The Malleable Yet Undying Nature of the Yellow Peril Essay

The Malleable Yet Undying Nature of the Yellow Peril Racial stereotypes dont die; they dont even fade away. Though Asian Americans today have achieved model minority status in the eyes of the white majority in America by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps through our supposedly quiet, dignified demeanor and gritty, overachieving work ethic, the terms of the racial discrimination we face remain the same today as they have since the first Asians began settling en masse in the United States more than a century and a half ago. At the root of this discrimination is the idea of a Yellow Peril, which, in the words of John Dower is the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed†¦show more content†¦According to John Dower, the vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color. This feeling of impending doom from the East led to the 1917 Immigration Restriction Act and the National Origins Act of 1924-two acts that prevented nearly all Asian immigrants from legally entering the United States and prohibited immigrants already in the United States from attaining citizenship. The height of a fear of the Yellow Peril happened immediately after Japans attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, leading the United States to enter into the Pacific War. Popular imagery of the time, particularly through political cartoons (some done even by our beloved Dr. Seuss) debased the Japanese as subhuman apes and gorillas, treacherous in nature and though morally corrupt and mentally and physically lesser to the Americans, possessing in superhuman endurance,