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:
“He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
““Because a few complacent years
Have made your peril of your pride,
Think you that you are to go on
Forever pampered and untired?”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)