No ‘excuse to normalize xenophobia’
Officials denounce bigoted rhetoric as illness anxiety rises
When John Lee went to a local barbershop as a firsttime customer on Thursday, the staff ’s initial inquiry had nothing to do with his hairstyle, he recalled.
“The first question to me was, ‘Are you from China?’ ” he said. “That was the start of the conversation.”
The 43-year-old from northwest suburban Palatine said the question about his nationality — in the midst of the recent coronavirus outbreak in China — took him aback.
He said he explained to the stylist that he’s Korean American and had immigrated here some 15 years ago. While Lee said he’s compassionate about mounting anxiety surrounding the new virus that originated in Wuhan, China — hundreds of miles from the nation of his birth — he still found the question about where he was from offensive.
Even as U.S. officials declared coronavirus a public health emergency Friday, medical experts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautioned against discrimination and xenophobia stemming from angst spurred by the new respiratory disease.
“Please do not let fear or panic guide your actions,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, at a news conference Friday. “For example, please do not assume that just because someone is of Asian descent that they have this new coronavirus.”
Yet news reports and social media posts indicate a rise in cases of discrimination and bigoted rhetoric linked to coronavirus in the U.S. and across the globe.
Officials with the University of California at Berkeley apologized on Thursday after its health center posted on Instagram a graphic listing “common reactions” to the coronavirus outbreak, including “xenophobia: fears about interacting with those who might be from Asia and guilt about those feelings.”
The graphic drew intense backlash on social media, with one Twitter user commenting, “Outbreaks are not an excuse to normalize xenophobia. Crisis should not erase our humanity.”
A Canadian physician in a tweet on Wednesday described the prejudice her child faced.
“Today my son was cornered at school by kids who wanted to ‘test’ him for coronavirus just because he is half-Chinese,” the doctor tweeted. “They chased him. Scared him. And made him cry.”
A Reuters news report from several Asian countries described anti-China sentiment overseas, including “shops barring entry to Chinese tourists, online vitriol mocking the country’s exotic meat trade and surprise health checks on foreign workers.”
Locally, under a Chicago Tribune story on coronavirus posted on Facebook, one commenter referenced “bat soup,” which some internet conspiracy theorists have falsely claimed as the origin of the virus.
Two cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in Illinois. A man in his 60s caught the virus from his wife, a Chicago woman who contracted coronavirus while in China. This was the first instance in the U.S. where the disease spread from one person to another, according to health officials.
Local health experts say that while the risk of Illinois residents catching the virus is low, they’re still taking steps to contain its spread. As of Friday, seven people nationwide had tested positive for coronavirus, 114 had tested negative and another 121 tests were pending, according to the CDC.
While the World Health Organization has called coronavirus a “global health emergency,” many medical providers in the U.S. note that the flu is still a far more ubiquitous and dangerous threat here.
Emma Yu, executive director of the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said she hasn’t heard of any businesses in Chinatown being discriminated against due to coronavirus, noting that “the non-Chinese who visit Chinatown to eat and shop are usually friendly.”
Yet she recounted a case where two DePaul University students from China were on a CTA train recently, wearing surgical masks as a precaution against contracting coronavirus.
Yu said she was told another rider approached the students and chastised them for “bringing the virus to the U.S.”