How idiotic has harassment against Asian-Americans gotten during this COVID-19 outbreak? So idiotic that a hotline set up by the Minnesota Department of Health for questions relating to the virus — you know, health type questions — has received a distressingly high volume of calls from people complaining about Asian Americans and other immigrant populations.
Meanwhile, the state's main hotline for providing answers to Minnesotans' health-related questions about the coronavirus has gotten lots of calls from people blaming Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans for the virus.
Danushka Wanduragala, international health coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Health, said callers were also blaming other immigrant and refugee communities, saying that they believe lax immigration policies have contributed to the spread of the virus.
“We received enough racist and xenophobic comments on our hotline that we had to develop resources for our hotline staff to be able to respond to some of those comments,” he said, “and make sure that they can focus on getting information out to the caller and not spend so much time having to deal with comments like that.”
This comes on top of the stories being told by Asian Americans who are experiencing all sort of harassment, from the sideways stares to the outright verbal assaults.
Bo Thao-Urabe, executive and network director of the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, said she heard from someone who was harassed on a recent walk.
“Somebody else saw them and said something like, ‘Take your virus and go back home,’” Thao-Urabe said. “Things like that are making people feel like there is a lot of assumptions about who are carriers. And Asian Americans, regardless of whether you’ve traveled, seem to have become the target.”
Minnesota Public Radio reporter Hannah Yang, who covers the mostly rural southwestern part of the state, wrote earlier today that:
During a recent grocery run, I was searching for a jar of tomato sauce when I overheard whispers that made me nearly drop to my knees: “Trump should send them back,” I heard one man say, followed by, “She looks diseased.”
I felt my face flush with anger and resentment. I suddenly felt the urge to vomit, but all that could come out of me was shortness of breath. It took me several minutes to realize that my fingernails were digging into the palms of my hands after clenching them in a fist.
It’s not like this is a new angle to the story, various outlets have noted the hostility towards Asian-Americans as COVID-19 has swept across the land. Stories like this one, and this one, and this one, have documented the rapidly growing bile directed at our fellow Americans.
As National Public Radio noted, the U.S. is not an outlier:
The anti-Asian harassment isn't limited to the U.S., either. International outlets have reported harassment in majority-white countries like Australia, where parents in Melbourne refused to let Asian doctors treat their children, and Canada, where around 10,000 Toronto-area people signed a petition calling for the local school district to track and isolate Chinese-Canadian students who may have traveled to China for the Lunar New Year.
So what can I and others do to stand up to this vile behavior? As MPR reporter Yang wrote:
There was a part of me that hoped maybe someone heard them, too, and that they would run to my defense. Yet no one came. I looked around and saw everyone was too absorbed in grabbing their own essentials to care about one Asian woman standing in the aisle almost about to break.
My role must be to be that person Ms. Yang hoped would come to her defense. If we shred our basic common decency in the face of this outbreak, when it ends, what will we have to say for ourselves? Calling out those in power — cough, President Trump, cough — who continue to use terms like Chinese Virus or Kung-Flu need to be called what they are — racist jerks.
Our humanity should not be sacrificed to see this through. Or at least that is what the hopeful side of me wants to believe.