Transcript: Race in America: History Matters with Erika Lee & Helen Zia
MS. LEE: Good afternoon, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Michelle Ye Hee Lee, a national reporter at The Washington Post.
Joining me today are two esteemed guests. First, we have Erika Lee, professor of History and Asian American Studies. She is also director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. And we also have Helen Zia, author and activist and a spokesperson for the Justice for Vincent Chin Campaign.
We're here to discuss the rise in anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic and the long history of attacks and discrimination against Asian American and Pacific Islanders in this country.
So, thank you both for joining us, and welcome.
DR. LEE: Thank you so much.
MS. ZIA: Thank you. Good to be here to talk about this important subject.
MS. LEE: Well, let's dive in. Helen, let's start with you. We've seen a rise in anti-Asian attacks for nearly a year, you know, since lockdown started, and early on in the pandemic, early on in the lockdown in April 2020, you actually foresaw that the attacks would rise and could rise. You wrote in The Washington Post, "There are hundreds of reports of anti-Asian harassment and violence. This violence could become much worse as more people lose jobs and lives." You almost predicted what was going to happen. Why did you think it could get worse, as it has?
MS. ZIA: Well, very sadly, we have seen this terrible nightmare before. The history that Professor Erika Lee has written about so brilliantly in many places, you know, really this has been told over and over again in the history of Asian Americans in this country. This is where we fit into the white supremacy, you know, a hierarchy of keeping people apart, to take attention away from the real problems, to blame, scapegoat, attack, kill, harass, and, you know, Asian Americans have been bearing the brunt of that from the time we've been on this continent.
So, we don't even have to go that far back. We've seen this happening after 9/11. We've seen this, and I was part of a time when anybody who looked Japanese was under attack and being killed because they looked Japanese. And that happened in Detroit in 1982 when a young man named Vincent Chin was killed. That was a time of incredible economic stress, crisis in America, the collapse of the entire manufacturing sector of America, and it took a little while, but sooner or later, the groups that were blaming each other arrived at a group to blame.
....
DR. LEE: Yeah, that's a great question. So, one of the ways that I like to start thinking about this with my own students is to identify some of the labels that we commonly use to describe immigration. It's an invasion. It's a plague. It's a [audio distortion]. It's very threatening. It's very invasive, right?
And going back to some of the very earliest immigration debates that we've had in the United States, it's very clear that whatever immigrant problem was identified in our country was often tied to a public health outbreak. So, when yellow fever struck Pennsylvania in the 18th century, it was called the "German flu." Jewish immigrants were blamed with bringing typhoid. Italians were blamed for a polio outbreak on the East Coast.
But there is something really [audio distortion] about Asians and Chinese people that have taken on this sort of outsized idea of China being dirty, diseased, and Chinese people being sources of contagion. We saw this in 1900 in San Francisco when there was a bubonic plague outbreak. The local officials decided to quarantine all of San Francisco Chinatown, keeping those people in Chinatown but making sure that White residents were evacuated.
And I think that what's so important here about what's happening today is that this isn't just a culmination, a logical culmination of our really long and deep history of racism and racial violence directed at Asian American and Pacific Islanders, but that there was a specific spark in 2020 and 2021, and that was the divisive political rhetoric of many of our leaders who insisted on calling the coronavirus the "China virus," the "Chinese flu," the "Wuhan virus," et cetera. This allowed what had been certainly, again, a deep-rooted sentiment and stereotypes about Asians and Chinese people in particular to explode, to justify the violence that we have seen this past year.