The Latest Targeted Attacks against Asians Has Links to Misconceptions on the Novel Coronavirus’ Origins
Social scientists and researchers have earlier predicted the surge of racism and xenophobia caused by COVID-19 disinformation.
A series of racially motivated attacks in the United States in March 2021, including the mass shootings at three spas in Atlanta, Georgia, that killed six individuals of Asian descent, reminded me of an article by Filipino researchers and educators Jonathan Corpus Ong and Gideon Lasco from February 2020 — just before the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. In the article published at the London School of Economics’ blog, Ong and Lasco warned about the growing epidemic of racism in news coverage of the then emerging global health emergency.
At the time, there was a worsening trend of racist and anti-China rhetoric — both from private individuals and influential media outlets — that was fuelling a dangerous “othering” of people from China. Ong and Lasco pointed out how “dangerous narratives,” which include attributing the novel coronavirus to the eating habits of Chinese people and propagating conspiracy theories about its origin, would encourage “racism and hate” by portraying “vulnerable populations as virulent carriers, rather than victims worthy of empathy and sympathy.”
In light of these recent attacks, Ong and Lasco’s article seems now a dark foreshadowing of what Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are experiencing.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak’s escalation into a pandemic, media coverage from right-wing tabloids and even reputable publications has been amplifying Orientalist prejudice and unfounded criticisms not just against the leadership in Beijing but Chinese people as a whole. A local publication in the Philippines with a large digital circulation has even committed the same crime in April 2020, when one of its senior editors instrumentalized the claims of a since taken-down research paper that COVID-19 was first contracted in a Wuhan laboratory. The article in question, which did not provide links to the source study, took a blatantly anti-China stance by zeroing in on Beijing’s bullish foreign policy and totalitarian governance leading to a dismal lack of transparency to verify the plausibility of the conspiracy theory. Even a year later, with widespread assurance from virology experts that SARS-CoV-2 occurred by nature and was not synthetically developed, the article remains on the leading paper’s website.
Framing the coronavirus pandemic in this manner gives perpetrators of hate crimes moral justification to vilify people of Asian descent. These types of coverage have also impacted the social, psychological, and economic well-being of affected populations in the middle of an already devastating pandemic. Physical assaults and racial slurs directed specifically toward people of East Asian descent have been reported time and again in Euro-American contexts by journalists and researchers. In Asian countries, anti-Chinese sentiments have likewise intensified, and the hatred stemming from the Chinese government’s encroachment on non-Chinese territories has been unfairly projected toward Chinese immigrants and tourists.
In February 2021, Ong wrote in a paper for MediaWell, “The pandemic moment has unleashed contagions of stigmatization and health misinformation.” This has resulted in even worse health and socioeconomic conditions in marginalized communities.
Social scientists are also pointing out other emerging race-related problems. In Ong’s slides shared on Twitter, he cited Monica Schoch-Spana, a disaster researcher, who warned about the politics and ethics of naming COVID-19. Taking into consideration how Donald Trump refers to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China Virus,” Schoch-Spana warned about creating “geographies of blame” when it comes to naming viruses, given how this could lead to the false assurance that viruses infect only the named people (in this case, those of Chinese descent), which could also be regarded as a “failure of imagination” to consider that it also affects the rest of the world. While the initial conversation was focused on the original COVID-19 virus, I can’t help but think of how the geographic naming of the recently discovered variants (i.e., those first discovered in South Africa, Brazil, the UK, and the Philippines) would affect or even endanger the people of those countries on a much wider scale, especially migrants in foreign lands. And what would happen once herd immunity is achieved first by more developed countries? What would happen to workers and visitors coming from the Global South, those who have become casualties of these so-called geographies of blame?
In the Philippines, Ong said, we should also watch out for the “intersection of disinformation and hate speech,” as well as fake news, that could escalate into racial violence. He put it on journalists to hold the line, not just for their own editorial independence but also for them to avoid the trappings of anti-China sentiments.
In Information Dystopia and Philippine Democracy, he lamented how “some journalists have only doubled-down on their decision not to fact-check,” with some of them even falsely claiming that hate speech is not the same as disinformation. However, both hate speech and disinformation “have porous boundaries” that would lead to even more hate crimes and violence.
“We need collaborative alliances that can create effective divisions of labor in monitoring our information system,” Ong wrote. “We need to combine journalists’ storytelling, fact-checkers rigorous research, deep ethnographic insight, and big data researchers’ broad pattern analysis to combat disinformation innovations to come.”
This kind of intersectoral cooperation has been floated before, but whether we will heed this call is yet to be seen. What clearly lies ahead, however, is that this kind of cooperation will require us to look inward, to reflect on how much we have participated in propagating racism and disinformation, part of which is turning a blind eye to unfair, insensitive, and harmful narratives simply because they don’t align with our political biases.
If there is anything to be learned from our own administration’s response to the pandemic, it is that a citizenry, especially their values and lived experiences, does not necessarily equate to its government. Allowing ourselves to fall into the rabbit hole of spreading anti-China sentiments without critical evaluation of a situation and its consequences for innocent individuals will make us no different from those who sow fake news and disinformation in our own country.
The media, for all its faults, still holds immense power in influencing public opinion. As much as putting the blame on Beijing and painting China in a bad light seem convenient, intentionally sensationalizing bits and pieces of a whole narrative is harmful to the media as an institution and to individuals. The recent hate crimes in the United States are but a fraction of the disenfranchisement experienced by minorities and migrants around the globe. The least the media can do is de-escalate the possibility of such incidents from happening in other territories.
This article was written by JP Campos.
