Rationalizing Racism: On Naming COVID-19 the ‘Chinese Virus’
If you insist on tying it to the Chinese people, you just may be a racist
If you insist on tying it to the Chinese people, you just may be a racist
Caption: President Donald J. Trump, joined by members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, listens to a reporter’s question at a coronavirus (COVID-19) update briefing Sunday, March 22, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour / Wikicommons)
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President Donald Trump and his supporters’ insistence on naming the current Coronavirus outbreak the Chinese or Wuhan Virus is having real-world consequences. As I wrote a few days ago, this is not just a theoretical complaint. It is not just some snowflake-liberal overreaction. People are being put in danger because the president, Republicans in Congress, and Trump’s followers insist on disregarding World Health Organization naming conventions for viral outbreaks and linking COVID-19 to the Chinese.
The WHO is explicit in its recommendations, which were issued in 2015, that we need to follow practices in “naming new human infectious diseases (that) minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people.”
The WHO calls for public naming conventions that “consist of generic descriptive terms, based on the symptoms that the disease causes (e.g. respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea) and more specific descriptive terms when robust information is available on how the disease manifests, who it affects, its severity or seasonality (e.g. progressive, juvenile, severe, winter). If the pathogen that causes the disease is known, it should be part of the disease name (e.g. coronavirus, influenza virus, salmonella).”
Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).
Trump and his acolytes insist on ignoring these conventions, rationalizing their overt racism by pointing to earlier diseases.
The WHO anticipated this argument five years ago in announcing the current best practices. Keiji Fukoda, the assistant director-general for health security at the WHO at the time, said “names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors.”
He added that
“This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”
Fukoda’s comments now seem prescient, given what has been reported around the country. As The New York Times reports today, Chinese-Americans are facing a “double threat.”
Not only are they grappling like everyone else with how to avoid the virus itself, they are also contending with growing racism in the form of verbal and physical attacks. Other Asian-Americans — with families from Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar and other places — are facing threats, too, lumped together with Chinese-Americans by a bigotry that does not know the difference.
Chinese restaurants are closing (at least two in the South Brunswick area, though it is not clear why they closed), while other Chinese-American businesses and individuals are reporting growing fear. As the Times writes, Asian-Americans say they are afraid “to go grocery shopping, to travel alone on subways or buses, to let their children go outside. Many described being yelled at in public.”
The Times likens the current atmosphere to the “sudden spasm of hate” that was “faced by Muslim-Americans and other Arabs and South Asians after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” The difference, as the Times pointed out, was that President George W. Bush’s rhetoric at least attempted to tamp down the hate, though his actions did inflame anti-Muslim attitudes.
Trump has made no efforts to do this and instead continues to ramp up anti-Chinese energy. His insistence and his supporters insistence that this be called the “Chinese Virus” even as the WHO and the scientific community have pushed back is evidence of an intentional racism that is both central to Trump’s character and a useful deflector designed to shield the president from blame for his inept response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Initially calling it the “Chinese Virus” or the “Wuhan virus” is understandable but, once the scientific community and others in the media and government pointed out the potential dangers of the naming and also pointed to WHO guidelines, Trump and his enablers and supporters had a responsibility to back away from it. To continue in the face of these sensible criticisms should make clear that this naming effort is not benign.
Add his history — throughout his long public life and in the three-plus years of his presidency — off making comments about blacks, women, Jews, Mexicans, Muslims, and Asians and it seems pretty clear to me, that Donald Trump is the racist-in-chief. And, for those who seem so willing to explain all of this away, I’ll repeat something I said last week: “You need to look in the mirror.”
An Injustice!
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