@Khaem @dcstardude @Barkhadle1520
Even though today Asians particularly Chinese Americans are often portrayed as the "model minority," it wasn’t always this way. It's important to remember that Chinese Americans were once subjected to intense xenophobia, racism, and dehumanizing caricature by white Americans.
They were frequently the targets of openly exclusionary, and at times even genocidal, languagetold to "go back home" and repeatedly reminded that they were not truly American.
What makes it worse is that this wasn’t just anonymous trolls online ,it was public, legal, and institutionalized.
The Society Pages (TSP) is an open-access social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota
thesocietypages.org
There’s even an entire archive dedicated to racist depictions of Chinese people in 19th and early 20th-century political cartoons:
Thomas Nast's cartoons of Chinese Americans
thomasnastcartoons.com
Some of these portrayals were horrifying posters accused Chinese men of being sexual predators, and one infamous image showed the Statue of Liberty welcoming white immigrants while Chinese people were depicted as an evil serpent being rejected.
They were ridiculed in art, cartoons, and literature just like what’s happening now to Somalis, where we’re being reduced to piracy memes and Barkhad Abdi caricatures on twitter.
This hostility was triggered by a familiar context: Chinese and Japanese immigrants fleeing poverty, war, and hunger in search of opportunity. As their countries grew stronger economically, their image in the U.S. shifted, and immigration slowed or changed through self-selection. Early Chinese American communities built businesses, organized themselves, and paved the way for a new public image.
It’s also worth noting they were subjected to the same "Middleman Minority" resentment that Somalis experience today resented for our visibility in business, accused of "stealing" jobs or opportunities, and sometimes targeted with violence.
It lead to massacres
This is not unique to Chinese Americans. Many immigrant communities in the U.S. have faced similar cycles. It’s part of the broader American immigrant experience the story of initial rejection followed by eventual acceptance and success.
And that’s the key lesson: resilience. Each group overcame hate and marginalization to build better lives and uplift their communities.
Somalis should take inspiration from this push forward, stay united, and build. In time, today’s hostility will become a footnote in history, replaced by a new and better reality that we shape ourselves.