The coronavirus is much more than a public health problem.
The coronavirus outbreak, which emerged in China earlier this year, is quickly spreading across the world. We may not have reached full pandemic status yet, according to the World Health Organization, but we are inching closer every day as reports of new infections — in the US and elsewhere — stream in.
As legitimate concerns grow over the scope of the crisis, there’s another problem worth worrying about: xenophobia. The history of pandemics, as Columbia University assistant professor Merlin Chowkwanyun told Vox recently, is bound up with outbursts of fear-mongering and anti-immigration hysteria. This is no less true in the US, where concerns about infectious diseases have historically been linked to draconian restrictions on various groups, including Chinese Americans and African Americans.
The Trump administration, unsurprisingly, is considering imposing major restrictions at the US-Mexico border in response to the coronavirus, even though the virus isn’t coming from Mexico. And it’s not just what’s happening at the top. Chinese-owned businesses have been hit hard by coronavirus panic. As Jenny G. Zhang wrote in Eater, the panic has had a “decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric ‘others’ who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases.”
And to that end, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) recently issued a call asking reporters to “ensure accurate and fair portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans and to avoid fueling xenophobia and racism that have already emerged since the outbreak.”
Natalia Molina is a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on immigration, ethnicity, and how public health crises are often used to reinforce racial categories and advance nativist political movements.
I spoke to Molina by phone about the history of xenophobia and public health in the US, what pandemics — or the threat of pandemics — does to our politics, and the difficulties of balancing credible health concerns against the temptations to unfairly ostracize specific groups of people.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Why does a public health crisis, especially a pandemic, lend itself to exploitation by racist movements?
Natalia Molina
Well, it’s important to note upfront that we’ve always used race as an organizing principle to define problems in the economy, problems in the culture, problems in the political domain. When there’s a pandemic, or any kind of health crisis, our existing ideas about race naturally shape how we process and frame the situation.
So it’s not surprising that our ideas about race define who we think of as disease carriers, who we think is more susceptible to the disease, or which borders we think we should close. We can’t help but see these problems through the lens of race, because nearly everything in society gets processed through this lens one way or the other.
In this case, there are plenty of things we know about how to deal with this virus. We know to wash our hands, we know to stay home when we’re sick. But we tend to focus less on those practices than we do on pointing out people that we think are going to be more likely to be disease carriers.
At my own campus at USC, students that are Asian American but aren’t Chinese and don’t have any connection at all to the coronavirus are more likely to be seen as disease carriers. People are more ready to point out and stay away from people that look a certain way than they are to engage in the practices that they know will keep them healthy or will contribute to keeping them healthy.
Sean Illing
Is a wave of xenophobia the historical norm during epidemics?
Natalia Molina
It’s what we’ve seen over and over again. What may be a little surprising is that even when we have a better understanding of diseases and how to combat them, our reactions are still so malleable. Our perceptions are still distorted by our sociocultural biases.
So in the early 20th century, when we knew a good deal about how diseases operate, we still had different screening practices for Asians coming into the country through Angel Island on the West Coast. We had different screening practices for Mexicans coming through the US-Mexico border. We had different screening practices for European immigrants coming through Ellis Island on the East Coast.
Our views about race have always colored our views about who is safe or who is contaminated, or who is most likely to be a disease carrier or a disease spreader. The process for making these kinds of decisions has never been objective in the way we like to believe.
Sean Illing
It seems like the rhetoric of xenophobia is built into the way we talk about disease and public health. Or does it just appear that way because xenophobic movements have adopted the language of disease to target specific groups of people?
Natalia Molina
It’s a good question. It’s very hard to separate these things out. But the language of disease has always been linked to our discourse around immigration. For example, we saw this in 2014 with the Central American children who were coming to the United States in larger numbers than before. There was a congressman, Phil Gingrey of Georgia, who wrote a letter to the CDC saying that these children from Central America were bringing diseases like H1N1 and dengue fever and Ebola, without any hard evidence whatsoever.
So I think it’s pretty clear that our fears about immigrants and outsiders have always been bolstered by fears about disease and contamination.
Sean Illing
Do we have evidence showing that awareness of a virus activates xenophobic sentiments in people? Or are these associations implanted by outside forces?
Natalia Molina
The key thing is that when we already have negative representations of certain groups, when we already think of certain people as “dangerous” or “unworthy” or “outsiders,” then it’s much more likely that we’ll see them as disease carriers or as health burdens. This is what I mean when I say that our views about race frame the way we perceive public health threats.
Sean Illing
I have to assume that the more these racial biases influence our response to a threat like a virus, the worse the health outcomes are for everyone.
Natalia Molina
Absolutely. Think about it this way: If you’re afraid of getting sick and race is the organizing principle for how you view the disease, then you’re going to be more concerned about where you go and who you’re around rather than following standard health practices. And even more significantly, for those who feel targeted, they’re going to be less likely to speak out if they get sick or go get treatment. They’re going to be less likely to go to a free clinic and get vaccinated. They’re going to be less likely to report something that they’ve seen.
We saw this in Los Angeles when Proposition 187 was passed nearly 25 years ago. This was legislation that denied public services to undocumented immigrants, which many people said was dangerous because if you’re trying to stop the spread of communicable diseases, you want to make sure that people can still get vaccinated, that people still go to hospitals and get treated.
Even when that proposition was stayed by the courts, for a long period afterwards people were afraid to use public health clinics, even those that were documented, even those that had green cards, even those that were citizens, just for fear of being discriminated against. This is why we should all be invested in making sure that we do not see race as an interpretive framework for understanding disease and outbreaks.
Sean Illing
How can a government balance legitimate concerns about an epidemic against the temptation to overstate the risks or incite hysteria about a disempowered population?
Natalia Molina
We need to focus on behaviors and practices, not specific population groups. We need to talk about geographic zones, but we can’t map the disease onto certain bodies based on race and appearance — that’s not going to be helpful.
Author: Sean Illing
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