In 1961, the American scholar Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” to describe an emerging tactic in the field of public relations: Saying or doing something with the sole purpose of generating media attention and publicity.
Pseudo-events seem to comprise the majority of President Trump’s public utterances. He specializes in manufacturing outrage, and some would say we in the mainstream press have been slow to adapt ourselves to his nonstop outrage cycle.
Yet Trump’s latest ethnic slur — calling the deadly coronavirus “kung flu,” at a political rally in Tulsa, Okla. — deserves our condemnation, not least because of the pathetic and disingenuous defense his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, offered Monday. Asked why Trump was using a racist nickname for the virus, she replied: “The president doesn’t. What the president does do is point to the fact that the origin of the virus is China.”
Later, when asked about the widespread outrage in the Asian American community, McEnany responded — with astounding condescension — that Asian Americans are “amazing people and the spreading of the virus is not their fault in any way, shape or form.” She added, “They’re working closely with us to get rid of it. We will prevail together.”
That defense is, if possible, even worse than the original offense. By not specifying what she means by “us,” McEnany contributed to longstanding and pernicious stereotypes of Asians as dangerous outsiders. Xenophobia and racial animus contributed to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans and hate crimes like the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin.
Anti-Black racism and anti-Asian racism have often gone hand in hand, serving similar functions of distracting Americans from the common values and interests that should unite them. And the “kung flu” comment is but a taste of the kind of verbal abuse that Black Americans routinely face in our society.
It was in the years after Reconstruction that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was adopted. It was at the height of the Jim Crow era, in the 1920s, that Congress passed laws choking off immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, motivated in part by fear of Catholics and Jews. And it was in the 1960s, in the same years that domestic activism and Cold War pressures prompted an expansion in civil rights, that immigration restrictions were finally eased. We whose families came to the United States following the adoption of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act owe a moral debt to the generations of African Americans whose agitation for political equality helped expand the definition of who gets to be American.
Frank H. Wu, the first Asian American to serve as a faculty member of a historically Black law school (at Howard University), has thought deeply about the need for solidarity between Black Americans and Asian Americans.
“Asians, especially Chinese, have faced a history in America of being described as dirty, the source of contagion,” wrote Wu, now a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. “In San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake, for example, the bubonic plague outbreak was attributed to Chinese immigrants. The characterization of Chinese as filthy, living in a squalid Chinatown, as if they had chosen hyper segregation, was used in turn to justify continuing exclusion and further discrimination.”
Trump’s usage of “kung flu” is a pseudo-event, intended to shock and distract. But if it has any use, it is in reminding us of how far we need to go to achieve racial progress. In describing Asian Americans as “amazing people,” McEnany was echoing — inadvertently, I imagine — Trump’s bizarre 2017 observation that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.”
Douglass was indeed amazing, for his expansive and capacious view of American freedom. And it would be amazing indeed if all Americans followed the moral example he set in resisting racism and xenophobia.
Sewell Chan is the Editorial Page Editor of the Los Angeles Times.
