Professor Janelle Wong Quoted in Vox Article, "How the coronavirus is surfacing America's deep-seated anti-Asian biases"

Dr. Janelle Wong, Professor of Asian American Studies and American Studies, was quoted in a Vox article published on April 21, 2020 on “How the coronavirus is surfacing America’s deep-seated anti-Asian biases”.

The latest uptick in racism, however, isn’t just fueled by the pandemic. Although the uncertainty of the outbreak — coupled with the president’s rhetoric — has amplified it, this prejudice is rooted in longstanding biases toward Asian Americans that have persisted since some of the earliest immigrants came to the US generations ago.

“I think the recent surge is [driven by] the rhetoric that political leaders have been using ... but I don’t think we would have seen the spike in anti-Asian bias without a pretty strong foundation rooted in the ‘forever foreigner’ stereotype,” says University of Maryland Asian American studies professor Janelle Wong.

The “forever foreigner” idea Wong references is one that’s been used to “other” Asian Americans in the US for decades: It suggests that Asians who live in America are fundamentally foreign and can’t be fully American. Enduring tropes that have associated Asian Americans with illness and the consumption of “weird” foods, which have reemerged in relation to the coronavirus, are among those that play into this concept.

The revival of these stereotypes and the recent spike in harassment are having a pointed effect: they’re forcing a reckoning about the existence of anti-Asian racism in the US.

Read full article on vox.com.