The Virus and the Hate

In the most recent cases, two assailants beat an 89-year-old woman in the face and set fire to her clothes. In San Francisco, an 84-year-old man went out for a walk one morning and never returned. He was beaten to death. In Mountain View, California, two friends were quietly eating in an open-air restaurant and a woman passed by and spit on them. The only thing the victims of the apparent crimes have in common is that they are U.S. citizens of Asian heritage, and the assailants assumed that they were Chinese.

Since last year when, when the pandemic was declared and President Donald Trump began calling COVID-19 the “China Virus,” “the China Plague” and “Kung Flu,” violent street attacks against people who are thought to be Chinese have increased by 150%. The victims are being unjustly scapegoated by ordinary people who are extremely frustrated and angered by the economic and social impact that COVID-19 has left in its wake.

Trump always and constantly blamed China for the spread of COVID-19; consequently, since last March, people who appear to be Asian have been discriminated against and looked down upon. Asian Americans have lost customers at their places of business, their children are teased and more than 3,000 cases of violent incidents against Asian Americans have been reported to the police in the last 10 months.

While hate crimes — defined by the FBI as attacks and offenses motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation — declined by 7% last year against Black people, Latinos and homosexuals, hate crimes committed against Asians in 2020 were worse than they had been in a century.

Most of those who have suffered attacks were older than 60, mostly women who spoke little English. The incidents have occurred particularly in New York, which has the highest number of Asian residents in the country, but also in places such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; and the cities of Los Angeles, San Jose/ and San Francisco, California, where a 91-year-old man was thrown to the ground by another passerby who shouted, “go back to China.” The elderly man turned out to be Japanese, but here they look the same in what is derisively called “Corona Wuhan.”

Throughout the history of this country, ethnic minorities have been blamed for contagious diseases, as was the case in 2009 with the swine flu that was associated with Mexican Americans. In 2003, with SARS, or Acute Respiratory Syndrome, it was Chinese Americans, while HIV was connected to Haitians and homosexuals.

Long ago, people believed the black or bubonic plague came from Jews, typhoid was spread by the Irish and the influenza pandemic of 1918 was the Germans’ fault. But in the United States, Asian Americans — a community that is not monolithic but made up of people whose families come from China, Japan, the Philippines and Korea, among other places — have been blamed for spreading illness throughout history.

During World War II, the government imprisoned approximately 120,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese origin based on their race, destroying entire communities in California, Washington and Oregon, where it forced Japanese business owners to close their doors and Japanese residents to give up their homes before they were transported to detention centers in rural Colorado and Wyoming.

There is no doubt that Trump, with his incendiary and xenophobic rhetoric, inflamed passionate responses unjustly linking the virus to Asian Americans, in effect giving permission to attack them. It’s going to take time and education to mitigate the danger that he exposed them to. President Joe Biden has condemned racism against Asian Americans, and has recognized that they are being forced to live in fear for their lives simply by walking the streets of the United States. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones.