SINOPHOBES IN SEASON:

Reports of anti-Asian violence and harassment abound, and right-wing websites, subreddits, and message boards are full of conspiracy theories and racist tropes targeting the Chinese. Incidents like those documented here, here, and here, point to a resurgence of "yellow peril" racism and remind us of the peculiar power of Orientalism to make Asians easy targets of racist conspiracy theories by casting us as forever foreign in our tastes, interests, and loyalties. President Trump's insistence on calling Covid-19 "Chinese," whether intended as a deflection or red meat for his base, appears to be playing an important, even definitive role here, legitimating racist right-wing conspiracy theories, and giving white nationalists permission. That permission is amplified by federal government inaction in the face of community demands to address reports of hate crimes. [...]

Steven Gardiner of Political Research Associates, a 40-year-old nonprofit strategy and research center that is monitoring how anti-Chinese resentment is blending with anti-globalism and anti-Semitism, sums up the current situation: "The racist right is both inciting its followers and engaging in a bigoted call-and-response with the Trump administration.... Provocateurs like Anne Coulter are consolidating every Sinophobic slur into Covid-19 currency for right-wing media consumers, while more sober seeming outlets like American Renaissance are waxing nostalgic for the Chinese Exclusion Act with unmasked white nationalism."

This kind of bait-and-switch--in which targets of popular bigotry are used as proxies for less easily assailed scapegoats--is a tried and true tactic of the right. And it's facilitated by a failure of vigilance against racism and other bigotries, both as social ills and as antidemocratic ideologies. Asian Americans and Jews are both easy targets in the contemporary US context, because the racism we are subjected to isn't regarded as important, politically meaningful, or sexy media fodder. We think of racism only in terms of harm to "the most vulnerable." We focus mainly on the most corrosive effects in terms of poverty--shortened life expectancies, mass incarceration, unemployment, etc.--which have the effect of making racism appear to be a "them" issue to mainstream white voters and not an "us" crisis of democracy, eroding our ability to see across traditional divides to our shared interest in supporting an equitable welfare state that provides, among other things, robust public health infrastructure. It is only when racism directed at soft targets like Jews and Asians takes on a certain lurid quality--when it gets exaggerated by racial terrorists--that we consider it important enough for serious consideration by the media and the general public.

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