Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror) was a colour metaphor for race that originated in the late nineteenth century with Chinese immigrants as coolie slaves or laborers to various Western countries, notably the United States, and later associated with the Japanese during the mid-20th century, due to Japanese military expansion.
The term refers to the skin color of East Asians, and the belief that the mass immigration of Asians threatened white wages and standards of living.
Read more about Yellow Peril: Origins, New Zealand, South Africa, American National Origins Formula, Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words yellow and/or peril:
“They are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain,—made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The man who stands by and says nothing, when the peril of his government is discussed, can not be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)