Hee-cheol, K. (2016, July 24). How did Asians go from being called “white” to “yellow”. The Hankyoreh.

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How did Asians go from being called

“white” to “yellow”
Posted on : Jul.24,2016 13:02 KST Modified on : Jul.24,2016 13:02 KST

Book now available in Korean translation charts the history of Westerners use of
term “yellow”, with all its negative baggage

In “The Travels of Marco Polo,” the people

of China are described as “white.” Records
left by eighteenth century missionaries also
report the skin color of Japanese and other
East Asian people as clearly white. Yet in
the nineteenth century, this perception
quietly gave way to descriptions as “yellow.”
In travel books, scientific discourse, and
works of art, portrayals of East Asians
began presenting them as having yellow
skin. What happened in between?

In his 2011 book “Becoming Yellow: A Short

History of Racial Thinking,” National Taiwan
University professor Michael Keevak delves
deeply into the origins and history of how
and why East Asians went from being seen
as “white” to being classified as “yellow.”

The first suspect implicated in applying the

The cover of the Korean translation of “Becoming Yellow: A “yellow” label to East Asian faces is the
Short History of Racial Thinking,” National Taiwan University
professor Michael Keevak
famed Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). At first,
Linnaeus used the Latin adjective “fuscus,”
meaning “dark,” to describe the skin color of Asians. But in the tenth edition of his 1758-9
“Systema Naturae,” he specified it with the term “luridus,” meaning “light yellow” or “pale.”

It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

(1752-1840) who went beyond the coloring
ascribed by Linnaeus to apply the
completely different label of
“Mongolianness.” Regarded as a founder of
comparative anatomy, the German
zoologist did more than just use the Latin
word “gilvus,” meaning “light yellow,” to
describe East Asian skin color: he also
implicated the Mongols, a name with
troubling and threatening connotations for
Europeans with their memories of Attila the
Hun, Genghis Khan, and Timur.

While the references remained anomalous

at first, travelers to East Asia gradually
began describing locals there more and
more as “yellow.” By the nineteenth century,
Keevak argued, the “yellow race” become a
key part of anthropology.

But the yellow label came associated with “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking,”
National Taiwan University professor Michael Keevak
discrimination, exclusion, and violence. Just
as no one in the world is purely white or
black, neither does anyone actually have skin that is deep yellow. By “creating” a skin color
and investing traits such as “Mongolian eyes,” the Mongolian birthmark, and mongolism
(the old name for Down syndrome), Westerners made the perceived yellow race
synonymous with abnormality. They also responded to the arrival of immigrants from Asia
by sounding the alarm over the “yellow peril” - a term with a whole range of negative
associations from overpopulation to heathenism, economic competition, and political and
social regression. The hidden agenda of this racial color-coding becomes apparent when
one considers who benefits from a hierarchy that places “yellow” and “black” beneath
“white.”
For the Korean-language edition, the author
wrote a new introduction that asks, “Isn’t it
time to stop using the discriminatory terms
‘yellow’?” It’s an argument solidly bolstered
by the book’s footnotes and references,
which account for a third of its 348 pages.

By Kang Hee-cheol, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to

[english@hani.co.kr]

[http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/culture/religion
/753395.html]
Michael Keevak, National Taiwan University professor

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