XENOPHOBIA ERUPTING

On top of everything else, a shameful, xenophobic, infestation is spreading throughout our country, and through much of the world. On May 8, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, recognizing a festering problem, said that "the [Covid-19] pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering." He urged governments to "act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate." Since he issued that statement, xenophobic reactions targeting Asian-Americans have proliferated exponentially. The organization "Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate" began collecting reports of racism and discrimination from the time the Covid-19 virus began spreading in the U.S.. Between March 19, 2020 and December 31 of last year, it received 2,808 first hand reports of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and Washington D.C.. Roughly 71% were cases of verbal harassment, shunning or avoidance made up about 21%, 9% involved physical assaults, and 6% included being purposely coughed or spit on. (Spectrum News, Feb. 21, 2021). Eruptions of xenophobia, the fear of others who are different from us, have historically followed closely on the heals of pandemics. Some, like David Ley, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, argue that this trend is actually normal. He refers to it as an evolutionary form of protection. Early on, even U.C. Berkeley listed xenophobia under "common reactions" to coronavirus, a statement for which they later apologized. Throughout history, people have assigned the blame for a contagious disease on outsiders. Especially when viral outbreaks are deadly, fear often drives those at risk to place blame on some group external to their own national, religious or ethnic identity. During the 1300s, people thought that the bubonic plague came from the Jewish community. People had little scientific understanding of the disease, and were looking for an explanation. The Jews were an easily identifiable target. They were massacred in numerous European cities. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed. Increased immigration from Ireland during that country's potato famine, mid-19th century, coincided with the outbreak of cholera in several U.S. cities. For Protestant elites who hated Catholics, it was only natural to assume that the alien newcomers must have brought what became known as the "Irish disease" with them. The influenza pandemic in the the 1900s was blamed on Germans, polio on Italians, Jewish immigrants were blamed for consumption (tuberculosis), Haitians for HIV, Chinese-Americans for SARS, and so on. The "Age of Sail" imposed a natural restraint on the spread of epidemics originating in Europe, Africa or Asia. It took as long as a month to cross the Atlantic. Many infections had already burned themselves out by the time port was reached. Steamships and, ultimately, air travel changed all that. The coronavirus spread like wildfire across the world. By the time former president Donald Trump began referring to it as the "China virus" or "Kung-Flu," it had already become convenient for some to assume that Asian-Americans were most likely to be to blame. As the virus spread all over, so did the eruption of xenophobia. For the Asian-American community, recent vitriol has just become the latest chapter in a long history of anti-Asian racism in the U.S., from the "Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Perpetrators of xenophobic assaults, many of which appear to be unable to distinguish between different ethnicities of Asian-Americans, need to be identified and persecuted. A sampling of some of the horrendous offenses will illustrate the point: - An 89 year-old Chinese-American woman was set on fire by two assailants in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. - Japanese jazz pianist Tadataka Unno was assaulted on the New York subway system, resulting in a complex fracture of his shoulder and arm, requiring surgery and leading him to comment that he may not ever be able to play piano professionally again. - A 19-year old McDonald's worker in Oakland was assaulted for asking a customer to wear a mask. The man in the drive-thru used racial slurs, threatened to kill her, then broke her arm. - An elderly Thai-American man was assaulted in San Francisco, later dying from his injuries. - At a Sam's Club in Midland, Texas, a man attacked a family from Myanmar, stabbing 3 victims, including a 2 year-old girl and a 6 year-old boy. He feared they were Chinese and infecting others. Throughout multiple jurisdictions, prosecution of these crimes has been grossly inconsistent. It appears obvious that all of these ought to be litigated as hate crimes. We should throw the book at the scum perpetrating these, and put a stop to it. Ignorance is no excuse. Theo Wierdsma