The Precarity of the Asian American Body in the Era of COVID-19
By: National Center For Institutional Diversity
Tags: Asian American, Discrimination, Covid 19, Covid 19 Crisis

This piece is part of our Spark series: Unmasked — Anti-Asian Violence amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Between March 18 and March 26, the online reporting council, Stop AAPI Hate, received over 650 firsthand reports of discrimination against primarily Asian Americans. In addition to verbal discrimination, physical attacks have been reported around the world against people of presumed Chinese descent. These people are of various ages, ethnicities, gender identities, and geographical locations. The only identity they all “share” is Asian and/or presumed Chinese descent. In this ongoing COVID-19 moment, bodies of presumed Chinese descent, or Asian-presenting bodies, are under public scrutiny, suspicion, attack, and exhibition. The level of anti-Asian and xenophobic turmoil recalls Japanese internment camps as well as legal actions like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The idea of the Asian body of presumed Chinese descent has, for many people around the world, turned into a hyper-visible signifier of virus, infection, and contagion.

Not Your Token Asian

This signification countervails the Asian “model minority” myth that was popularized in the 1960’s. In 1966, sociologist William Petersen’s New York Times article, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” argued for the idea that Japanese-Americans were “good” citizens “better than any other group in our society, including native-born whites. They have established this remarkable record, moreover, by their own almost totally unaided effort.” This stereotype also placed Japanese-Americans in stark contrast to African-Americans, reinforcing identity politics and competitiveness between minority groups.

While being the target of COVID-related racism and discrimination, Asian American physicians, nurses, healthcare, and essential workers also are being called to serve in large numbers on the frontlines of the pandemic. The paradox of being both “model minority” and enemy “Other” can be seen in the demographics of Asian American physicians, nurses, and healthcare workers serving to combat the virus and save lives. While the latest U.S. Census (2017) reports that 5.6% of the U.S. population identifies as Asian, at least 17.1% of U.S. physicians identify as Asian, with another 13.7% identifying as multiracial, “other,” or “unknown.” In addition, patients are refusing to be seen by Asian-American physicians due to fears of COVID-19. The inscrutability of Asian American rights and roles in the current moment can seem insurmountable. Asian Americans are now both blamed and called to serve as seeming martyrs in the cause.

Photo provided by author

Asian American Precarity

The COVID-19 crisis motivates me to think about the concept of precarity in light of the Asian American body. The human body can signify, in sickness or injury, an acknowledgment of precarity — the condition in which certain individuals or groups are exposed to unpredictable and uncertain life chances. Judith Butler writes about precarity as the condition of living an uncertain and vulnerable existence, oftentimes with respect to one’s gender identity or expression, socioeconomic status or class, race, and ethnicity. Precarity makes us consider the conditions of a livable life and address problems like social marginalization, job insecurity, and the disempowerment of historically marginalized individuals and groups. The Asian body’s vulnerability to death and bodily harm has been amplified in the face of public uncertainty of who carries the virus and what exactly caused it.

From the moment “China” appeared in the global lexicon of COVID-19 discourse, the virus was racialized. This racialization created a human target for reacting to the threat of infection and death. This targeting hearkens back to the end of the nineteenth century when European imperialist powers were expanding into vast expanses of interior Africa and Asia for the first time. Political leaders including the last German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II used the term “Yellow Peril” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to justify European colonialism in China.

When Russian sociologist (Yakov Novikov, 1849–1912), writing in French, popularized “Yellow Peril” in his 1897 essay, “Le Péril Jaune,” he activated a color metaphor that persists in racializing Asian bodies today. The phrase quickly became de facto grounds to distrust, objectify, and dispossess the Asian body of individual human qualities. In the past half century, decolonization and globalization may have unseeded the primacy of the “West” in the world’s political order, but the discourse of polarized “East vs. West” worldviews persists, as well as the implicit metaphor of “Yellow Peril.” This color metaphor has been adapted and manipulated to serve multiple purposes that continually dispossess the rights of the visibly “Asian” body and body politic.

COVID-19 Racialized: A Public Health Issue

Public health methods to control, limit, and stall the spread of COVID-19 have expanded state control over individual and collective freedoms, but these emergency actions have also heightened individual levels of uncertainty, panic, and fear-based actions. In this global pandemic, the role of the individual is charged with increased personal responsibility. In addition, the Asian-presenting body is under threat of violence and bodily plunder due to anti-Asian and xenophobic attacks. Used since the 1600’s, the idea and action of “plunder” refers to “taking something as spoil in time of war or civil disorder,” “to rob (a place or person) of goods or valuables forcibly,” “to despoil,” and “goods or valuables taken from an enemy by force; booty, loot.” As many have argued, the history of “Western” civilization’s global expansion is a history of plunder. From the Parthenon Marbles to the history of British plunder in India, countless examples of conquest and stolen goods populate the histories of nation-building and colonial struggles. For Asian representation during this pandemic, plunder is occurring not only physically but also psychologically, culturally, politically, and systematically.

At its broadest level, the paradoxical, disorienting role of the Asian American body in the era of COVID-19 illustrates how individual precarity can be a type of shared vulnerability across the spectrum of lived experience. This shared vulnerability is a humbling of the individual will in the face of collective suffering. Precarity, in certain contexts, can be a “resource for politics” in “[t]hat our very survival can be determined by those we do not know and over whom there is no final control.” As a resource, I argue that the precarity of the Asian body illustrates the limits of individual rights-based movements and the power in collective organizing across identities and interests. The representation of not only Asian voices but the historically marginalized, disenfranchised, and silenced groups of our collective antiracist struggles is a global public health issue.