BONUS SECTION: RACISM DURING COVID-19
Disease exposes discrimination
Fears about the current coronavirus, or COVID-19, have revealed rampant racism and xenophobia against Asians. Anti-Asian discrimination ranges from avoiding Chinese businesses to direct bullying and assaults of people perceived to be Asian. This discriminatory behavior is nothing new. The United States has a long history of blaming marginalized groups when it comes to infectious disease, from Irish immigrants blamed for carrying typhus to “promiscuous women” for spreading sexually transmitted infections.
From Stacy Torres, an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UC San Francisco and Xuemei Cao, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York in USA Today (2020) Coronavirus on college campuses: Fight fear and racism along with the outbreak. If anyone can give you a disease, everyone is potentially a threat and your enemy. Crises such as coronavirus test social trust as well as science.
Matthew Lee, a health policy researcher published Coronavirus fears show how 'model minority' Asian Americans become the 'yellow peril' (2020)
While viruses and other pathogens do not discriminate between hosts based on race, ethnicity, nationality or immigration status — stigma and misinformation certainly do.
...anti-Asian discrimination has ... manifested in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.
We asked our listeners whether they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments and tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country — regardless of ethnicity, location or age.
GOP minority leader in the House called the virus "the Chinese virus":
From Time Magazine, Trump's 'Chinese' Virus Is Part of a Long History of Blaming Other Countries for Disease (March 20, 2020)
...one part of President Donald Trump’s reaction to coronavirus has remained consistent. More than a week after he prompted outcry by retweeting a supporter who called the novel coronavirus the “China virus,” photos from Trump’s Thursday press briefing about the virus showed that “corona” had been crossed out and replaced with “Chinese.” The President and his team have defended the use of that language—despite the World Health Organization making a point of not naming the disease after the place where the outbreak began, and despite advocates arguing that such terminology fuels the risk of hate crimes against people of Asian descent, who have already reported a surge in discrimination.While Trump may have his own political reasons for describing the virus as foreign, he’s also part of a long history of associating diseases with certain countries—a tradition that experts say has led to ethnic and racial discrimination, stymied efforts to effectively handle public health crises, and distorted public historical memory.
From Northwestern University's Daily Northwestern, Yunkyo Kim posted (2020)
Graffiti, handshakes and the “perpetual foreigner”: Asian Americans at Northwestern report alienation amid COVID-19.From a 2018 article in the American Journal of Public Health, “Spanish Flu”: When Infectious Disease Names Blur Origins and Stigmatize Those Infected" also available here.
Despite not originating in Spain, the 1918 influenza pandemic is commonly known as the “Spanish flu”—a name that reflects a tendency in public health history to associate new infectious diseases with foreign nationals and foreign countries. Intentional or not, an effect of this naming convention is to communicate a causal relationship between foreign populations and the spread of infectious disease, potentially promoting irrational fear and stigma. I address two relevant issues to help contextualize these naming practices. First is whether, in an age of global hyperinterconnectedness, fear of the other is truly irrational or has a rational basis. The empirical literature assessing whether restricting global airline travel can mitigate the global spread of modern epidemics suggests that the role of travel may be overemphasized. Second is the persistence of xenophobic responses to infectious disease in the face of contrary evidence. To help explain this, I turn to the health communication literature. Scholars argue that promoting an association between foreigners and a particular epidemic can be a rhetorical strategy for either promoting fear or, alternatively, imparting a sense of safety to the public. (Am J Public Health. 2018;108:1462–1464. doi:10. 2105/AJPH.2018.304645)
ABC News:
Asians facing discrimination, violence amid coronavirus outbreak
Wikipedia:
In the past, many diseases have been named after geographical locations, such as the Spanish flu (a misnomer, as it is generally agreed that the influenza did not begin in Spain[1]), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and Zika virus, but in 2015 the World Health Organization introduced recommendations to avoid this practice, in order to reduce stigma. In accordance with this policy, the WHO recommended the official name "COVID-19" in February 2020.[2]
In early coverage of the outbreak, some news sources associated the virus with China in a way that contributed to stigma. The journal Nature later published an apology for this type of coverage.[2][3] However, even after the majority of politicians had switched to avoiding stigmatizing language when referring to the virus, a minority continued.[2]
List of racist incidents around the world here:
In the NY Times (2020) Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety, "As bigots blame them for the coronavirus and President Trump labels it the 'Chinese virus,' many Chinese-Americans say they are terrified of what could come next."
The Hill reports (2020) Attacks on Asian Americans skyrocket to 100 per day during coronavirus pandemic. Representative Judy Chu said that reports of bigotry and hate crimes against Asian Americans have surged during the coronavirus crisis.
From the LA Times Op-Ed (2020), Trump’s racist comments are fueling hate crimes against Asian Americans. Time for state leaders to step in.
After news of the coronavirus broke in January, Asian Americans almost immediately experienced racial taunts on school campuses, shunning on public transit and cyber-bullying on social media. When President Trump insisted on labeling the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” in early March, these attacks became more virulent and common.
The FBI now warns of an increase of hate crimes against Asian Americans, but we’ve already experienced a surge. Since the Stop-AAPI-Hate website, a project of the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council and Chinese for Affirmative Action, launched on March 19 to track anti-Asian harassment, it has received more than 1,000 reports from people in 32 states detailing verbal abuse, denial of services, discrimination on the job or physical assaults.
From Buzzfeed, A Man Who Allegedly Tried To Kill An Asian American Family Because Of The Coronavirus Could Face Hate Crime Charges.
The incident is just one in a surge of racist attacks that Asian-Americans have faced during the coronavirus pandemic.
Newsweek reports (2020) Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco-based advocacy organization, said she has talked to Asian-Americans who have been attacked in recent weeks, including a woman in San Francisco who was spat on in the street and yelled at by a stranger and blamed "for bringing the virus to the United States." An even more violent incident, she said, was that of a 12-year-old child in the Los Angeles area who had been taken to the ER after being beaten and told he'd introduced coronavirus to the country. "All of this as we are doing our part in a health emergency and caring for others," Choi said. "Now we have this added burden of feeling scapegoated."
