Xinhua News Agency, Washington, August 29, by wire(International Observation) Racism intensifies and blames the U.S. for its poor history of anti-epidemic
Xinhua News Agency reporter
The United States is experiencing another peak of the new crown epidemic. According to data from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, the current average daily death toll from the new crown in the United States is 1,100, a new high since mid-March. As the epidemic worsened, American politicians once again set off a climax of the epidemic. While continuing to criticize China, they began to target Hispanic immigrants.
Analysts pointed out that racism and xenophobia in the United States are deeply entrenched, and there have been cases in history where minorities or foreigners were accused of epidemics. Now in the face of the new crown epidemic, American politicians are repeating their old tricks and engaging in “medical racism” by blaming foreigners and immigrants to shift contradictions and blame. But this is not helpful in fighting the epidemic. In the end, it will only lead to a cocoon and harm others and self.
Used to stigmatization
As the delta strain of the mutated new coronavirus is raging in the United States, some Republican politicians are not thinking about fighting the epidemic, but are targeting immigrants. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference earlier this month: “No matter what the strains are, they are coming in from the southern border.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott accused the Biden administration. People who may be carrying the new crown virus are allowed to enter the United States freely, while prohibiting mandatory mask orders across the state.
The US “Newsweek” website commented that some Republicans have retreated to old vicious tricks in an attempt to divert the attention of the American people by accusing foreign immigrants.
Throughout the history of the United States for more than two hundred years, the stigmatization of minorities and immigrants has occurred frequently during the epidemic, and these “back-to-back” groups have been greatly harmed as a result.
In 1832, cholera broke out in New York. In the beginning, the most severely affected areas were poor communities, and these places tended to be concentrated in Irish immigrants. Many New Yorkers blamed the outbreak on Irish immigrants, saying that they were “self-blame” for contracting the disease.
In the late 19th century, anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States was high, and health officials and politicians often associated Chinese immigrants with disease and filth. In 1876, there was an outbreak of smallpox in San Francisco, and the city’s health officials immediately blamed it on “Chinese who ignored American health regulations.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, discrimination against new immigrants became a trend in the United States. When a polio outbreak broke out on the East Coast of the United States, many Italian immigrants who lived in generally poor living conditions contracted the disease and were accused of causing the disease.
When AIDS appeared in the early 1980s, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed foreigners from Haiti as one of the high-risk groups without strong evidence.
In 2014, the Ebola epidemic occurred in West Africa, and people from West African countries such as Nigeria and Guinea became targets of discrimination. A typical case is that two Nigerian students were refused admission by the university just because they were from the country where the epidemic occurred.
This period of dark history has been exposed by the “Washington Post”, “New York Times”, “Time” and other American media.
Natalia Molina, a professor at the University of Southern California, said in an interview with the media that the practice of blaming immigrants and practicing “medical racism” has a long history in the United States. “As the infection rate rises and the mortality rate rises, scapegoat behavior will increase.”
University of Pennsylvania professor Jonathan Zimmerman recently wrote in the “Washington Post” that whenever there is an outbreak in history, the United States has always targeted people from other countries. “They become convenient scapegoats and relieve the rest of us from responsibility for disease and death.”
Harm others will harm yourself
Analysts pointed out that these historical events have fully exposed the serious racism problem in American society for a long time. Racial discrimination has been hard to return and spread unscrupulously like a virus, adding to the society’s xenophobic tendencies and extreme emotions during the epidemic.
Xie Li Wang, an associate professor at Santa Clara University in the United States, pointed out in an interview with the media that slandering minorities-especially when the crisis comes. This practice has a long history in the United States. Fear of being weakened. Some white Americans often advocate racial fallacy, portraying other ethnic groups as inferior, dirty, or dangerous groups than whites.
The result of “medical racism” is often to mislead the public to blame ethnic minorities or foreigners, but ignore their own epidemic prevention measures, leading to ineffective epidemic prevention and control. Kim Yi Dion, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, has specifically studied the issue of “politicization of disease.” She pointed out that if ordinary people regard a disease as only foreigners, they will not take preventive measures and their own risk of infection will increase.
For example, during the epidemic, Kansas officials once declared that their area does not need to implement strict public health measures because there are “not a few Chinese” and it is safe.
If it is said that in some historical epidemics, the stigmatization of ethnic minorities and foreigners is partly due to human lack of scientific understanding of the principles of infectious diseases, then in today’s advanced medical sciences, this behavior is entirely for politicians. Covering up their own failure to fight the epidemic and slamming the blame, deliberately exploiting deep-rooted racist prejudices in the United States.
Professor Zimmerman of the University of Pennsylvania believes that the United States could have contained the new crown epidemic by vaccinating more people, requiring masks and other preventive measures, but in some of the states with the largest number of confirmed cases and deaths, politicians are not trying to improve people’s health. Anti-epidemic behavior is to give pointers to people outside the border.
Molina, a professor at the University of Southern California, said that it is always easier for politicians to blame people from other countries, rather than voters or themselves. This situation will not change in the short term. (Participating reporters: Sun Ding, Yang Shilong, Zhang Mocheng)
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