in a pandemic
A look at how COVID-19 sparked an outbreak of xenophobia against Asian Americans
by Kiki Sideris
RACISM
A
s New York City based artist Crystal Cheng passed through Herald Square in Manhattan in early March, a stranger tried to catcall her — an experience that Cheng, like many women in the city, is entirely too familiar with. She performed her usual routine: avoiding eye contact and walking away without an interaction. Usually, the plan is foolproof. Although occasionally met with a snarky comment, it’s nothing she couldn’t brush off. But this time was different. The man’s response was something that stuck with her.
He shouted back at her, “She’s got coronavirus!”
“I’ve always been hyper-vigilant living in the city, and especially on the subway,” Cheng said. But recently, things have changed. Now, “it’s more like I feel extra vigilant and ready to defend myself if something were to happen. I’m more observant of people around me, and observant of fellow Asian people because I feel this sort of responsibility to protect my people as a Chinese woman.”
As fear and anxiety of the coronavirus run rampant across the globe, Asian Americans are contending with growing racism in the form of verbal and physical attacks.
In New York City, a 23-year-old woman told police that another woman punched her in the face and made anti-Asian slurs, and the victim was hospitalized. The incident is being investigated by the city’s Hate Crimes Task Force. In London, a Singaporean university student was kicked and punched in the face after a man told him, “I don’t want your coronavirus in my country.” The police called the incident a “racially aggravated assault.” Similar incidents have occurred around the world.
While no official numbers exist yet in the US, Asian-American advocacy groups and researchers say there has been a surge of verbal and physical assaults reported in newspapers and to tip lines. San Francisco State University found a 50 percent rise in news related to Anti-Asian discrimination and the coronavirus from February 9 to March 7. The lead researcher, Russell Jeung, has helped set up a website in English and 11 Asian languages to gather first-hand accounts. In the first two weeks of its launch, the site collected over 1,100 reports of coronavirus-related discrimination, including verbal harassment, shunning, and physical assault.
What’s more, an Ipsos survey conducted for the Center for Public Integrity found that one-third of Americans have witnessed someone blaming Asian people for the coronavirus pandemic, and about three in ten Americans blame China or Chinese people for the pandemic.
The hateful responses and blame assignments are reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims, Arabs and South Asians in the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But unlike in 2001 when President George W. Bush called for tolerance of American Muslims, President Trump is using language that experts say is inciting these racist attacks.
At a White House press briefing about the coronavirus pandemic on March 19, President Trump referred to the disease as the “Chinese virus,” and later defended his use of the phrase. This comes despite the World Health Organization’s guidelines urging people to avoid talking about the virus in non-neutral terms.
On March 23, Trump tweeted, “It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States.” He added that they should not be blamed for the pandemic, though he did not comment on his use of the phrase “Chinese virus.”
Then, at a White House press briefing on April 13, President Trump referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus.”
Experts think using the phrase, as well as assigning blame to one community, might put Asian Americans at greater risk of racist attacks. “Gluing an Asian face to the virus,” John Collins, an anthropologist at Queens College, said, permits US citizens and politicians “to focus on their xenophobia, and assigning blame, rather than reacting in an intelligent manner. It suggests that the virus is a result of a ‘dirty other,’ rather than a symptom of the ways we all live today. The Asian face thus relieves US citizens of having to change how they conduct themselves.”
Jeongwook Kim, a 48-year-old Korean immigrant and mother of two girls, says she has been affected by those consequences. When Kim went on her weekly Rite-Aid run for some medication and groceries in early April, another shopper stopped her at the door before she could enter. The man shouted at her about how she shouldn’t be outside because she’s Asian.
He followed her around the store, yelling expletives at her about China while maintaining his distance.
“He told me to go back to China, that it was my people’s fault that the virus is in this country,” Kim reflected. She added that although she is not Chinese, the Asian community “is realizing that the hate on the Chinese is indicative of a larger problem — hate and xenophobia on Asians as a whole.”
The United States has a history of assigning blame to minority groups in the face of a pandemic. Chinese people were also targeted during the 2003 SARS outbreak; people of African descent were targeted during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks; Mexicans were blamed for the swine flu; Haitians and gays were targeted at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; Japanese people were blamed in the 1900s for the bubonic plague; Irish immigrants were blamed for the cholera epidemic in the 1800s. The list goes on.
"The hate on Chinese is indicative of a larger problem — hate and xenophobia on Asians as a whole."
Each of these outbreaks had one thing in common: the assignment of blame to immigrants or minority groups. But where does this stem from?
Previous research has suggested that fear of disease leads to anti-immigrant bias, based on the false notion that migrants are carrying germs or viruses into the country. However, a July 2019 study led by Harvard University psychology professor Brian O’Shea, suggests that Americans who live in states with higher rates of infectious diseases are more likely to hold racist views.
“It’s probably driven by fear and disgust,” O’Shea explained. He added that humans hold an evolutionary bias that makes us reject people who don’t look like us in order to protect ourselves from threats, especially infectious diseases. In the case of the coronavirus, O’Shea says, people may discriminate against Asians because “it’s safer from an evolutionary perspective to assume that all Asian people, for example, could get you infected. You [think that you should avoid] them rather than taking the chance of exposing yourself to them and just assuming you're okay.”
In early March on the N train to Brooklyn, an angry straphanger yelled at an Asian man to move away from him. “I don’t want him under me!” the man yelled. “Tell him to move!”
When the Asian man did not abide by his demands, the straphanger sprayed him with air freshener. The MTA described the event as an act of “racism.”
"It's very rare for people in the United States to view Europeans and whites as a biological threat, or as a menace."
“If we were to think about it differently, many of the European colonizers who came to the land eventually known as the United States, brought with them diseases and illnesses that essentially killed off huge proportions of the indigenous population,” Crystal Fleming, sociologist and author of the book “How To Be Less Stupid About Race,” explained. “Despite that, it’s very rare for people in the United States to view Europeans and whites as a biological threat, or as a menace.”
Although Italy had a greater number of coronavirus cases and deaths than China, Trina Ruan, a 22-year-old Brooklyn resident, says that she hasn’t seen the same discrimination against Italian Americans. “People see Italy as a victim to the virus,” Ruan said, whereas China is viewed as the perpetrator because the virus originated there.
Part of blame assignment could stem from the missteps of the mainstream media, according to Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director and lecturer of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University's School of Journalism.
“Even as the coronavirus was spreading in Canada and the United States and all over the world, it seemed as if the generic photo that they were using was a group of Asian people in masks,” Anzalone said. “So it kind of associated the disease with a certain group of people, a certain ethnic racial group.”
Even worse, some of the partisan press has reported on the coronavirus with “irresponsible language and lack of caution,” Anzalone said. “On talk radio, and some of the partisan press, they’ve been spreading this rumor that the coronavirus was started in a lab in China, which there is no evidence for, and the evidence suggests it’s not true,” Anzalone explained. “But it’s a way to kind of exoticize and make scapegoats of the Chinese.”
Using Chinese and other Asian Americans as scapegoats in the context of the coronavirus can be attributed to America's long history of discrimination against Asian people, according to Fleming. This discrimination dates back to the country’s first influx of Chinese settlers, which prompted the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, beginning in 1882. The acts halted all immigration of Chinese laborers and prohibited Chinese already residing in the US from obtaining citizenship. The acts weren’t repealed until 1943, and Chinese families weren’t allowed to enter the US until 1965, when discrimination against immigrants was finally prohibited.
According to Fleming, this is part of “a very long political tradition, and a shameful one, but one that we need to understand in today’s context.”
Meanwhile, people have rushed to protect themselves. One man even started a buddy-system Facebook group for Asians in New York who are afraid to take the subway by
themselves. In March, gun stores across the country reported a sharp increase in the number of Asian people purchasing firearms to protect themselves from backlash.
Others are afraid of the backlash that might come from speaking out.
Ruan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, was placing her groceries on the conveyor belt at her local grocery store while consciously maintaining the prescribed distance of at least six feet from the shopper in front of her. Ruan says the cashier looked at her in disgust and yelled at her, claiming that she wasn’t maintaining a far enough distance. She wanted to fight back, but felt hesitant to defend herself.
“I was kind of afraid that if I were to say something, an argument would break out and maybe the customers around would also go against me and side with the cashier,” Ruan said. “I regret not saying anything because what if an elderly person goes through the same thing I went through, but worse?”
Coronavirus racism is not slowing down, despite social distancing orders, and the discrimination is bound to stick around — or intensify — even after the pandemic, according to Tony DelaRosa, a Filipino American anti-racist educator, activist and self-proclaimed "cultural broker," who helps organizations build bridges across lines of difference through his public speaking company, Tony Rosa Speaks.
He explained that the coronavirus pandemic has made implicit biases that already existed, explicit.
"So what can we do at this moment?" DelaRosa asks. "Look to your ethnic group — whether it's Lao, Filipino, Thai, whatever — and find and research what happened within our history, between us and another race. Get those stories manifested and publish them. Share them across social media. We need those stories to uplift other people to show that this is a possibility for us to work together across lines of difference. And another thing we can do, Asian Americans should be sharing their story if they have the capacity to do so."
And perhaps, DelaRosa says, there's a silver lining to the struggle.
"We [the Asian American community] have never felt so strong, so united," DelaRosa said. "It's sad that it took until this moment for us to come together, but it is what it is at this moment."