For those of you who don’t follow American politics, the immigrant scourge is back. This time it is Haitian immigrants eating your pets which has gone from a crazy internet meme to the Republican candidate for Vice-President pushing it in his speeches. That actually is, I think, sort of new, in that this used to be more of a whispering campaign type of thing.
Well, it was is the U.S. anyway. The locus classicus of the Yellow Peril in Europe was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s dream of an Asian assault on European civilization by the godless Buddhists, which he had done up as a painting and distributed widely 1
One reason I find this interesting, of course, is that Haitians eating pets is an obvious echo of the racist stories about the Chinese eating cats and rats and whatever that were such a big part of the Yellow Peril in earlier US history.
Part of this is just cultural difference. They Chinese really do eat dogs, just like the French eat horses (another thing that causes problems with the Americans).. There are food associations with the fear of other outsiders in U.S. history of course, from the threat of “taco trucks on every corner” to German immigrants and their bier. The Chinese and what they eat (and may be serving to Real Americans) seem to stand out as most associated with food.
Of course it does not even matter if any of this is actually true. As Tchen and Young put it.
. In the contemporary Western world, to evoke Yellow Peril has become synonymous with a looming dread where the potential threat is as good as any actual violation. Today yellow perilism has become an omnipresent haze-a malaise that sometimes coheres around an actual event, a fictitious character, or something else deliciously dangerous to establishment norms2
J.D. Vance is already being credited with “backtracking” on his comments, although he did not really backtrack, but of course just getting it out there is all it takes.
The thing I find most depressing about this is that when I looked at my copy of Yellow Peril!
it has a blurb on the front cover telling us that the book is “Smart, funny, comprehensive and theoretically astute.”
Why funny? Well it is funny. It is hilarious the silly things people will believe, and laughter is the best medicine after all. Making fun of silly old racist things that people used to believe is always fun for students, and a good way to liven up class.
Of course it is not always fun and games. I remember reading, somewhere, about the early days of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, when they were organizing some of the first voter registration attempts in the South. They had a bunch of white college students down from the Northeast, and as part of the training there was a film clip of a southern sheriff telling the local TV station what he would do about voter registration. The volunteers of course roared with laughter at what a stereotypical hick he was. They had to clear the room so the African-American SNCC members could discuss if they could work with these volunteers at all, since for them this was not even a little bit funny.
