Anti-Asian Hate, Purity Culture, and Christian Nationalism
Summary
In the wake of the mass shooting of 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian women, Brad ties together the threads of anti-Asian hate, purity culture, and Christian nationalism.
Killing half a dozen Asian women and attributing it to sex addiction, not racism, is Christian nationalism in a nutshell: "Purity culture made me feel bad about my sexual needs, so I eliminated the temptation. What does race have to do with that?" (Hint: everything) Purity culture is not simply about sexual "purity." Sexual ethics is a way to slip racial, ethnic, and nationalistic purity into equation. As my co-host says, focusing on the purity of the individual body leads to trying to purify the national body. Purity culture is a step away from a pure national body. A body whose borders are not breached by foreign invaders, including "sexual tempters and those of low morals." If purity culture puts undue pressure on women to remain pure, think about what it does to non-white women who are seen as hyper-sexual seducers not only because of their gender, but also because of their race/ethnicity.
Transcript
Brad Onishi: Hello. Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Capps Center at UCSB.
Today, I want to talk about the events in Georgia where a young man of 21 years old killed multiple people, including half a dozen Asian women who worked at various massage parlors. As you can imagine, for Asian Americans and those of us in the community, it's a tough day, it's a tough set of events. There's an immense amount of sadness and anger and other emotions.
I wanted to talk about how all of this sort of fits together in terms of Christian nationalism, racism, anti-Asian sentiment, and patriarchy.
This morning, I wrote this on Twitter: "Killing a half dozen Asian women and attributing it to sex addiction - sex addiction, not racism - is Christian nationalism in a nutshell."
So somebody could say purity culture made me feel bad about my sexual needs, so I eliminated the temptation. What does race have to do with that?
What I'm referencing there is that the killer here attributed his actions to sex addiction rather than to race, and the sheriff in charge of the investigation said today that he had a bad day. He was tempted by visiting these massage parlors and lashed out after being fed up.
How does this relate to Christian nationalism? Well, let me try to tie those threads together.
Let's start with anti-Asian sentiment and anti-Asian racism. This is a long and sordid history in this country. There's a kind of way that it's covered over in popular culture by the idea that Asian Americans, especially East Asians, are the model minority. And the model minority myth is used to sort of, at times at least, depict Asian people as the right kind of neighbors now - good citizens, quiet, hard-working, and a model for all of the other minorities out there.
And yet, at the drop of a hat, as we've seen throughout American history, Asians are used as scapegoats, as those who are to blame for the country's problems, as a horde infesting the nation, and so on and so forth.
My colleague Wendy Lim at Skidmore always says that Asians and Asian Americans in this country are either a pet or a threat - either your pet model minority who you pat on the head and treat as if they are a docile, submissive, good person of color who just acts the right way, or a threat who is infesting the country. And we've seen that. We've seen it with how Donald Trump and others have talked about COVID-19 as "China virus" and used other slurs. This has drummed up anti-Asian sentiment, and so we've seen a rise in hate crimes and violence against Asian people, especially older Asian people and women. Numbers are somewhere around a 68% increase in these incidents since the pandemic began.
As I said, though, this is not new. There's a long history here. And let me just quote some passages from Erika Lee's America for Americans.
She sets up in the chapter "The Chinese Are No More" the fact that anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese sentiments on the West Coast really set up the immigration system in this country for most of the 20th century. And so here's what she says on page 81:
"The nearly 139,000 Chinese who entered the United States between 1870 and 1880 were only a small fraction of the total number of immigrants - nearly 3.2 million, mostly from Europe - who also arrived in the country during the same decade."
So in that decade, you have 3.2 million immigrants, 140,000 of them come from China. Nevertheless, Lee says, their presence sparked some of the most violent and racist campaigns in US history.
So it was not about the numbers, right? We have 3.2 million people coming and we have 139,000 Chinese immigrants. It was about something else. It's about the idea that Asian people are unassimilable, that they will never be true Americans, and that they are an infestation that needs to be rejected from the country's body.
She goes on to explain the various measures and acts that led up to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. So she says that a Chinese police tax was levied on all Chinese people living in California in 1862. And over the next decade, various laws barred Chinese people from testifying in criminal or civil cases.
There was the Lodging House Ordinance, or Cubic Air Ordinance, which required every lodging house to provide at least 500 cubic feet of airspace for each lodger, which was, of course, intended to prevent living spaces with multiple generations and many people living in them.
In 1870, the state legislature passed a law forbidding the landing of any Mongolian, Chinese, or Japanese female for criminal or demoralizing purposes - a law that the state Commission of Immigration used to deny entry to all Chinese women. So we need to sort of put a pin here that there's this idea that Chinese women and Japanese women and Mongolian women are criminal and immoral.
Okay, five years later, in 1875, the Page Act barred Asian women who were suspected of prostitution. This law was broadly used to deny entry to all Chinese immigrants, especially women. Both the 1862 and 1875 laws would become important blueprints in the eventual exclusion of all Chinese laborers in 1882.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and it prevented the entry into this country of all people from China.
On page 93, Lee talks about the effects of this this way: "The Chinese Exclusion Act set in motion the transformation of the United States into, quote, 'a gatekeeping nation' - one that began using federal immigration laws to exclude, restrict, and control allegedly dangerous foreigners, often on the basis of race, national origin, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. In the 1880s, the United States was the first gatekeeping nation. Today, of course, every nation is."
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