The Yellow Peril Revisited: The Impact of SARS on Chinese and Southeast Asian Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction News of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) first hit Canada in early March 2003. For the duration of the spring and into the summer, extensive media coverage with headlines like U.N. warns of worldwide threat from killer ailment, and lack of access to accurate information contributed to a climate of fear, panic, and siege mentality in Toronto. During the months of March to June, Chinese and Southeast/East Asian communities were doubly burdened, fearing for their own health and well-being, and bearing the stigma of this disease on themselves and their communities. The made particular groups and their transnational mobility hyper visible as news reports literally traced the origins and routes of the conflated virus/migrant. The regulation of mobility as revealed through the experiences of racialized bodies in this project show a mapping through race. The narratives in this report indicate that the city, and to a larger scale, the nation, are racialized spaces. The following is an excerpt from the report Yellow Peril Revisited: The Impact of SARS on Chinese and Southeast Asian Communities, coordinated by the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC), an advocacy group for Chinese Canadians, and Solutions Research, a research consulting company which lent its expertise. The report was written in 2004. During the crisis, CCNC National and Toronto chapters were the first groups to speak out against the racist backlash that followed the onset of the crisis, while all levels of government were reluctant to acknowledge or intervene in the social effects of SARS. Another initiative called the Community Coalition Concerned with SARS coordinated support lines, public education forums for Chinese-speaking people as well as challenged the Toronto Sun for running a racist SARS cartoon during the crisis. The hysteria surrounding SARS evoked a number of racist backlashes against the Chinese and other Southeast Asian communities. CCNC, alarmed by the events and hoping to stop such occurrences from happening again, applied for project funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage to gather and document some of the social effects on communities. This report illustrates that Chinese and Filipina Canadians were racially profiled through media and state discourses of SARS. It attempts to tease out some of the complexities of how this disease became constructed as an issue of race, and how targeted communities experienced this crisis within an analysis of interlocking oppressions. The intent of the report is threefold. One objective is to document our communities' experiences so that we may better understand how racism operates during a moment of moral panic, with the understanding that these experiences are also gender- and class-based. The other objective is to give an opportunity for people within the defined community to voice their concerns. This was conducted through interviews and focus groups with volunteer participants and community organization representatives. The people interviewed were solicited through postings by community organizations, electronic forums, word-of-mouth and invitation. Throughout the barrage of media reporting on SARS, very few media outlets addressed the social alienation, discrimination, racist practices that Southeast/East Asian communities experienced during this time. The personal narratives belie the broad impact that the SARS crisis had on these communities. The report's interviews were drawn from two groups. One group included those people who voluntarily responded to our call for participants. The other group included community leaders and front line staff in community organizations who supported affected individuals. Finally, based on the data collected, we developed a list of strategies to help prevent this from future occurrence. This report is not an exhaustive investigation of the issues experienced by our communities that resulted from the racialization of SARS. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".