Unmasked: Anti-Asian Violence amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
Introduction by series curator Melissa Borja, assistant professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan.
At first glance, the novel coronavirus appears to choose its victims mercilessly and without discrimination. As of June 24th, the 9.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 473,000 deaths have touched all continents except Antarctica. COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has afflicted the indigent, the imprisoned, and the elderly as well as princes, prime ministers, and professional basketball players. The economic and social havoc produced by the pandemic has affected people of all ages, genders, ethno-racial identities, and classes, from restaurant workers recently laid off to homebound kindergarteners required to learn through Zoom.
But if this pandemic has brought suffering throughout the globe, this suffering has not been equally shared. As with so many disasters, whether natural or manmade, our current crisis has exacerbated inequalities and delivered particularly high levels of death and destruction to vulnerable communities long ravaged by discriminatory government policies. As public health experts have emphasized, COVID-19, as a physical disease, preys most viciously on people burdened by preexisting medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Similarly, COVID-19 — as a social, economic, and political crisis — impacts most acutely those burdened by preexisting conditions of inequality related to race, gender, class, ability, and citizenship status. The disparate pain produced by COVID-19 has not arisen by chance, but as a consequence of a natural disaster acting upon a society already weakened by the manmade disaster of systemic inequality.
Stories and statistics from Black, Latinx, and Native communities reveal the cruel convergence of an acute public health crisis with chronic racial inequalities. CDC statistics show that Black Americans, who make up only 13% of the U.S. population, account for 33% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 nationally. Moreover, death rates for white Americans stood at 45 per 100,000 population, while the death rates for Black Americans and Latinx Americans were significantly higher (92.3 and 74.3, respectively). And as of May 11, the Navajo Nation counted over 3,000 coronavirus cases — more cases per capita than any state in the U.S.
Beyond exacerbating disparities in health outcomes, the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified other political and social vulnerabilities, such as those experienced by Asian Americans, the focus of this Spark series and of my own research. The association of the coronavirus with China has revived longstanding beliefs that Asian and Asian American people threaten the health, morality, and prosperity of white Americans. Abetted by politicians who have used stigmatizing terms such as “kung flu,” “Wuhan virus,” and “Chinese virus,” this new iteration of old Yellow Peril rhetoric has coincided with a spike in anti-Asian harassment, vandalism, and violence. In the wake of a particularly brutal attack on a Burmese American family in March, the FBI warned of a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, and the data on hate incidents suggest that the FBI’s prediction was correct. The Stop AAPI Hate Center, with which I am affiliated, has worked to document the scope and character of rising anti-Asian hate during the pandemic. In the four weeks since the Stop AAPI Hate Center began to collect data, it received nearly 1,500 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents, which increased even as state and local lockdowns kept Americans at home and drastically reduced public interactions. Analysis of news media confirms these findings. My research team found that between the week of March 8 and the week of April 5, there was a 225% increase in anti-Asian hate incidents reported in the news. Hate incidents seem likely to increase in the coming months as businesses reopen, as people encounter each other more frequently in public places, as tensions between the United States and China escalate, and as politicians continue to use stigmatizing rhetoric.
This series, which explores the causes and consequences of the upswing in anti-Asian hate, represents an effort by NCID to publish a number of essays that consider how the COVID-19 pandemic has had a disparate impact on diverse communities. Many people have described the coronavirus as an equal opportunity virus that does not discriminate between Black and white, or rich and poor. But it is clear that this pandemic acts upon a human society that does discriminate on the basis of race, class, gender, ability, citizenship, and other forms of difference. When the coronavirus is unleashed upon a Black community disadvantaged by institutionalized racism and housing segregation, Black people are more likely to die. When the coronavirus is unleashed upon an economic system that depends on and exploits migrant labor, undocumented immigrants are more likely to fall ill. When the coronavirus is unleashed upon an educational system that fails to offer equal resources to students, poor students are more likely to flounder in technology-dependent online classes. And when the coronavirus is unleashed upon a society that has long devalued people who are incarcerated, disabled, or chronically ill, those people are more likely to be ignored and to suffer. And when labeling of the virus builds on centuries-old ethno-racial stereotypes, violence results.
In the end, the essays in this collection invite reflection on more than the COVID-19 pandemic. They force a reckoning with societal ills that have faced America since the beginning of its history, and they urge recognition of the ugly truth that racism continues to plague our society and diminish our capacity, as institutions and individuals, to battle the coronavirus and the chaos it has unleashed. In times of prosperity and health, these problems are perhaps easier to ignore. To address them now, however, could literally mean the difference between life and death.
