In reality, some Vietnamese writers and intellectuals were heavily influenced by social Darwinism before the Second World War,[2] shaping their discourse on race.
They increasingly employed a discourse of race and ethnicity that, at times, demonized Black, Arab, Khmer, and (non-Vietnamese) indigenous Other.
[3] For instance, nationalist propaganda leaflet in the Mekong Delta in 1951 claiming how the "barbaric French" were using machines to "cook" Vietnamese soldiers and turn them into black Africans and Moroccans.
Racially charged rhetorical expressions could be found in popular slogans, newspapers, and graphic imagery such as propaganda posters and cartoons.
[2] The term đồng bào (compatriots) also accentuates the same meanings, were later extended to the Chinese in Mekong Delta who had often intermarried with the Vietnamese, but was never applied to peoples of Cham, Malay, and Khmer ethnicities.
[7] Such intense antagonisms received little condemnation from the Viet Minh leaders who at the same time also realized that those Black and Arab soldiers were also victims of the French colonial empire.
Hanoi journalist Phùng Tri Lai in 1950 vigorously characterized African minorities in terms of their so-called "nudity, barbaric habits, and custom of eating human flesh."
"[10] These resulted in an outbreak of ethnic tensions, mass murders, chaotic pillaging of towns, and race riots committed from both Khmer and Viet populaces erupted and spread throughout the Delta from August 1945 to March 1946.
Rather, in the worst of times, Vietnamese sometimes perceived the war as a struggle for their own racial or ethnic survival against enemies, who ranged from French rapists and killers to Moroccan and Senegalese cannibals and on to Khmer Krom decapitators.
"[7] The Kinh Vietnamese dominated government media propagate negative stereotypes of the highlander ethnic minorities, labeling them as "ignorant", "illiterate", "backward" and claim that they are impoverished and underdeveloped because of their own lack of economic and agricultural skills.