It's a pun that goes wrong with readers. The regional daily newspaper Le Courrier picard published its front page Sunday, January 26, with the headline "Yellow Alert" about the coronavirus, a virus which appeared in early December on a market in Wuhan, China, and which has already killed 80 people. A color that directly refers to the skin, as if the virus were racial.
"Lesson of uninhibited racism" tweeted an elected official. "Journalism in all its splendor," laughs another reader. "The title was not appropriate, we recognize it," later acknowledged the Courrier picard . 20 Minutes offers you a decryption with Vincent Geisser, researcher attached to the CNRS and publication director of the review Migrations Société.
The front page of the Picard Courier titled "Yellow Alert" caused a lot of reaction. Why is this problematic?
This goes back to the old fantasy of the “yellow peril”, a fantasy common to many Western societies, which is mixed with political - the idea of Asian imperialism, whether Chinese or Japanese - and cultural, the fantasy of massive intrusions. coming from Asia. When we refer to the "yellow peril" we play on a register of fantasies, fears. Imagine someone saying "Muslim danger" or "Jewish danger", or "black alert" for the Ebola virus in Guinea ... There is the fear of distant lands linked to a population living in France, and it is this link between the extreme distance and the frightening Asian visibility.
It is a title which plays on fears and which does not allow to have a calm and realistic vision of a sanitary situation which is controlled. Institutional communication does not play on this fantasy at all, it must be emphasized.
How did the expression "yellow peril" come about?
The expression was born in American history, at the time of the Japanese-American rivalries. It was present from the twentieth century and increased during the Second World War. It is found in Europe, in Russia for example, or in France, at the time of the rise of nationalisms and the competition of empires. French colonialism will also play on this "yellow peril", we see the expression appear in intellectual discourse and in media figures.
Asians are often seen as "workers". What is the racist logic behind this shot?
Any generalizing representation based on presuppositions is reversible. When we say "Asians are hardworking", "Blacks are nice", "Jews are exemplary" etc., this type of positive representation always has an inverted face. It can backfire. To say that black people are laughing, nice ... Well, it turns against them, they have a hard time finding work. Any representation is accompanied by ambivalence and can be reversible: "Asians are hardworking", the reverse can be "Asians are deceitful" and negative stigmatization may end up prevailing. Behind the representation of the “soft” Asian woman there is the cliché of the woman as a sexual object, the fantasy of the massage, of the submissive woman… We also see many reports on Asian prostitution in Paris in the media.
There are other examples in history where diseases and viruses have aroused racist reflexes ...
Yes for example AIDS has often been associated with a disease coming from black Africa [we know today that it is true], with this idea that HIV was born from a relationship between a man and a monkey, this which helped to carry all sorts of racist stereotypes about the allegedly zoophile Africans. There is also the image of the syphilitic North African worker in the interwar period, which extended into the 1950s. These are health fantasies that reflect a social, racial and cultural register. Today, it is not impossible that certain xenophobic circles exploit the risk of contagion of the coronavirus in a racist mode, thus speaking of “Chinese virus” or “Asian virus”, with all the slippage that this can cause.
It is hard to think that people of Asian origin are very French. They are suspected of not being fully assimilated. When you look at the Asian populations living in France, they are completely in French sociability. We fear the culture of a virus, and we attribute it to a population that we forget lives in social conditions comparable to other French people.
Does anti-Asian racism go under the radar, compared to other forms of racism?
Yes totally. We speak very little about it, we rarely denounce it: it does exist, however, prejudice is very strong. And it is badly lived by the French of Asian origin. They say: “We are still seen as models and yet we live in forms of exclusion. There is a paradox in the perceptions that make them people who integrate better, but at the same time in more communitarian ways. As it is a paradoxical stigma, both of a model community and of a closed community, this undoubtedly explains the difficulty in denouncing it. This racism is less denounced and taken into account by state institutions but also by anti-racist movements.
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- Discrimination
- coronavirus
- China
- Asia
- Media
- Racism