By Calling it the “Chinese Virus,” Trump Unleashed a Wave of Hate and Violence Against Asian Americans

April 1st 2020

Donald Trump (Gage Skidmore)

By Bill Berkowitz

Donald Trump’s repeated description of the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” -- both during news conferences and on Twitter -- 

unleashed an epidemic of hate and violence against Asian Americans. Not only are Chinese-Americans facing discrimination, but “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,” The New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel Jr. recently reported. 

In the past few weeks alone, The online reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate has received more than 650 direct reports of discrimination against primarily Asian Americans.

In mid-March, The New Yorker’s Anna Russell reported that the Anti-Defamation League, tracking racist memes and online activity directed toward Asian communities, “uncovered lurid cartoons depicting an Asian ‘Winnie the Flu,’ mocking references to ‘bat soup,’ and more violent imagery. 

“For months, there have been posts on notoriously extremist-friendly platforms like Telegram, 4chan and Gab linking the coronavirus to racist and antisemitic slurs and memes,” the A.D.L. wrote, in a recent blog post. “Users across these channels regularly share racist messages or caricatures of Chinese people, mocking their eating habits, accents, and hygiene.” 

Oren Segal, the vice-president of the A.D.L.’s Center on Extremism, noted that extremists “use every opportunity they can to create division. The fact that this sort of hatred exists in the same spaces where people are collecting their legitimate news—it is a concern.” 

Discrimination against minorities during a crisis is nothing new. It is, as H. Rap Brown once said, “as American as cherry pie!” 

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, an urban-studies scholar who co-curated an exhibition titled “Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis” at the Museum of the City of New York last year, told The New Yorker’s Anna Russell that “throughout history, pandemics had often intensified discrimination against minorities.”

”In the early twentieth century, immigrants at Ellis Island, seen as carriers of trachoma, underwent invasive screenings that were wrapped up in all kinds of anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” Russell  said.

“The xenophobia that has occurred in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic can be situated in a longer history that dates back to 19th-century epidemics and the first international conventions on controlling the spread of infectious diseases,” Alexandre I R White wrote in The Lancet.

White from the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, added: “In the current pandemic of COVID-19, we also see the links between epidemic risk, xenophobic responses, and the global economy. Verbal and physical attacks on people of Asian descent and descriptions of the disease as ‘the Chinese virus’ are all connected in this long legacy of associating epidemic disease threat and trade with the movement of Asian peoples.”  

As The New York Times’ Matt Stevens pointed out, “After enduring decades of exclusion, racism and discrimination that include some of the darkest chapters of American history, Asian-Americans entered 2020 with reason for optimism on the political front. A wave of second-generation Asian-Americans had come of age, sparking hope that they could help break voter turnout records in the fall. And three people with roots in the diaspora had run for the country’s highest office during the same cycle, with one of them, Andrew Yang, energizing Asian-American voters in a fashion seldom seen before.”

According to Stevens, “The racist abuse on display has evoked painful memories. Asian-American leaders were quick to recall the government-sponsored discrimination baked into the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese internment in the 1940s. Experts say those events and others contributed to the perpetual foreigner and “Yellow Peril” myths that promoted the false ideas that people with Asian features were disease carriers, a threat to the nation and could never truly become American.”

Earlier this week, “The leaders of the congressional black, Asian and Hispanic caucuses gathered Monday to condemn the racism that the Asian American community is confronting during the COVID-19 pandemic,” NBC News’ Kimmy Yan reported. 

Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., chair-woman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said: "These attacks are nothing new, unfortunately, in the history of our country at different points in time. White supremacy rears its head, and there have been attacks on one of our communities.

"And so, us standing in solidarity today, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and CAPAC, that amounts to us continuing a historical tradition," she said. "I hope that we don't have to have this historical tradition forever."