The virus stems from Wuhan, a city in China which is currently under strict quarantine by the state. While the virus itself has been declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO), not many have recognized the deadly consequences of the current narrative pinning the spread of the disease on Chinese people. The coronavirus outbreak has swept the world into a frenzied, xenophobic panic.
On Twitter and Instagram, there are hundreds of posts blaming Chinese people for the spread of the virus through eating food not common in Western countries, such as bats. Asian people who look ethnically Chinese have been regarded with suspicion and derision.
It seems those who carry out these actions and words under the guise of health concerns are gleefully taking advantage of a health epidemic to be openly racist.
This is not the first time a health crisis has been used by those living in Western countries to be openly xenophobic. When the Ebola crisis first broke out in West Africa in 2014, Black people were treated horribly and as carriers of the disease, whether they had recently visited West Africa or not. Jokes ensued, with people such as James Charles, a YouTube personality, tweeting a joke about going to Africa and catching Ebola.
What these two cases seem to have in common is that the viruses originated in non-white countries. If this were not the case, wouldn’t white Americans be globally feared as the creators of an anti-vaccination movement which brought back diseases such as plague and measles, which were long eradicated by vaccines?
Wouldn’t we blame the five million people who fled Wuhan before it was quarantined? Shouldn’t we question the Western governments who are actively using their influence to fly citizens out of Wuhan even now?
In Canada, we have seen first-hand the results of such viral racism, and those who use these racist rhetorics to carry out their own agendas. From the 1930s to the 70s, the Canadian government forced Indigenous people into extended hospital stays, where they were abused and medically experimented on against their will, due to the belief that they were carriers of tuberculosis.
Canada built hospitals attached to residential schools to experiment on and abuse Indigenous children. The government also made it mandatory for all Indigenous people living on tribal lands to have X-ray scans done and sent to the government.
If anyone opted out, it meant the tribe would not receive any money from Canada. Everything described here is not unique to the 1900s. Just in 2009, when the swine flu crisis was sweeping the world, the Canadian government sent body bags to Indigenous tribes in Manitoba.
The outbreak of the coronavirus is not an opportunity for people to exercise their narrow-minded, racist worldviews. Right now, is the time to practice compassion and care for those who have been and will be devastated by this outbreak.
File photo.
