Yellow Peril Awareness [Day 1]

Coming Soon: the first-ever ‘Yellow Peril Awareness Day’ on 6th May 2024

Did you know there were 6 Chinese survivors on the Titanic? That the first Japanese visitors to London came in the 1500s and that in 1945, the Home Office secretly and illegally deported thousands of Chinese seamen who had helped Britain during WW2? Their families, left in Liverpool, weren’t notified, and spent decades assuming their husbands and fathers had died or abandoned them, and only found out the truth decades later .

Undercurrents of Sinophobia and Yellow Peril, the fear, and, by extension, hatred of people who appear ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) continues to rear its ugly head through history and in more recent years. To ensure the next generation of ESEA people don’t have to battle anti-ESEA scapegoating, we’re launching ‘Yellow Peril Awareness Day’, an annual deep-dive into chapters of interwoven British-ESEA history.

Kickstarting on the 6th May, we’ll annually commemorate the signing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering the country by US law. To date, it is the earliest and first known ban a country has made explicitly against a certain ethnic group. For 83 years, until 1965, it justified top-down, racial tension, inclusive of riots and massacres of the Chinese people who already lived there. On the other side of the border, it historically kept the 6 Chinese survivors of the Titanic stranded on a lifeboat instead of getting treatment, when they’d suffered exactly the same as the other survivors.

With our annual Yellow Peril Awareness Day, we want to:

1. Uplift and educate about the depth of ESEA history, inclusive of yellow peril and its global impact.
2. Implement resources for top-down changemakers in the British public. Materials will be translatable for anti-racism training, specifically with a ESEA lens, for schools, colleges, universities, and workplaces.
3. Empower ESEA people to acknowledge their belongingness, share their experiences and be emboldened to report incidents.​

Join in on a national exploration of hidden history- and of ESEA belongingness in the UK!