But both Russia and China are a menace and evil. -nfg-
state propaganda tells us for like forever
Mongoloid Menace!
While plotting out my next installment, I picked up another pandemic-related book from my local San Francisco library. It’s about how authorities handled a small bubonic plague breakout in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the first few years of the 20th century — and all the bigotry and hysteria and profiteering schemes and political fighting that came out of it.
I picked up this book because it’s related to the pandemic and to a piece of San Francisco’s forgotten early history — only later realizing that it of course it overlaps somewhat with my own immigrant project. Chinese workers here in America had a lot of similarities to the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire: they lived in a parallel yet economically integrated world. They were forced into ghettos, were routinely pogromed, and suffered all sorts of discrimination and exploitation and had to navigate various exclusionary laws, including restrictions on owning property.
Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown by Guenter B. Risse.
I’ve been making my way through it now and I think it’s probably a bit too detailed for the general reader — gets too much into the weeds of the local San Francisco situation. But even as I write this I’m thinking, “maybe not.” It’s interesting history and and it’s filled with all sorts of bits that are relevant to our own pandemic situation. Stuff like this — from the first signs of a possible outbreak in 1900:
In early January of that year a group of medical experts had expressed confidence that no foreign illness would stage a "“disastrous invasion” of American because of the “sanitary improvements of progressive civilization.” Bubonic plague was considered an “Oriental disease,” lurking in contaminated Asian soil…Its bacilli were generated in filthy matter, and the disease rarely afflicted individuals adhering to new Western hygienic principles.
I swear passages like this could be describing the way American’s media and political establishment treated Covid in the beginning of 2020, when it mocked China for taking it seriously. To the people in power here, the way China reacted was a cautionary tale about the way these shifty totalitarian foreigners will use any pretext, no matter how fake or silly, to repress their citizens. There was also a lot of talk about it being a filthy asiatic disease which emerged out of gross asiatic culinary habits — remember the bat soup memes and all that? All through those early months, people took it for granted that this was a filthy Asian disease and would never make an impact here, not in our clean, democratic America!
And there’s all sorts of other stuff in the book that’s relevant to our current pandemic: the militarization of pandemic control, the role of the press in inflaming and spreading fear and hate, the suppression of information about possible plague outbreaks because the knowledge would cause a panic and hurt commerce, and the way petty local political infighting immediately blew up and shaped the response to the disease — in San Francisco’s case, Democrats and Republicans in city government fought over the budget and prevented funds from being released to do bubonic plague surveillance in the city.
These are the kinds of conditions Chinese workers were forced to live in. San Francisco’s wealthy Anglo owners of these hovels believed the Chinese were barbaric and preferred to live like this.
But what really caught my eye was in early on in the book — in the introduction, actually. It has what is probably the most concise and readable description of the origins of the whole strange “mongoloid” racial category that emerged in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries — a category that encompasses pretty much all “non-European” easterners in Eurasia — anyone from Jews to Russians to the Chinese.
Here’s how Guenter B. Risse, the author of the book, explains this racial category:
Based on folk taxonomies, Asian racism traces its deep roots to Europe. To explain human diversity and claim self-identity, even superiority over the "other,” the ancients made ethnocentric distinctions linking physical characteristics and behavior to location and climate.14 Later, the medieval concept of a hierarchically arranged scala naturae, or chain of being, ranging from a perfect Christian God to the lowest speck of dirt, gained popularity. This notion placed some human groups—children, paupers, laborers, and idiots—close to brute primates. Faced with greater human diversity and inequality during the era of global exploration and early colonization, Europeans sought to elaborate on the biblical notion of a single family tree. Francois Bernier, a seventeenth-century French physician-traveler characterized people from East Asia as flat faced, with short noses, little and deep-set pig eyes, and thin beards.
During the Scientific Revolution, naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus in Sweden pursued a comprehensive inventory of the world through a classification of plants, animals, and people. A geographical and biological determinist, he selected the four known continents as habitats for distinct human populations or “races” (an English translation from the Spanish term raza, from the Latin ratio, meaning “species” or “stock”). These categories were based on biological, behavioral, and cultural information. Commingling physical features with behavioral traits, Linnaeus’s Homo Asiaticus was profiled as a person with black hair and dark eyes, displaying a yellowish, sallow complexion, and endowed with a melancholic temperament.
Building on Linnaeus’s work, the German physician and anatomist Johann F. Blumenbach proposed in 1795 a new “scientific” racial system based on speculative physiology and an extensive collection of skulls. Employing physical characteristics such as cranial measurements and skin color, the scheme featured five major species of humanity: Caucasian (white), Mongolian (olive yellow) Ethiopian (black), Malay (tawny brown), and American Indian (copper red). The terms Caucasian and Mongolian both were borrowed from a colleague of Blumenbach; the former designated white people from the northern Caucasus region (today's Chechnya), presumed to be near the biblical landing of Noah’s Ark. Caucasians represented the very archetype of God's original creation: beautiful and “not stained with pigment.”
As a foil for the perfect white Caucasians, Blumenbach adopted a new racial category—Mongolian—a designation that sought to lump all ethnic Asian populations. The label harked back to images of invading barbarian hordes under the ruthless leadership of Genghis Khan, which caused death and destruction in Eastern Europe during the thirteenth century. Coarse and filthy, Mongolians were ugly people, endowed with square, flat faces, narrow eyelids, and scanty hair.
Blumenbach's notion that all “colored” races suffered structural variations that affected human size, vitality, and strength because they diverged or “degenerated” from the ideal Caucasian template set the stage for subsequent anatomical distinctions and degrading racial stereotypes. Instead of climate and culture, presumed racial characteristics were deemed biological, “hereditary, permanent and unalterable.” Comparative anatomical studies of skull shape and facial angle suggested to racial scientists that Chinese possessed diminished intellect and moral character. A comparison with Caucasian and chimpanzee brains claimed to demonstrate some unfavorable Chinese ratios regarding size and weight. The diminished cranial capacity explained the inability to adopt Western ideas, Christian religion, mechanical arts, and sciences. Moreover, the typical Mongolian eye fold was pathologized: the slanted eyelids were associated with shifty, unscrupulous behavior. The pale yellow skin color assigned to Asians reflected indolence, even unwellness, jaundice and potential foulness. By the 1850s, French and German psychiatrists came to emphasize the dangers of hereditary mental degeneration for the future of humankind, leading to new dread of interracial contacts and degraded offspring.
Advanced material and social organization—notably science and technology—made Caucasians “civilized” while all “colored" people were collectively degraded as "savages,” especially black Africans involved in the burgeoning slave trade. Race remained a potent social and cultural construction in search of scientific validation. With help from subsequent anthropological studies, physical racial characteristics were effectively linked to inferences regarding personality traits and behavior. Asians were deemed dishonest and depraved in spirit and manner. Such racial categories became particularly relevant in Britain and its former colonies, including the United States, as these countries sought to consolidate political power, establish social hierarchies, and create systems of economic exploitation.
When Chinese migrants came to America's West Coast following the gold rush, they were greeted with condescension and aversion. The experience of diplomats, missionaries, and travelers to China suggested that “Mongolians” were “barbarians,” primitive humans often behaving like, their subhuman animal cousins. Race-making in San Francisco was equally shaped by local political, social, and economic circumstances. In California, the Mongolian race category became a legal designation allowing for discriminatory legislation. Depicted through popular stereotypes, Chinese with their queues (hairbraids) and distinctive clothing were routinely portrayed as “little brown men” and “urchins.” Local writers commented on their effeminate, childlike appearance: the “flat” and “dull” faces with “slanting fishlike eyes” narrowed by Mongolian eye folds.” Some followed the degeneration model by; describing a Chinese person as a “queer little specimen of petrified progress with a natural propensity for conflict, violence, crime, and prostitution.” An apparent greater tolerance for pain prompted notions of arrested development of their nervous systems. Californians eagerly adopted the racialized conception of a “yellow peril” — a phrase, coined in late-nineteen century — to categorize the threat Asian peoples posed to European-American civilization. This notion suggested another invasion of ‘‘heathen.” Mongol migrants, who would debilitate labor and social relations even as they adhered to their traditional “barbarian traits. Among the most feared aspects of this assault was the potential importation of dangerous diseases endemic to the Asian continent. When Congress passed its first Chinese Exclusion-Law in 1882, such racial arguments remained at the forefront of the justifications for the legislation: “Mongolians are alien to our civilization, aliens in blood, aliens in faith…they are a degraded people.”
The Mongolian category has been dropped from respectable usage. But other aspects of this categorization scheme remain — specifically the ridiculous Caucasian racial grouping.
Anyway, reading this passage made me think something else. It’s been wiped from collective memory — now that Trump is out of office — but all this talk about shifty asiatics invading and degrading white, god-fearing America reminded me that for four years straight our liberal media talked about the “Russians” in pretty much the same way — day in, day out. I’m not even joking.
Anyway, have a great day. The past is always with us.
—Yasha Levine |
