Veiling racisms in Asia

In July 2020, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, I returned to Australia to be with my partner who lives in a regional town with a small population of 1500 people.

Located along the coast of the Southern Ocean, the town is incredibly scenic but also lacks the population diversity of bigger cities such as Melbourne.

Other than the tourists from all over the world who visit during peak periods, my partner and I counted approximately thirty people of non-white backgrounds living in the town, including ourselves.

My first time here, it is easy to imagine how much I stuck out as a sore thumb, and that too, at a time where there were no tourists to hide my presence.

It was perhaps no surprise then that my partner and I soon encountered a white woman in the supermarket who commented in a mocking tone as she walked by us, ‘Where did these two come from?’ There was only one message underlying her comment, just like the other racist incidents I had encountered over the decade I spent in Australia, ‘You don’t belong.’

As a healthcare worker who has been living in the town for more than two years, my partner has thus far only encountered covert racism. His Asian face but ostensibly non-Chinese name has so far only caused him the inconvenience of being an unwilling representative of all things Asian –being frequently forced into corners by white colleagues complaining about Chinese tourists, Chinese people and Chinese products.

The overt racism we encountered at the supermarket was a first for him in the town. It was a hard reminder of the limits of his nationality as an Asian Australian.

Rise of anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiments

Since the coronavirus hit Wuhan, China in December 2019 and subsequently moved to infect people all over the world, anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism has become widespread. In the US, President Donald Trump called the corona virus ‘the Chinese virus’ (Kandil, 2020).

Unprecedented numbers of Asian Americans reported verbal and physical abuse including an Asian American middle-schooler in Los Angeles who was hospitalised after being beaten by students who claimed he had the coronavirus (Kandil, 2020; Hay & Caspani, 2020). In Australia, Chinese Australians have also reported increasing hostility since the virus outbreak. Some had their houses vandalised with racial slurs (Young, 2020; Fang & Yang, 2020).

Since returning to Australia, I have felt especially vulnerable with my Asian/Chinese face, knowing that Singaporean Chinese have been targeted overseas. In London, a Singaporean Chinese student was attacked by a group of strangers who shouted, ‘I don’t want your coronavirus in my country’ (Lau, 2020).

In Melbourne, Australia, a Singaporean student and her Malaysian friend were physically assaulted when they responded to the perpetrators’ taunts of ‘coronavirus’ and ‘go back to China’ (Sun, 2020).

Ironically, Singaporeans’ behaviour at this time echo white peoples’ in the rest of the world: an online petition urging the Singapore government to ban travellers from China gathered 125,000 signatures (della Cava & Lam, 2020). Mainland Chinese businesses and Chinese nationals have also reported being shunned and the latter have even encountered verbal abuse in Singapore (Lee & Loke, 2020).

While similar acts of abuse have been happening in the US, Europe, Australia and Asia, only those occurring in white-dominant countries are called racism. What about South Korea where, since the pandemic, restaurant owners have displayed ‘No Chinese allowed’ signs? Or the Japanese Twitter users who circulated the hashtag #ChineseDontComeToJapan (della Cava & Lam, 2020)?

Beyond colour racism

Traditionally, studies on racism are focused on white people racialising others. While such work contributes to our understanding of the persistence of racism and its evolution, focusing only on white versus Others can homogenise select groups of non-whites such as Asians while ignoring racialisation and racism by Asians and among Asians. Consequently, there has also been a dearth of literature on issues of race in non-white settings.

Yet racialisation and racist discourses have evolved beyond the traditional perspective of biological superiority and colour to discriminate against cultures, religions, and class (Dunn et al., 2004). Furthermore, the ‘invisibility’ of racism can be entrenched among groups who look outwardly similar (Walter, 2011).

While white-majority countries have traditionally been the most attractive migrant destinations, new global multidirectional flows have enabled migrants to access non-western locations, including many parts of Asia. With the seeming decline of the ‘West’ and the rise of Asia and China reconfiguring ethno-racial power constellations in the region, a small body of work has addressed racism in Asia (see for instance Lan, 2016; Morris-Suzuki, 2015; Lee, Jon, & Byun, 2016).

Recently, my co-convenors, Elaine Ho, Brenda Yeoh and I made efforts to contribute to this body of work by challenging the Euro-centrism of race and migration studies. In January 2020, we held an international workshop New Racism and Migration: Beyond Colour and the ‘West’ and are now working on a journal special issue, comprising of some of the workshop papers, tentatively to be published in 2022.

We hope our efforts will further insights into the variegated processes of racialisation and racism beyond the white/Other binary, introduce new dynamics in racialisation and racist discourses and examine new geographical sites of racialisation and racism including Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.

Rather than focus on what ‘race’ is, which is a highly contested concept, we have found it more useful to focus on what ‘race’ does (Lentin, 2016). For instance, my own work has found that Singaporean-Chinese’s racialisation of Chinese nationals in Singapore parallel colonial racialisation of the Chinese as inassimilable and inferior.

My work shows that this ‘invisible’ racialisation has the very real consequences of causing Chinese nationals in Singapore to be targeted for policing (Ang, 2018). ‘Race’ is effective as a category to include and exclude Others.

Racism in Asia is racism

Certainly I have experienced racism in the past, but I did not leave home for days after the encounter at the supermarket, lest I would be confronted with more than just comments the next time, as the news headlines amply warn.

Time and again, racism makes me feel inferior, that I do not belong, and with the pandemic, increasingly unsafe. How is what happened to me any different from how Asians and Chinese nationals have been made to feel since the pandemic, whether in Australia, Japan or Singapore?

It is time to call a spade a spade. Veiling racism in Asia under other terms or neglecting racism in Asia reinforces the false notion that racism is something only white people do to others or that racism can only happen between people of different (skin) colours.

To recall, racism is ‘an ideology of racial domination’ where presumed biological or cultural superiority is used to justify or prescribe the inferior treatment or social position(s) of other racial groups (Clair & Denis, 2015). It may begin as a casual comment at the supermarket.