- If you've been watching the news,
you know that hand sanitizer, face masks,
and toilet paper are in low supply
all across the nation.
But do you know what's always in stock?
Racism!
Today's baggage:
The racist history of pandemics.
Coronavirus disease, or COVID-19,
is a respiratory illness
that was found in China in late 2019.
The virus has since
traveled across the world
and, hell, it's alarming.
- Coronavirus!
Coronavirus!
I'm telling you, s*** is real!
- Cardi B tells no lies.
In all seriousness, COVID-19 is very real.
It's highly contagious and
there're cases of the disease
in over 100 countries around the world.
Since the coronavirus
has traversed the globe
and affects so many people,
the World Health Organization has declared
that it's a pandemic.
And, unfortunately, as COVID-19 spreads,
so does fear, prejudice, and xenophobia.
Ever since the virus
appeared in Wuhan, China,
Chinese people, and
other East Asian folks,
have been turned into villains,
those thought to be the
carriers of this disease.
Hmm.
That sounds racist.
Before we go any further,
let's clarify a few terms.
First up, xenophobia.
You might've heard this word
floating around as of late.
Xenophobia is literally
a fear of "foreigners."
And sinophobia, on the other hand,
is a more specific kind of bigotry.
Pretty much it's the
fear of Chinese people.
In the United States,
this perception that
people from other countries
carry a contagious disease
dates back to the 19th century.
Merlin Chowkwanyun is a historian
and Assistant Professor
of Sociomedical Sciences
at Columbia University.
We sat down to chat about
pandemics and outsiders.
So, Professor, when do we
first see contagious diseases
linked with outsiders?
- I think this rhetoric
of blame really solidifies
in the 19th century because of
the huge wave of immigration
throughout the 1800s.
And it really follows a
couple, I think, basic themes
that have been remarkably persistent
across centuries, really.
One is that the outsiders have
this kind of intrinsic quality,
something maybe biological,
but it makes them more
prone to getting diseases
and to affecting others.
And the other is sort of related to that,
but I think it's distinct.
It's that these outsiders behave badly,
so they don't clean themselves,
they eat strange foods,
they live in very cramped spaces.
I think one of the most prominent groups
that this happened to in the 19th century
was in the antebellum
era, it was the Irish,
who were often blamed
for cholera epidemics.
A few decades afterwards,
you get a lot of immigration
from Southern Europe.
Italians are blamed for polio outbreaks.
African Americans and
Jews from Eastern Europe
are often singled out for TB.
Over in California in
cities like San Francisco
and Los Angeles, it's the
Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans
who are blamed for smallpox outbreaks,
typhus, trachoma, and TB as well.
The professor says that these associations
lead to some extremely harsh
practices around immigration.
Just take a look at medical
inspections as an example.
While the Feds still require
immigrant health examinations,
back in the day, these
were hella invasive.
And not everyone got the same treatment.
Chowkwanyun says that Chinese immigrants
faced particularly strong and
invasive medical inspections.
Chinese and Mexican immigrants
could have been stripped naked,
had their blood and urine sampled,
or their bodies disinfected
with chemical agents.
Immigration laws banned people
from entering the United States
if they suffered from "a
loathsome or contagious disease,"
all because the fear of
immigrants and contagious disease
had these white people shook.
For context, this is around the same time
that Jim Crow laws started to emerge
in the United States post-emancipation.
So this fell right in line
with America's trash treatment
of non-white people.
And similar to Jim Crow,
discrimination towards
immigrants was put into law.
This is when we start to
see immigrants from Ireland
and Italy woven into the
American fabric a bit more.
They become accepted as white.
But for the "othered" folks,
Chowkwanyun says that the
fear of contagious disease
was even used to justify
residential segregation.
- We also know that many neighborhoods
of mostly working class African American
and immigrant residents were bulldozed
throughout the 20th century and razed,
and a lot of the rationale for that
is these are cauldrons of disease.
- With America's history
of racism and xenophobia,
it's no surprise that during
this public health crisis,
the othering continues.
- The Chinese coronavirus epidemic
turns outs to be just that, an epidemic.
It's racist, they're telling you,
to blame the most racist
nation in the world
for the spread of this virus.
- Let's start the media.
Take a look at these people wearing masks,
who are mostly Asian.
Why are they being used as
cover art in these stories?
The thing is, these people
are completely unrelated
to these stories in any way.
Like in the case of this
Washington Post article
about the first recorded
coronavirus death in the U.S.,
but the cover photo shows an Asian couple
walking down the street with
masks on in South Korea.
And this New York Post article
that discusses the first case
of coronavirus in Manhattan,
yet the tweet is of an
Asian guy in Queens,
minding his own business with a mask on.
Mind you, it looks like
he's mid-swipe on Tinder.
Leave him be!
Educational institutions had
made some poor judgements, too.
In a now-deleted post, UC Berkeley,
a university with a 29%
Asian student population,
said that xenophobia is a
common reaction to COVID-19.
Do better.
This stigma of Asian people
has even lead to violence,
harassment, and outward
displays of bigotry.
- He don't wanna hit him.
- If you're Chinese or
Yang, don't come around me.
Philippine?
I'm sorry.
Man, get this out of my thing
- Y'all, this is not okay!
Donald Trump and the Trumpettes are guilty
of racializing the coronavirus, too.
He tweeted saying that
"we need a wall now more
than ever!" because racism.
- I think this continues to
perpetuate this very strong link
between Asian people more generally
or Chinese people more
generally and the virus itself.
China had the misfortune
of being the first country
where they were a large
and huge number of cases.
And this tendency to kind
of shift it, to reduce it,
to this one country, this one place,
I think can also contribute
to some of the xenophobia
that we've been talking about.
- The shade is Italy has been coping
with one of the largest outbreaks
of COVID-19 in the world,
but they're not being
stigmatized in the same way.
Some of these attitudes are really ironic.
Dr. Celine Gounder is an
infectious diseases specialist
and host of The American
Diagnosis, an Epidemic podcast.
She points that some of the
earliest cases of COVID-19
involve some unlikely suspects.
- So some people have
reached out to me saying
"Well, if I charter a private
plane for whatever event,
that'll keep me safe, right?"
But remember, who was getting
infected in the beginning?
If you look at some of the early cases,
these were wealthy businessmen
who were traveling to
China on business trips
and then bringing it back home.
People taking luxury cruise ships.
This is not a "riffraff"
or "disease of poverty,"
at least not in the beginning.
And I think unfortunately
what you're seeing
with the anti-Chinese
xenophobia is, again,
it's this othering that we see
with every single infectious disease,
whether it was Ebola or HIV.
There's this very strong instinct
whenever you have a new
infectious disease to other,
to say "It's not gonna happen to me."
I don't think we've seen the same kinds
of travel restrictions being
enforced as stringently
for people coming from places like Italy
as we saw for people coming from China.
- So you've done lots of
work with Ebola, TB, HIV.
Did you find that those
diseases, those epidemics,
were racialized as well?
- Remember the 2014 midterm
elections with Ebola?
You had our current President,
you had Chris Christie,
you had others tweeting things
like "those dirty Africans".
I was told that I was crazy,
that I was traitor to this country,
for wanting to go over
there to help people.
These are not primitive people!
Unfortunately, there was
a real lack of empathy
for people on the ground
and I think it's important
to understand the context
of these places.
These are countries where
they have a very recent,
in their mind, history
of slave traders coming
and picking up people
and taking them away.
There's real trust issues.
- Are there any other
points that you think
that we should be aware of
when we talk about COVID-19?
- Regardless of race,
what you need to be doing
is really the basic stuff,
so washing your hands.
And I know people are like
"Oh, really, that's all
you're gonna tell me to do?"
but this is something we
really need to recognize,
that the best way to protect
yourself: Wash your hands,
wipe down your surfaces in
your kitchen and your bathroom,
and, again, this has nothing to do
with race or social status.
This is just about basic
human common sense.
- Gounder says that we're
likely gonna see a spike
in the number of cases
reported in the U.S.
as we test and learn more
about the coronavirus.
The big picture is no
one wants to get sick
and many of us are worried about ourselves
and our loved ones but there's
never an excuse for racism.
Ever.
So cover your cough, wash
your hands well and often,
and, in the meantime,
don't be racist trash.
