New TAAF Article Examines AAPI Stereotypes Through History

Many Americans first became aware of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic, when racial harassment and violent crimes against Asian Americans made headlines. Discussions about the origins and spread of COVID had disturbing racial overtones, and unfounded stereotypes about cleanliness, mask-wearing, and even culinary practices ran rampant. But this fear and scapegoating of people of Asian descent was not a new phenomenon at all. In a new paper from TAAF, AAPI Stereotypes: History and Implications, we examine the origins and impacts of many of these stereotypes, which go back further than you might think:

Within the U.S., the racialization of disease was also rampant. In the 1800s and 1900s, Yellow Peril drove the stereotypes that Asians were immoral, unsanitary, prone to eating “foul” meats like rats, and carriers of diseases like leprosy and smallpox. In fact, many historic ethnic enclaves, such as San Francisco’s Chinatown, arose from White communities’ hatred of Asian bodies sharing White people’s spaces, and therefore quarantining Chinese people and their “unsanitary” practices in slums far away from city centers. In addressing syphilis in San Francisco in the late 1870s, Dr. H. H. Toland, the founder of Toland Medical College (later the University of California Medical School) testified before a congressional committee describing Chinese prostitution as “the source of the most terrible pollution of the blood of the younger and rising generations.”

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