Competition rhetoric reinforces the idea of the “Yellow peril” and leads to anti-Asian xenophobia

“Yellow peril,” a derogative ideology invented by European imperialists during the 19th century, pathologizes Asian people as an existential threat to Western civilization and justifies the colonization of Asian nations (Tchen & Yeats, 2014). This idea became popular in the United States as many Chinese male laborers arrived on the West Coast in the mid-19th century. Their lifestyles and work ethics challenged working-class Whites’ financial security and the idea of “White purity” (Takaki, 1998). When the smallpox epidemic broke out in San Francisco in 1876, local health officials depicted Chinese immigrants as contagious diseases and Chinatown as the main site of urban decay (Shah, 2001). The fear-mongering led to the lynching of Chinese immigrants during the 1870s and the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricting the number of Chinese immigrants and denying them U.S. citizenship. When Japan’s Imperial Army bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that authorized the incarceration of Japanese Americans and cast them as perilous to national loyalty. In the next three decades, the U.S. military bombarded Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. These imperial wars resulted in the massive death of Asian people and racialized them as “yellow perils” who needed to be contained and annihilated (Hamamoto, 1994). “Model minority,” another prejudicial term coined by a White male American sociologist during the 1960s, exoticizes Asian Americans’ ability to transcend historical racial antagonism, overcome systemic barriers, and achieve mainstream success (Wu, 2013). During the Cold War (1945–1991), this ideology targeted Asian Americans for civil inclusion on the premise of pledging allegiance to U.S. imperialist aggressions in Asia (E. Lee, 2015). In so doing, this insidious belief covers the yellow peril trope, essentializes Asian Americans as achievers of the American dream, renders Asian Americans politically passive, pits Asian Americans against other people of Color, and upholds White supremacy in the United States (Hartlep, 2021; Wu, 2002). However, “yellow peril” and “model minority” are two sides of the same racist coin, and Whites possess the institutional power to flip it as needed. This is evident as the Trump administration reignited the “yellow peril” pathology during the COVID-19 pandemic to diverge U.S. anxiety on the trade war and competition for technology supremacy by demonizing China as a threat to humanity and posing the U.S. empire as a savior to the world (Siu & Chun, 2020). Consequently, this rhetoric intensified anti-Asian xenophobia in the United States. Yet little is known about how this shifting social climate may manifest in U.S. K–12 schools.