Yellow

Chinese Mythology

Chinese mythology had long venerated the Huang Di (the standard translation of the term is Yellow Emperor). The Huang Di was regarded as the semimythical progenitor of Chinese civilization. As purple has been the color that traditionally symbolized royalty in Western culture, yellow was its Chinese counterpart. Chinese people customarily characterized themselves as the sons of the Yellow Emperor. They extended the family metaphor to the diaspora who had settled beyond national borders. The reference to yellow, however, was not understood in literal terms. It was not seen as describing skin color. It also was not applied by the Chinese to other Asian ethnicities.

Other Uses of Yellow

The word yellow was used in American racial discourse in another manner. High yellow was a 19th-century colloquialism for the skin tone of persons who were presumed to have significant proportions of white blood mixed with black blood. Although the adjective high reflected the relative status of these individuals, the designation is now regarded as pejorative.

Development as a Racial Term

In a definitive book, Michael Keevak documented how yellow, as in pigmentation, became a dominant European description for Asians. In the earliest encounters between Europeans and Asians, the former had seen the latter as white even though they had called Africans black. That did not last.

When Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, he promised an ordering of nature itself through a Latinate naming scheme. His work was highly influential in establishing the discipline of biology. His taxonomy of race was based on geography and color.

By the time of ethnologist John Beddoe, writing in the English Victorian era, the trend was toward not only consolidating races but also arranging them according to hierarchies. Beddoe sought with his index of negrescence to document that the Irish were blacker and thus more primitive. Likewise in the discussions of race, Asians became darker as they became inferior.

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