There is a rise in attacks on Asian Americans. There seems to be little question that the pandemic has something to do with it. The origin of the virus has been traced back to China; there are questions about how truthful the Chinese government has been about it. This would naturally be a cause for some concern, fear, and resentment.
Also being raised is the rhetoric of the former guy, who kept calling it “the China Virus” and other names that served to make China a scapegoat for his own failings. The usual right wing paranoia hardly needed an excuse to start cranking out conspiracy theories. I won’t link to them here. I’m pretty sure they’ve been discussed elsewhere, although nothing seems to be too crazy to be believed these days by someone.
It’s a tool Republicans are using to create division by trumping up threats, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott claiming the latest wave of immigrants coming over the border from Mexico are spreading Covid-19 — even as Texas drops restrictions and mask mandates because the threat level has dropped.
The economic disruption, the restrictions, and of course the deaths have made people angry and fearful. That’s never a good combination. People want easy answers to explain their problems. They want someone to blame. The fact that this virus has been traced back to Wuhan, China is enough to fuel all kinds of attention on China as an object of that blame.
The thing is, we don’t know where the next pandemic could be coming from. Covid-19 is just the latest SARS virus to come out of Asia. MERS came out of the Middle East. Legionella came out of Philadelphia.
We had the Zika virus outbreak coming from Africa originally. Chikungunya also came from Africa; Ebola is always lurking too. HIV took a while to be recognized as a serious disease threat because the nature of its spread and how slowly it developed, but it too is believed to have originated in Africa.
Granted, it’s a little hard to distinguish ‘normal’ American violence directed against African Americans from that which is potentially a response to a perceived disease threat out of Africa. Is it there? Assuming some new pathogen threat emerges from Africa, we may find out.
Short Wave at NPR’s Code Switch discusses how The U.S. Has A History Of Linking Disease With Race And Ethnicity. (It’s a 12 minute podcast.)
For Asian Americans, the issue of attacks over the Coronavirus is entangled with other reasons why China is being targeted. It’s not just xenophobia; it’s tangled up with national insecurity. Here are a few things being tied to China:
- Loss of American jobs to cheaper labor in China.
- Loss of American expertise as we outsource manufacturing to China.
- Unfair trade policies where China manipulates costs to gain market share.
- Charges of Chinese theft of intellectual property.
- Industrial espionage, where Chinese interests steal trade secrets.
- Military/Political espionage that is a national security threat.
- Cyber attacks coming from China.
- Growing Chinese military power in the Western Pacific, coupled with aggressive expansion.
- Growing Chinese domination of Pacific trade.
- The sheer size of the Chinese population and their economy.
- Chinese policies that suppress human rights — sometimes violently.
- Chinese contributions to climate change.
Even without a pandemic, there would be plenty of excuses for violence against Asian Americans, and it would be a continuation of a long history of American discrimination and worse. It makes it more difficult because there is some legitimacy to these concerns.
Buckle up — it’s going to be a rough road ahead.
UPDATE:
I’ve gotten comments by several people who are taking my words here as using economic anxiety to justify racial prejudice. As it seems I didn't phrase it clearly enough, let me say this.
I don’t excuse economic anxiety or any other kind of anxiety as an excuse for violence against any group, let alone Asian Americans. Here is what I am pointing out:
1) There are issues between the U.S. and China that are legitimate cause for concern: human rights issues, espionage, trade policies, etc. — see the bulleted list above.
2) These issues provide a background level of animus against China that gets conflated with all things Chinese and in a broader range, Asian. It’s what humans do.
3) People hear “China did this” and “China did that” — and people who don’t read past the headlines or hear anything but the soundbites are getting the message “China bad.” They overgeneralize it to anything/anyone who they take for Chinese.
4) The Former Guy and his people deliberately set out to scapegoat China for the pandemic, to distract away from their failures. This is despicable and unacceptable — but they did it, and there were people primed to hear it.
5) At a time when some people are experiencing economic anxiety AND anxiety over health risks which they simultaneously believe are fake and an attack on the U.S., fine distinctions get lost. They’re not thinking “The Chinese government is responsible for this.” (or maybe they are). They’re thinking “That person looks like the people I blame for all this.” We don’t beat up on people because they look like Russians even though Russia isn’t exactly our friend either. We don’t because they don’t look like the other.
6) The point I was trying to make is this: there’s a background level of irritation with China for justifiable reasons that all too easily feeds the racial violence and long-standing prejudice against Asians as it gets overgeneralized. IF we are going to address the violence, we have to recognize that some of the things behind it reflect tensions that are apart from the racial aspects — or should be.