URA Scholar Zoe Hwang will present her research, "We Were Never Welcome Here: How American History Predicted the Rise of Racism and Xenophobia During COVID-19" at URCAD!
URCAD.umbc,.edu
April 19-25, 2021
Abstract
Mentor: Elaine MacDougall, Department of English
The racialization of the coronavirus led to a dramatic increase in xenophobic and discriminatory attacks against Asians in the United States, but this hostile environment is nothing new. This violence is rooted in centuries-old American traditions of stereotyping, othering, and generalizing people of non-white backgrounds, and the bigoted reactions to a global pandemic were yet another demonstration of how racism is undeniably entrenched in American culture. The primary purpose of this project is to highlight the extensive past of anti-Asian sentiments in America by contextualizing archival documents from significant and traumatic moments of Asian American history. This collection demonstrates how the spike in racist rhetoric and behavior was inevitable in a country with such a violently intolerant record. A country is exactly what its history shows. Whether it’s the Chinese massacre of 1871, Executive Order 9066 for the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, or the racial scapegoating of the domestic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, this is America for Asians.
