By Jane Yeahin Pyo
Postdoctoral Researcher of Digital Politics and Race
University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
In March of 2020, amidst the growing concern, confusion, and distress regarding the new COVID-19 virus, US President Donald Trump tweeted about the “Chinese virus.” Several weeks later, during a speech at the Turning Point Action, a student Republican group, he referred to the virus as “kung flu.” “Wuhan was catching on, coronavirus, kung flu,” he mentioned to the enthusiastic crowd, simultaneously downplaying its consequences. With his comments, conspiracy theories that coronavirus was intentionally created in a science lab in Wuhan flourished, further stoking resentment toward Asians. Soon, across the US and the world, hate against Asians followed, with a surge of hate crimes and racist harassment against Asians. According to a Pew Research Center survey, nearly half (45%) of Asian adults in the US responded that they had experienced at least one offensive incident since the start of the pandemic, and they mostly believed it was tied to their ethnicity (Ruiz et al., 2023). As such, Trump’s racist comments, entangled and coupled with disinformation about the coronavirus, endorsed, condoned, and even encouraged Asian Hate.
The case of Trump and his comments that associate the coronavirus with Asian ethnicity is an indication of how racialized disinformation can become hate speech that attacks, silences, and erases an already marginalized community—in this case, the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Disinformation, defined as misleading, manipulative, and deceptive information with the intent to harm others (Marwick & Lewis, 2017), becomes a political weapon when it is used against racially minoritized communities, spreading hateful narratives about them. Hate speech becomes harmful when those in power use essentializing and dehumanizing speech against those with less power. Hence, when Trump used dehumanizing language to spread false information about the coronavirus, disinformation became a form of hate speech that threatened AAPI communities and a gateway to hate crimes.
Disinformation is particularly harmful to AAPI communities, and this is because disinformation does not exist in a vacuum; it exists within the complex social, political, and cultural context in which AAPI communities are situated. Disinformation is fundamentally related to existing power structures and is used to serve political motives that sustain structural inequality (Kuo & Marwick, 2021). Contemporary disinformation that harms AAPI communities draws from long histories of xenophobia—such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and the erasure of Korean American voices during the LA riot in 1992—and old racial and colonial tropes to legitimize racialized violence.
Within the history of the US, AAPI communities have been denied voices and representation, being considered “forever foreigners.” They have been trapped between two ambivalent stereotypes that perpetuate them as “others” in US society: the “model minority” and the “yellow peril” stereotype. On the one hand, the “model minority” stereotype seemingly celebrates AAPIs for being hardworking and law-abiding but depicts them as silent, passive, and apolitical (Kawai, 2005). On the other hand, the “yellow peril” stereotype sees AAPIs as those who cannot be fully integrated into US society because they pose cultural and economic threats. While seemingly contradictory, the two stereotypes work hand-in-hand to place AAPI communities in racial triangulation where they are considered “superior” to other racial minority groups but still “inferior” to White US Americans (Kim, 1999). Following these hateful stereotypes, AAPI communities have been targets of hateful action. For instance, in 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was murdered by two white men in Detroit, Michigan. The two autoworkers took out their anger at Chin for being laid off from their work and blamed Chin for taking over their job, signaling the influence of the “yellow peril” stereotype.
The current disinformation about AAPI communities leverages these existing racial stereotypes and historical traumas (Asian American Disinformation Table, 2022). As we have witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, dehumanizing disinformation about AAPI communities frames them as outsiders who bring harmful influence to society. Dehumanizing disinformation has left AAPI communities subject to growing Asian Hate, which further subjected them to the threats of hate actions and harassment, including the brutal mass shooting of eight Asian women in Atlanta spa shops on March 16, 2021.
Disinformation, hate speech, and hate action are not disconnected; they work in tandem to put AAPI communities in perpetual marginalization, whose voices have already been silenced and erased. Disinformation is harmful not only because it is misleading and manipulative but also because it renders AAPI communities—and racial minority communities at large—as dehumanized objects of hate, further denying their rightful voice and presence in society.
References
Asian American Disinformation Table. (2022). Power, platforms, and politics: Asian Americans ans Disinformation.
Kawai, Y. (2005). Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril. Howard Journal of Communications, 16(2), 109–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170590948974
Kim, C. J. (1999). The racial triangulation of Asian Americans. Politics and Society, 27(1), 105–138.
Kuo, R., & Marwick, A. (2021). Critical disinformation studies: History, power, and politics. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76
Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 106.
Ruiz, N. G., Tian, Z., & Krogstad, J. M. (2023, June 8). Asian Americans Hold Mixed Views Around Affirmative Action. Pew Research Center Race & Ethnicity. https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2023/06/08/asian-americans-hold-mixed-views-around-affirmative-action/
Biography
Dr. Jane Yeahin Pyo is a Postdoctoral Researcher of Digital Politics and Race at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a fellow at Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech). Her research examines how digital media technology impacts and shapes our civic and political life. One of her current research projects sheds light on the tensions surrounding Asian American communities, examining the emerging tension between the influence of disinformation and counter-influence efforts of resistance.