigration, they are explicitly tying China, Chinese people, Chinese spaces with disease and contagion. Historians have shown that the rhetoric is about Chinatown as plague spots, as cesspools of laboratories of infection. Erica says that way back in the late 19th century, we really started to see specific policies that reflect this thinking around Chinese as a threat to public health. Okay. Give me an example of that. So Erica told us about a quarantine that happened in 1900 in San Francisco when they discovered bubonic plague in Chinatown. Mm-hmm. Bubonic plague. That's a potential deadly bacterial disease.

Right, the black death, right? People believe rats brought across the Pacific bias steamship were a likely source of the disease. But Erica says San Francisco officials at the time saw the Chinese immigrants as vermin infested. So all of Chinatown was placed under quarantine. And there were these periodic campaigns to, quote, disinfect Chinatown, flooding basements in that district with acid, washing the walls with lye, tearing down old buildings. Wow. That rhetoric, by the way, Eric. Erica says has been applied to a lot of immigrant groups throughout history. But there is a particular way in which it has been racialized with Chinese. Chinese as dog eaters, as eaters of weird and strange animals, including rats and mice,

and that they, if they are eating and consuming rats that are known to spread disease, then Chinese people as a race are also carriers of disease. So what happened then was San Francisco's quarantine? So the plague became racialized, blamed on a group of people. The city ordered an immediate quarantine of Chinatown with orders to remove all whites from the affected area. So white residents of San Francisco were ordered to leave Chinatown, but Chinese people could not. It's such an intense thing to know and accept this history and realize it's been with us for a really long time. It's been with us.

haven't really grapple with that at all. And all of this, of course, is happening against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was passed in 1882, and that prevented Chinese laborers from entering the United States, which this is a time of heightened anti-Chinese rhetoric and sentiment. That law would actually mark the first time the U.S. banned the immigration of an entire ethnic group. Right. So when you and your co-host, Shereen Marisol Maragi, spoke to Erica Lee, Erica told you a very personal story about her grandfather and what happened to him when he immigrated to the U.S. And it's really relevant to what we're talking about today. Yeah.

So Erica's grandfather came to the U.S. through Angel Island. Right. Angel Island. It's like the Ellis Island of the West Coast. Right. It was in San Francisco Bay. And there was this whole special system of scrutiny for Chinese immigrants in particular. So Erica's grandfather, like so many Chinese immigrants to Angel Island, was pulled aside and inspected separately from other Asian immigrants because people believe that,

Chinese immigrants were carriers of disease. What a way to come into a country. Yeah, and she said that her grandfather never told her that story directly, but she was interested in it, and because she's a historian, she actually took up the records of her grandparents' interrogations, and specifically she found her grandfather's medical exam from Angel Island. It was, it was nothing like anything I've read before. immigration officials ordered my grandfather to be subjected to the most invasive and humiliating

medical exam that I've seen in hundreds of these records. So they had the medical doctor at Angel Island, you know, examine him for diseases, but also to measure every aspect of his body, his teeth, his genitals, his, you know, his height to determine what age he was, to determine whether his claim of being 17 when he was immigrating was actually true. And they included just all of these detailed notes in the record, and it was just quite shocking to read. Wow. That's really intense.

Yes. I mean, I hear this story and I think it's important at a time like this to hear stories like this. So, you know, we've been talking specifically about Chinese immigration. But as you mentioned earlier, this history of public health and hygiene efforts and how it gets mixed up with race and ethnicity. It's also happened to other immigrant groups. Right. And I mean, this is something that Erica talks about a lot in her book, which is, of course, about xenophobia in the United States. But it wasn't just Chinese immigrants who were being targeted in this way. I mean, if you looked at what was happening around the same time on the southern border,

Mexican immigrants to the U.S. were being treated very similarly. This is one of the ways in which xenophobia works. It uses an already existing playbook. You know, certain immigrants are threats. They are threats because they bring crime, also because they take away jobs, but also because they are sort of genetically carriers of disease. And surprise, surprise, American policymakers set up immigration procedures for Mexicans that looked a lot like what was happening to the Chinese on the West Coast.

And when Mexican immigrants arrived across the border, they were routinely subjected to invasive, humiliating, and harmful disinfecting baths using pesticides to rout out Laos, but also to cleanse Mexican peoples, their clothing, and their baggage before entering the United States. I mean, just the fact that Mexicans were seen as carrying disease in the same way that Chinese were, and that this pattern is repeated is really interesting. This is much harsher than what happened at Ellis Island, where European immigrants certainly faced scrutiny, but the medical exams were known as six-second physicals. And Chinese people in particular still carry around that stigma. And we're seeing that perception play out when it comes to coronavirus. Absolutely.

I, you know, there's a real anxiety and fear out there right now about getting sick that is getting tangled up in this legacy. And, you know, I'm picturing people who are listening to this. And they're thinking, yes, this history is real. I know this sounds really bad, but I'm just worried about eating at a Chinese restaurant, Gene and Emily. I'm just worried. And I'm worried about sitting next to someone who's Asian. What do I do? That's not how disease works, y'all.

We actually put this question to Erica. And she said, with each new headline, with each new case, with each new bizarre choice of photo for a new story, it only fans the flames of anxiety right now in the U.S. But racist scapegoating and outright discrimination does not have to accompany this anxiety. It is an unfortunate sort of echo of the past, but it doesn't have to be. That's historian Erica Lee. Thanks to Gene Denby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch for reporting this episode. Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez. It was edited by Viet Le and fact-checked by Emily Vaughan.

Special thanks to Shireen Marisol Maragi and the rest of the amazing team behind the Code Switch podcast. I'm Emily Kwong. This is Shortwave from NPR.