Relevant to the horrific killings in Atlanta, I think more discussions of the yellow peril myth (the racist idea that East Asians are taking over the U.S. and endangering “Americans”) need to emphasize the sexual and gender politics of this racist myth. A thread.

A common stereotype of Asians is racially submissiveness. This is how we often discuss the model minority myth and the racial stereotype of Asians being quiet, politically meek, and deferential to white people. But a longstanding image of Asians is of being sexual predators.

Before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act there was the Page Act of 1875. It was used to exclude women who were suspected of prostitution or having “immoral” purposes. While people from all racial groups worked as prostitutes, the Page Act was used to target Chinese women.

The 1875 Page Act operated with a racial profile of who to suspect of prostitution. So this act could appear on the surface as targeting an activity (prostitution) but be used to limit Chinese women based on longstanding gender and sexual stereotypes of Chinese people and China.

The conflation of Chinese women with prostitution was also connected to images of China as a despotic, authoritarian, and excessively patriarchal society. While gender and sexual violence and patriarchy exists globally, this was viewed as specifically racial to “Chinese culture.”

Part of the long history of white supremacy is to depict white hetero-patriarchy as more “civilized” and to depict nonwhite racial groups, nonwhite countries, and the non-west as excessively violent to women, excessively patriarchal, and excessively homophobic.

Myth of white hetero-patriarchy as more “civilized” informs some feminism. For example, white women have often promoted racist myth that men of color are excessively violent as a people and that nonwhite women need to be rescued from excessively patriarchal cultures or countries.

This image of men of color as excessively patriarchal was part of Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Some justified anti-prostitution policies and racist myth of Chinese women as automatic prostitutes by claiming Chinese women likely forced into it due to Chinese patriarchy.

The Page Act was partly informed by image of Chinese women being dominated by Chinese men and Chinese culture while Chinese women simultaneously being viewed as sexual threat or predator that was being imported into the U.S. (and often assumed to be doing so against their will).

Part of white supremacy is the myth that “problems” or “dangers” are “imported” into white space or white relationships whether through immigration, racial integration policies, busing, or drug selling or use. It is a myth that helps maintain the image of white innocence.

This image of white innocence is part of the history of racistly treating Asian people as sexual predators, which was a dominant racist anti-Asian stereotype during the late 1800s. At that time, discourse circulated of white boys and men being “lured” to Chinatown brothels.

Despite racial segregation enforced by white people, including violently, according to this racist narrative, white men and boys were “lured” into prostitution by supposedly duplicitous Chinese people––a story reinforcing white innocence and image of Asians as sexual predators.

And white hetero women also helped promote this racist myth of Asians as sexual predators. Instead of seeing their white husbands as going out and paying for sex from a Chinese prostitute, they could say the prostitute “lured” their man and maintain racial self-esteem as a wife.

So any racialized jealousy or sense of inferiority that white women might have about their husbands paying for sex with a Chinese woman in the 1880s could be viewed as something the Chinese prostitute “forced” their husbands into by "luring" them with "predatory" sexuality.

White women could also manage whatever sense of inadequacy they might feel about being a mother in terms of their white sons seeking out prostitution in Chinatowns by claiming that their sons were “lured.” So their white sons also still "racially innocent."

So part of maintaining this image of a “stable” white family, white marriage, white motherhood, and of white “innocence” was by depicting white people as being provoked or lured into engaging in interracial prostitution by supposedly sneaky, predatory Asian women and Asian men.

These racist and sexist images of nonwhite people as inherently or excessively sexually and gender violent AS A PEOPLE have been used to justify white violence against nonwhite people––as a form of “saving” them from their sins or saving those being “lured” to sin with them.

Part of the history of white supremacy is the idea that nonwhite people need to be rescued from themselves in terms of pathologies or predatory cultures that are viewed as "racial" and this “rescuing” is often violent (occupation, war, militarization, policing, murder, etc.).

This idea of “rescuing” nonwhite people is tied to myth of white innocence and that white people need protection from perceived racial threats (embodied in people) for fear the white race will be “degraded” if they “act like” a group or have contact with a group or have desires.

In sum, as we talk about contemporary white supremacy, the racist yellow peril myth, and the violence and vulnerability to violence Asian women experience, I think it’s important to consider how “rescue” narratives and frames of “white innocence” have a long history.