Stigmatization travels faster than infectious disease
AUntil Washington stops holding the rest of the world to a higher standard, it will keep unleashing waves of stigmatization that outrun a disease that does not discriminate.
second wave of smears against Chinese was searing while the country was grappling with the threat of a second wave of the coronavirus outbreak from imported cases. US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suddenly insisted on calling the novel coronavirus the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus” in mid-March. Their obstinacy has injected new life into the controversy surrounding its designation, and threatened to negate the World Health Organization’s early move to christen it “SARS-CoV-2”.
The highly virulent pathogen was given a race and place of birth in their not-so-subtle attempts to draw the public eye away from the White House’s initial flailing response to the pandemic, which the president had first entrusted warmer weather to smother.
The artificial controversy has worked its magic. An uproar was ignited, petitions were launched, and apologists scrambled to manufacture justification and set the table for a blame game.
Maybe it is just for the sake of convenience, as some were quick to argue. After all, it did give people a faint idea about where the contagious disease first broke out.
Except that a scant number of Americans had heard of Wuhan before the outbreak. And by now, it has become a household name due to undesirable circumstances. And the convenience came at the risk of stigmatizing over 1.4 billion people. Like many other labels.
To derail the racism accusations that followed, a list was cobbled up of diseases named after places around the world, so it won’t be seen as unusual to call diseases by their places of alleged origin.
Minamata disease is named after a Japanese city in Kumamoto prefecture. Ebola is a river in Congo. And Stockholm syndrome, though not an infectious illness, also made the cut. To strike home the idea, athlete’s foot, which also goes by the epithet “Hong Kong foot” among Chinese communities, featured prominently in the list.
None is a pandemic as ferocious and infectious as the current outbreak. And a little research shows that Ebola virus got its name from an obscure African tributary because microbiologist Peter Piot wanted to spare a town the stigma that a careless name would let stick. It had had the misfortune of coming under the viral disease.
And how historical callousness justifies ongoing stigmatization will also need more explaining. History is supposed to help us see our stupidity, not to be used as a ready-made excuse for repeating our past mistakes — as we did during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, when people turned against Latinos because, in one version of its origin story, it was first detected in Mexico.
But the blame game must go on. Accusations soon proliferated of Chinese overreacting and politicizing the terminology issue. Is it too much to ask not to be associated with an intended stigma, at least not until scientific research locates the still-dubious origin of the new virus?
This finger-pointing was pulled straight from the playbook of the first wave of the coronavirus-induced xenophobia, epitomized by the Wall Street Journal column “China is the real sick man of Asia”. If anything good can ever come out of it, let it be a reminder not to throw around seemingly innocuous labels that elicit die-hard misery.
It’s anyone’s guess if the author and editors of this overquoted article intended the “sick man of Asia” appellation as an insult to the Chinese government and Chinese people. But over 1.4 billion people have become unwilling collateral damage in their witty burn.
“Sick man of Asia”, not unlike “sick man of Europe”, denotes a morose empire counting its final days. But unlike the mid-19-century Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Asia” label has taken on a pejorative meaning for Chinese individuals ever since it infamously footnoted a caricature that ridiculed Chinese athletes after their Olympics waterloo in the mid-20th century. As the characterization still stirs up humiliation and pain in living memory, many Chinese were indignant at its mention. And their understandable outrage deserves better than being dismissed by politicians as an attempt to politicize the outbreak.
If Pompeo was only being racist to counter “disinformation” suggested by a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, as his office later claimed, it’s the “sick man of Asia” all over again. And the flimsy logic behind such an excuse cannot explain away Pompeo’s repeated utterances of “Wuhan virus” before the Chinese spokesman’s tweeted remarks.
Chinese people, especially the millions in Wuhan, locked themselves behind closed doors for two months to comply with the draconian measures to curb the spread of the virus. But their scare, hardship and sacrifice is unlikely to get much airtime in the US.
Western media and politicians have always shown an extraordinary level of “concern” about basic civil rights of Chinese. They cry foul at any perceived abuse. But when they need to dispute the “authoritarian” government that so happens to be an imagined rival, they don’t hesitate to bully ordinary Chinese citizens themselves.
Such manifestations of subliminal discrimination are symptomatic of the increasingly toxic US politics, in plain view again as another presidential election nears. Name-calling and personal attacks drown out structured debates. Sentiment trumps substance. Whatever stirs, goes. Especially if it hurts only the minority group of Asian Americans at home.
Until Washington stops holding the rest of the world to a higher standard, it will keep unleashing waves of stigmatization that outrun a disease that does not discriminate.