Seven Reasons to Care About Racism and COVID-19 and Seven Things to Do to Stop It

摘要

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Much is still unknown, but as the virus causing this disease has spread, so has misinformation and xenophobia. Unfortunately, this has followed a predictable pattern of connecting people to diseases.1 The pandemic has reinvigorated old stereotypes of Chinese people and fears of Chinese food, including the notions that they consume pets. Recently, a US senator stated that the “Chinese virus” originated from a “culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs” (e.g., https://bit.ly/2yBFl0D). His statement reflects an old belief system linking race and disease. For example, Prince A. Morrow noted in 1898, “China . . . has been the breeding-place and nursery of pestilential diseases, cholera, plague, as well as leprosy, from time immemorial.”2(p946) According to this belief, races are biologically distinct and, therefore, prone to specific diseases or apt to manifest them in unique ways. Such logic was used to justify the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies and the belief in diseases such as “drapetomania” (the “illness” of slaves escaping their masters).3 Samuel Cartwright and others published articles that espoused a belief that racial minorities were biologically and socially inferior. Left to their own devices, minorities would ultimately “degenerate” and die off. A major concern for the White population was that interracial marriage would cause degeneration of their race. These concerns in the United States catalyzed the popularity of eugenics, helped establish antimiscegenation laws, justified slavery, restricted immigration, and encouraged deportation.