Negative images of Asians in the media came long before television and the movies, reports the Atlantic.
According to the new book Yellow Peril– An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, the first use of the pejorative term yellow peril came in 1905 when Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm commissioned an artist drawing of a “threatening Buddha in a lotus position riding a dragon thundercloud off in the distance.”
NYU professor Wei TChen, one of three editors of the book, says its doesn’t take much to go from dangerous minority to model minority.
“It’s all a question of whether they get incorporated into the society or not,” said TChen. “Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless: No. Charlie Chan and the ‘hard-working’ ‘foreign’ service worker who know their place: Yes.”
World War II unleashed a volume of anti-Japanese images integrated into books, magazine and movies.
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“Whatever prevailing images sold, they’d exploit. They weren’t necessarily personally racist … they simply wanted to keep their publications afloat by whatever means necessary,” said TChen.
That included the first Fu Man Chu and images of barbaric hordes of heathen Chinaman wanting to rape white women.
You can read more about anti-Asian images up through 9/11 in the Atlantic.
