Yee Bow

 I guess there is truly no corner of the American political psyche—no matter how dark or seemingly buried we thought it was—that Trump will not willingly exploit for his base political ends. Every form of vile prejudice from our national past—every stripe and permutation of racism, religious prejudice, and xenophobia—including all the types that we once naively thought were defunct—has been given new life at his rallies. It turns out, I guess, that these bigotries were never actually defunct—they were only lying dormant. Trump has discovered that all he has to do is nudge them back into waking life. 

Who would have thought a decade ago, say, that the nation's ugly history of anti-Chinese prejudice, the 19th century "Yellow Peril" canard, would come back? Surely we all agree now, I once thought, that the vicious "Chinese Exclusion Acts," etc., were a shameful chapter of our history. Yet, here comes Trump and his cronies, reviving all these same prejudices. As the Washington Post reported this morning, Trump at his recent rallies has exploited a reported uptick in the arrival of undocumented immigrants from China to push the ludicrous narrative that they are the entering wedge of an invading "army."

This is obviously not the first time that Trump has stoked xenophobia against Chinese immigrants and Asian Americans more generally. Recall the "China virus" nonsense and the associated surge in reported hate crimes against AAPI Americans that coincided with Trump's use of this rhetoric. But his latest attempt to portray undocumented Chinese migrants—who in reality are looking to work, escape political persecution, and feed their families—as an "army" of Chinese invaders, taps into an especially vile aspect of this legacy. After all, the "Yellow Peril" tropes of the 19th century pushed the same absurdities.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, precious few white Americans spoke out against this type of bigotry—even as it was Chinese immigrants fighting for their rights in the U.S. court system during that era who helped to expand the reach of civil rights for all Americans, of any ancestry. But there is at least one poet who condemned the racial violence directed against Chinese Americans in this era. In his great collection of poems commenting on life in small-town America, the Spoon River Anthology, the lawyer and poet Edgar Lee Masters includes an entry for "Yee Bow"—a fictional Chinese victim of racial violence. 

The poem chills me, more than a century after Masters's verse was published, because it captures something about the psychology of how hate crimes occur, amidst a political context in which the stigmatization of an immigrant group is considered normal. It is not the case, perhaps, in any simple or direct sense, that the xenophobic rhetoric of politicians translates into violence. After all, it may be that in any society, there are a certain number of antisocial impulses floating around at any time—given a sufficient aggregate of people—and that these impulses can be channeled in many directions. 

But what hateful rhetoric does is to provide a channel for these impulses. It paints a target on the backs of specific people. It makes them stand out. It says: here is someone upon whom you may exercise your impulses toward cruelty, violence, and dominance. You may feel free to do so with impunity. You'll hear no objection from us. That's plainly the message many white Americans heard in Masters's era. That's why a minister's son in the poem—presumably an "upstanding" member of the community, who will face no prison time for it—feels entitled to murder Yee Bow with a single cowardly blow from behind. 

It is also the message that Trump is giving to Americans today. Every time he says that Chinese immigrants are an "army"—every time he characterizes them as the advance force of a PRC invasion (never mind that they are trying to escape life in the PRC; never mind that many have fled political persecution because of their disagreement with the PRC government—Trump's rhetoric has nothing to do with reality)—every time he says these things, I say, he is painting a target on people. He is saying: exercise your cruelty here. And god knows what minister's sons may choose to take him up on it...