answering Shane Gillis’s questions about Chinese people and Chinatown

Chinatowns were created because of anti-Chinese racism from white-Americans. There was the whole Chinese Exclusion Act too.

So many Chinese people went into the food industry because of racist laws that kept Chinese people in jobs in food and cleaning. White men/lawmakers felt threatened by Chinese men, so they tried to keep them to “feminine” roles, and spread dehumanizing rumors of Chinese men as “feminine,” weird, emasculated predators of white women, partially because they believed white women belonged to them. They also created punitive laws for white women who were with Chinese men.

People form the ability to pronounce phonemes in languages at early ages. So someone learning a 2nd language in or after their teenage years will likely have a difficult time learning the correct pronunciations of words. That is why some Asian immigrants learning English as a 2nd language struggle with sounds related to l and r sounds. White racists mock Chinese immigrants for not learning English, and mock Chinese people for learning English.

There’s a long history of the dehumanization of Chinese people to justify murder. “Chink” is part of it. Calling them mischievous, scheming, duplicitous, is also part of it.