Kung Flu and Roof Koreans: Asian/Americans as the Hated Other and Proxies of Hating in the White Imaginary

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about not only political, social, and economic disaster globally, but also rising hate and the exacerbation of social inequity. As the pandemic spread beyond China, hate crimes against Asians skyrocketed in the United States and internationally. Amidst growing xenophobia and a global health crisis, 2020 also marked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. Memes that featured “Roof Koreans” started being shared during the protests, along with the already racist memes about COVID-19 that targeted Asians. In this essay, we critically analyze memes from the spring and summer of 2020 to examine how Asian/Americans are not only positioned and reproduced as the Hated Other (“Kung Flu”), but also how they function as Proxies of Hating (“Roof Koreans”) in service to white hegemony. Using critical discourse analysis, while also responding to Palumbo-Liu’s 1994 essay examining images of Korean Americans from the 1992 LA Uprising as proxies of white hegemony, we explore the symbolic connections between these memes and the pervasive narrative of Asian/Americans as both yellow peril and model minority.