When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in February, it seemed that nobody in the western hemisphere really took it seriously. Where the Chinese government responded relatively quickly with lockdown measures, and was in fact lambasted for its “authoritarian” measures, European countries and the United States did very little to halt the progress of the virus. One might think the East and South East Asian states learned a lot from SARS, while the rest of the world simply took it to mean that nothing would happen to them. Regardless, the peak came quickly in the countries that had been affected by SARS and infections rapidly declined. Where China had had the highest number of infections and deaths, it was very quickly overtaken by the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, France and so on.
Whenever any kind of mass casualty event occurs, the only meaning available to people tends to be blame. Who was to blame for this outbreak? It was impossible for many people in these countries to grapple with the fact that their governments and health authorities had been completely unable to handle the pandemic. Such an event had been predicted for years, and had been preceded by the avian flu and swine flu outbreaks leading up to the 2010s. The only difference between those pandemics and this one was how contagious and how deadly the virus has proven to be. How, then, could people reconcile the fact that they had been caught off guard with the actual situation?
Decades of “yellow peril” anti-Chinese propaganda proved to be more than enough motivation in the West. This is one of the most naked attempts to justify massive systemic inadequacy through a campaign of racism against East Asians. But it exists at multiple levels. Not only did the media play a major part in promoting this racism, the situation seemed to distil and manifest already-existing racism that had otherwise remained barely concealed in Europe and the United States.
The identification of the virus with China, and thus Asians more broadly, has been a conscious effort across many levels. So much so that Asians around the world have suffered racist attacks and harassment due to the pandemic. In response, a protest aligned with a hashtag, #iamnotavirus, has followed. The goal of this protest is to sever the link mass culture and media has worked to establish between the coronavirus and Asians.
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom (2020)
One person working with this subject directly is Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, a Korean-Swedish artist. Her drawings feature sweetly drawn yet unflinchingly journalistic descriptions of the types of attacks and harassment that have occurred. Among other things, she depicts a man in Texas convicted of attempting to stab an Asian family to death. On a smaller scale, she also depicts a white woman saying that she doesn’t “want to come across as racist” but that the Asian woman next to her should get off the tram.
These two points hint at the perimeters of the issue, while at the same time suggesting a far more deeply seated resentment of the Asian “Other” than can be accounted for simply by the hysteria surrounding the pandemic. Instead, it shows how racism can manifest in smaller, less identifiable places. In an interview, Sjöblom describes the strange looks, the distancing and the exclusion that is surely familiar to anyone who is not white in a majority-white context.
Everyone should be horrified at how easily race is weaponized in a time of crisis. That anyone is not horrified is itself horrifying. This will happen again and again as long as racism is tacitly accepted in the global North. And as always occurs when a scapegoat is found, the true culprit escapes. Thus far, no one in the Western world has faced consequences for the hundreds of thousands who have died from the immensely mishandled crisis. There are even talks of sacrificing hundreds of thousands more to appease the blood god of the economy. In such a situation, it is absolutely maddening to hear people speak of the Chinese as mindless. If this isn’t mindless, what is?