White Supremacy and the #ChineseVirus
by Joel Dinerstein
A new tweet appears twice a minute with the hashtag #ChineseVirus, used mostly by Trump supporters around the world. Why does the president insist on using this phrase when discussing the pandemic?
Viruses know what Americans resist knowing: humans are all 99.99% the same. This is the most important biological fact of the millennium and yet we have failed as a nation to communicate this essential knowledge. I learn this every semester at Tulane when my students are shocked to find out there is no gene for race in our DNA — that whether Yao Ming or Michele Obama or Greta Thunberg or my tiny yiddishe mama, all human beings have equal intellectual, physical, linguistic, and emotional capacities. Of course my students believe racism is wrong, yet they arrive in college believing that “race” refers to innate biological differences in human bodies and group capabilities.
“People are members of different races [only] because they have been assigned to them.” This is how Noel Ignatiev opens How the Irish Became White, a classic history of race without color that refers to England’s 800-year colonial rule over its “Irish savages.” Racial oppression does not require color: all a nation needs to do is create myths about the target group’s inferior intelligence, morality, or abilities. This was as true for stirring up white American race riots against the Chinese in the 1870s as for the Nazi ideology that paved the way for the Holocaust. A minority group is targeted as alien or foreign — as a plague upon the nation — with rhetoric that often invokes the metaphor of swarming vermin or disease-carrying insects. The objective of such racializing is obvious: the dominant racial group wishes to convince the body politic to reject this foreign contaminant.
Racial ideology then spreads like a virus: through repetition, it infects the whole society. Given time and peer pressure, the dominant race develops herd immunity while the racial group is quarantined in ghettos or reservations.
When the president gutted the possibility of a global response to the pandemic by insisting the G7 call the disease “the Chinese virus,” his underlying message was of a nation’s racial purity contaminated by an alien element. When he closed the border with Mexico — falsely claiming there was “viral spread” from undocumented immigrants — this served the same message of protecting white racial purity from foreign non-white agents. His political method often depends upon racial scapegoating: immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, Democrats of color, China.
The function of a scapegoat is to act as a stable target for a nation’s floating anxiety and to deflect responsibility from its leaders. Just to say “the Chinese virus” over and over generates a conspiracy theory about germ warfare created by “an invisible enemy.” This is the president’s specialty: he presides over the country as a ringmaster of resentment.
His use of the #ChineseVirus is encoded white supremacy — I will define my terms so there’s no confusion as to my meaning. Here is a short, useful description by white Southern novelist William Faulkner to describe the ideology of a 29-year-old white male character in Light In August (1932): Percy Grimm held “a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races.” This may sound strikingly like the Nazis’ master race ideology and it should. Faulkner himself made the connection of Percy Grimm’s American white supremacy to German ideology ten years later: “I didn’t realize until Hitler got into the newspapers that I had created a Nazi before he did.”
White supremacy is a quite literal phrase: it is the ideology of any person who believes “the white race is superior to all other races” at the genetic level.
When an individual sends a sample to 23andMe, geneticists do not learn the person’s race but rather his or her ancestry or population of origin (hence Ancestry.com). These terms are not synonymous with race — race will always be associated with ideas of hereditary abilities, behaviors, or inferiority. Racial classification was created by Europeans to establish a human hierarchy and its own superiority.
It is no accident that attacks upon individual Chinese-Americans have increased nor that the president turns a blind eye to the connection. Even Trump’s single tweeted attempt to express his concern over these attacks revealed an us vs them mindset within a worldview based on white racial purity. “They are amazing people,” he tweeted, but who are “they” in this statement? Certainly Chinese-Americans are, by definition, Americans. “The Virus is NOT their fault in any way, shape, or form,” he tweeted on, “and they are working closely with us to get rid of it.” Again, who is “us” in this statement? Any rhetorical analysis would have to conclude “white people” — and, in addition, that only “white people” fully count as Americans.
By racializing a group, a society reveals a desire to exclude a target group from the nation’s symbolic myths. That’s what Ignatiev meant when referring to all racial identities as assigned (or imposed) from outside. This is why race has always been useful to oppressive or colonial nations: racial myths reinforce the idea that genetic hierarchy accounts for a group’s success or failure.
I may now start my courses on race by teaching about viruses, since they do not discriminate among human bodies or populations. On every continent, for the first time in global history, people of every alleged “race” have the same disease. (See map above.) The main difference in the viral spread and death rates are due to health care disparities.
If there can be a silver lining to this pandemic, perhaps it will be the recognition that, just as diseases do not discriminate, so then there are no significant differences within the human species. Armed with this knowledge, we could begin to cure the virus of racial hierarchy by spreading the good word of our genetic equality. Unlike viruses, this is entirely within our (human) control.
