Becoming Yellow

Recently, on a popular forum someone asked about the racial classifications by skin type that created the White, Black, Red, and Yellow categories. They astutely pointed out that they've never met anyone who was yellow and so it seemed like a very odd choice. My first response was the point them to Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century scientist who in addition to setting up categories of kingdom, phylum, family, species, etc. also decided that human beings could be classified by these four racial types (with a monstrous category as a catchall for the leftovers.) You can read more about his racial classifications on the AAA's wonderful Understanding Race website.

But I wasn't quite satisfied with that answer. It explained why it became a popular designation of race over other competing theories and categories at the time. But it didn't address the main question the person originally asked - why yellow? So I did some further digging and found this fascinating book called
Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking by Michael Keevak. Keevak looks at the writings of travelers, missionaries, and explorers and the ways in which their descriptions and understandings of the people of East Asia change over time. The earliest 16th century travelers considered East Asian peoples to be white, in part because their technology and social complexity seemed on par with many Europeans. Paintings of Asian people at the time reflected this. But by the second half of the 18th century Europeans agreed that Asians were not white or at least not as white as Europeans. They refused to convert to Christianity and Europeans needed a cultural way to explain why they sought to dominate and colonize these peoples.Yet, scientists felt they didn't belong in the black/brown category either.

This inability to satisfactorily classify Asian peoples within a simple racial schema frustrated scientists during the Enlightenment and the skin color of Asians became a hot debate. The writings of Linneaus suggested that skin colors were a result of one of the four humors existing in excess. For Asians, this meant the yellow bile in large part because that was what was left over after assigning categories for everyone else. Meanwhile, Blumenbach argued they belonged in a category called Mongolian, which he described as having an olive or yellow tint to their skin. These two worked well together conceptually, and became the dominant way to discuss race of Asians. Anthropologists even employed a kind of spinning top near the limbs of Asian peoples to try and quantify their yellowness. For their part, Chinese peoples were not terribly upset about being called yellow because in Chinese the word huang is associated with high status, while the Japanese rejected it. Though some critics have rightly pointed out that Keevak glosses over the complexities of how Western categories were received and understood in the East.

Then in the late 19th century, Europeans and Americans became consumed with the fear that the immigration of Chinese and Japanese peoples threatened their way of life. Remember that in America, Chinese and Japanese workers were brought over in huge numbers to build railroads. First 10,000 Chinese were brought in and when Americans protested further immigration from China in the 1880s, Japanese workers were brought to finish the railroads. It was a tense time for racial politics in America and the Asian immigrants were often the butt of political cartoons and racial slurs. Yellow became a double meaning, drawing upon the cultural associations of the color with cowardliness.

This is an interesting albeit short little book about not only the history of yellow as a category but the complicated, political, and ultimately futile attempts of scientists to force humans into clearly defined racial categories.