Modern discourse goes on and on, and in the very front of this parade often people hold up high placards of identity politics. Overstimulating with each other, we pick up fights, block the march, and get accused of splitting the left and losing the election. Thank God I did not commit the last part, but I did get myself into a skirmish of semantics with a friend.
The bone of contention? The term “POC,” the acronym for “person of color”, which does sound like a job title in the DEI department. I argued that POC is not progressive banner, but rather a linguistic Trojan horse, smuggling in arrogance and insult. My friend countered that I was voluntarily pushing an anti-woke agenda and argued that it was a necessary umbrella, a verbal fortress to unite non-white people in a white-centric society.
Tired of this paintball fight, I sent them a reel on Instagram, the most modern rhetorical device. In it, a Black man, with all the attitude he got for a street-corner prophet, points to a white girl’s white dress and says, “This is white; you are not white.” Then he points to his own black T-shirt and says, “This is black, and I am not black.” Finally, he concludes in the comedic timing of Chris Rock: “We are all Mexicans of different shades.” Amen to that, brother!
We seem to still be stuck in a game of colors, but is this game really fair? This quest may take us to the journey through the pages of an excellent textbook that reflects on racial thinking: Michael Keevak’s work Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011). Yes, how did Asians turn yellow?
This book focuses on recreating the conceptual history of how Western society described and understood East Asian populations. It examines the origins of the concept of the “yellow race” and the knowledge process of how this theory spread to the East and was widely accepted by Eastern societies. It is an interesting yet weighty social and cultural history of racial thinking.
It’s easy to understand that the original meaning of “yellow race” refers to people with yellow skin. However, one surprising discovery in Keevak’s book is that classifying East Asians’ skin color as yellow was not the result of empirical observation, but entirely a new invention of modern science.
Before the mid-18th century, various travel reports described East Asians (mainly Chinese and Japanese) as having fair, slightly dark white, or olive-colored skin. They rarely considered East Asians to be vastly different from Europeans in terms of skin color. Travelers, merchants, and missionaries noticed that there were considerable differences in the characteristics of people from different regions of East Asia. For example, people in southern China had darker skin compared to those in the north, but this difference was similar to the variations among European countries – merely a matter of shade. This was the record of empirical observation. At that time, it was actually Indians, who were included in the “white” category in the 19th century, who were often classified as “yellow-skinned” by Western observers.
Color is not just an objective description of physical phenomena; it also carries values and emotions bestowed by various cultural traditions. Broadly speaking, in Western tradition, white represents holiness, purity, wisdom, and nobility. When East Asia, represented by
China was considered a civilized society like the West, Western travelers saw the skin color of Eastern people as white, not yellow. However, with the development of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, the ancient Eastern societies increasingly appeared backward, stagnant, and declining, and Eastern people gradually lost the qualification to be described as white.
However, yellow was indeed not a skin color that could be observed empirically by the naked eye in East Asia. To be even clearer on this: Asians, no matter from Japan or Thailand, none of them look like minions from Despicable Me. Yet, after white color was monopolized by Europeans, how to describe East Asians seemed to be difficult to reach a consensus for a considerable time. The solution to this problem had to wait until Eurocentrism continued to grow, transcending empirical observation, and was finally dominated by modern botany, zoology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory, achieving the historical leap of East Asian skin color from white to yellow.
The first important scholar in the history of racial classification was the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. In his Systema Naturae (1735), he divided humans into four types. Among them, Europæus albescens (whitish Europeans), Americanus rubescens (reddish Americans), and Africanus nigriculus (blackish Africans) were already familiar to Western society at that time. Only for the skin color of Asians did he use an ambiguous Latin word “fuscus,” which can usually be understood as dark or brown. In the 1740 German translation, this word was translated as “gelblich” (“yellowish”) in German.
Keevak believes that this was an important step in the skin color of the Asian race finally moving towards “yellow” from various optional colors. When Linnaeus published the tenth edition of the book in 1758-1759, he changed the color of Asians from “fuscus” to “luridus,” which can be translated as yellow, pale yellow, wax yellow, pale, deathly color, and so on. Keevak emphasizes that Linnaeus was not simply looking for a suitable transitional color between the two poles of white and black; he was actually looking for a word suggesting sickness and unhealthiness to refer to Asians, because Linnaeus had said that when plants show a “luridus” color, it means sadness and suspicion.
In the late 18th century, a milestone development in so-called Scientific Racism came from anthropologist Johann F. Blumenbach. Dissatisfied with the practice of Linnaeus of distinguishing races by continent and skin color, he instead adopted the method of physical characteristic analysis, especially skull morphology, to divide humans into five groups, naming them Caucasian, Ethiopian, American, Malay, and Mongolian races. Among the racial names he invented, the words Caucasian and Mongolian both have incredibly great
vitality. Even today, when racial thinking is being abandoned, they still stubbornly appear frequently in various scientific and popular texts. Genetic studies on drug responses may categorize participants as “Caucasian” or “Mongoloid” to analyze population-specific genetic markers. In both true crime podcasts and some dating apps, Portuguese and Polish live under the same profile as “Caucasian”, even though they generally have distinctive appearance differences.
Although Blumenbach believed that skin color classification was inaccurate and easily confused, and he himself only focused on skull analysis, he still combined the popular skin color classification with his skull classification, resulting in the five major racial classifications of white Caucasian, black Ethiopian, red American, dark brown Malay, and yellow Mongolian races. In Keevak’s view, it was because the Mongolian name was widely accepted by academia that the yellow color associated with this race also stabilized, standing out among all optional colors and becoming the ultimate winner. From then on, the East Asian race had the dual labels of Mongolian physique and yellow skin.
1795 was an important year for Scientific Racism. In this year, Blumenbach created brand new concepts such as “Mongolian race” and “Caucasian race.” In the following decades, although there were still people who had controversies about how to better describe the skin color of Orientals, the “Mongolian race” attribute of East Asians had been generally regarded as a foregone conclusion.
Why did Blumenbach use Mongolia to name the East Asian race? Keevak analyzes that this was not a random, convenient choice, nor was it because Mongolian skulls were the most typical and representative (which is said to be the reason for naming white people Caucasian). Rather, it was because the Mongols were the most terrifying Easterners in Western history, and this name was enough to evoke Western historical memories of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timur.
Blumenbach repeatedly hinted at the difference between Mongols and Tatars. He gave the name Tatar to the Turkic people, believing that people from Central Asia, including Tatars, as well as those from the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa, all belonged to the Caucasian race like Europeans, while the Mongolian race specifically referred to East Asians.
The physical anthropology established by Blumenbach immediately took racial research as the entire content of the discipline, quickly pushing Scientific Racism to the extreme. The red, dark brown, and yellow races between white and black were like transitions between night and day, civilization and barbarism, perfection and evil.
The physical differences between races were not just physiological differences, but also reflected moral and intellectual differences. The larger brain capacity of the Caucasian race
confirmed by anatomy determined that the white race was intellectually superior to other races, and their light skin color and high cheekbones also had a causal relationship with their highest moral level. The light yellow skin color and epicanthic fold unique to the Mongolian race were directly related to their innate cunning, darkness, and rigidity. The dark skin color, low brow, and thick lips of the Ethiopian race indicated that they were still close to apes.
Since the moral and intellectual differences of humans are determined by physiological differences, not only between races but also between subspecies of each race, differences would point to the superiority and inferiority of bloodlines. For example, Germans were considered much superior to other white people, and the greatest threat to the purity and nobility of white people was Jews and Gypsies among white people. This further pushed Scientific Racism down a more absurd and evil path of no return.
According to evolutionary theory, between the two poles of human evolution – the perfect stage of Caucasians and the primitive stage of African blacks – the yellow-skinned Mongolian race represented an intermediate stage of evolution. Some, using this theory, argued why East Asia, although it had a higher level of ancient civilization, stagnated and rigidified at a certain point, falling far behind the West.
Keevak examined the process of acceptance of the concept of the yellow Mongolian race in China and Japan. He found that Chinese people accepted this concept more actively because yellow had almost no negative meaning in Chinese culture (the term “yellow” meaning pornography was later derived from Western “yellow journalism”). Factors such as traditional proper nouns like Yellow Emperor and Yellow River, as well as the noble status of yellow, made it not difficult for Chinese people to accept the yellow race classification. The public in China comfortably confirms the term “yellow race”, with little knowledge about the value judgments attached to this color by Westerners. In Japanese tradition, yellow had no such positive usage, so the acceptance process was more tortuous.
Keevak also found that the earliest Chinese people to accept this concept and actively promote it were intellectuals who had the opportunity to receive Western education or understand the West. As for Imperialist Japan’s victory over Russia, or China’s anti-Western riots like the Boxer Rebellion, some of the Western responses led to the emergence of the “Yellow Peril” theory. Although the Yellow Peril theory was aimed at modern China and Japan, its historical basis was the Mongol invasion of the West in the 13th century, completely ignoring the fact that China was a victim of Mongol conquest in history, and Japan was also almost conquered by the Mongols. Only when the labels of Mongolian race and yellow race were combined could the popularity of the “Yellow Peril” theory be promoted.
Since Richard Lewontin published that article on the distribution proportion of human genetic diversity in populations in 1972, the traditional classification method of dividing humans into different groups and subgroups with labels such as “race” has begun to lose its biological basis increasingly.
Researchers believe that human genetic diversity mainly exists between individuals. In comparison, the differences between regions and ethnic groups are rather insignificant, and it is impossible to draw scientifically based boundaries between races and races, ethnic groups and ethnic groups. Recent studies on the relationship between genes and race, genes and ethnic groups show that the current state of modern human genetic diversity was formed long after humans left Africa about 100,000 years ago, as late as 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. It is the result of long-term repeated exchange of human genes between individuals and groups. We are bound not by the arbitrary lines of geography or pigment but by a shared story of migration, adaptation, and relentless interconnection. This process is later referred to “reticulate evolution,” and the so-called race is a later “socio-cultural construct.” The essence of this “socio-cultural construct” is political. Our body is politicalized, in which if the owner loses their autonomy to being othered, progressiveness would cease to hold under this gaze. Our language is politicalized, in which if the speaker fails to take care of its preciseness, the justice would not take care of itself. A verbal fortress built on quicksand is a Trojan horse for its so-called “the protected”.
The evolution against racism is not merely academic; it is an act of collective liberation. Let me say it again: collective. To honor our genetic kinship is to climb over the walls that politics built—and to reclaim humanity’s oldest truth: we belong to one another. Or to say, we come from one another.
Brody L.
