9 July 2020, NIICE Commentary 5531
Srija Mukhopadhyay
American President Trump’s description of the COVID-19 virus as “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu” was an example of the racist tendencies operating in times of crisis. While he argued that there was no hint of racism in this, it violates the guidelines put down by the World Health Organisation in 2015 that explained how naming of diseases on the basis of its geographic locations, a certain community of people, or animals were to be strictly avoided. It was shown that such measures resulted in stigmatisation of a certain community or economic sectors.
As countries pledged to cooperate towards containing the spread of virus together, the instances of racism in various parts came to light after the lockdowns were announced all over the world. This article traces the historical existence of racism in times of pandemics and points at the process of ostrasisation of non-western countries.
Historical Tracing of Racism in Times of Pandemics
Over the years, there has been a long history of naming the diseases based on the supposed place of its origin like – West Nile Virus, Middle East Respiratory Diseases and so on. The linking of medical emergencies to geographies with negative connotations often gave rise to racism due to the practice of community isolation and yet the process was not always rectified. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses since 1966 has been one of the organisations working towards providing scientific names to the viruses based on their species, family or genus. This helps understand the nature, genetics and the medical help needed to check the virus irrespective of geography.
Geographical links to diseases eventually leading to attacks on specific communities or races existed from the times of the 1817 Cholera pandemic. Cholera became “Asiatic Cholera”. Dr Charles Macnamara while delivering a lecture on ‘Asiatic Cholera’ in March 1884 at Westminster Hospital read an 1871 government order which stated, “Asiatic Cholera was a peculiar infectiousness of its own which when local conditions assist, can operate with terrible force.” The description of the disease as ‘Asiatic Cholera’ in the occidental eyes largely became a tool for confining a set of medical conditions to Asia and particularly Bengal, during the 19th century. Thus began attempts to avoid certain areas and people from those areas due to the fear of the disease.
Another example is the Yellow Fever virus that originated in Africa in the 17th century and travelled the routes of slave trade to reach the West. There was a belief that the African- Americans were immuned to the disease. Without proper examinations, they were delegated the task of direct contact with the patients to treat them. However, the notion shattered when several cases were reported in Philadelphia of infected African-Americans. But the deaths of African-Americans were partly due to their expected immunity and also because of the negligence towards the community.
Needless to say, the Jews in Europe were blamed for causing Black Death/Bubonic plague. The reason behind mass Jew killing was supported by the idea that they were poisoning the Christian wells. This is exactly the feared consequence of the linking of a disease to a certain geography.
According to the historians, during the Small pox pandemic, the African-Americans were isolated from the Whites to stop the spread of the disease. This was also the time when the free African Americans were leaving the plantation workplaces and changing their places. The isolation led to lack of medical aid to the communities and resulted in a large number of deaths.
The death of George Floyd, a 46 year old African American man in Minnesota on 25 May 2020 led to several protests against racism all over the world. In the midst of a pandemic that affected the United States seriously, such an incident brought out the harsh reality of racism. Despite this, President Trump’s remark shows the negligence towards racism. It was a reminder of the time when the European colonisers set out, looking for colonies, and separated natives from subjects in terms of basic behaviours. It is no doubt that neo-colonialism continued the practices.
It is interesting to note that the US Bureau of Labour Statistics reported a rate spike in the unemployment of Asian-Americans in April 2020 as against the 13.8 percent in White Americans. Large scale unemployment, lack of proper health care facilities, denial of student visas, all these might together form a xenophobic mentality which is also the direct consequence of the failure of the government policies in suitably handling the pandemic situations, victims being the non-whites at large. A special coverage by the ABC Newstitled “Pandemic- A Nation Divided” reported that a Chinese-American named Peng of New York was forced to close down his restaurant as nobody wanted to buy ‘diseased food’. He was sure that this economic hardship would continue even after the normalisation of business activities.
Colonial Medicine and Racism
While there is a narrative in progress addressing the existence of racism in societies, the focus on geo-medicine is still far behind.The evidences of the ignorance towards native medical practices in colonies indicate the feeling of superiority amongst the western countries. According to David Arnold, an expert on the analysis of medical practices in Colonial India, the dialectical relationship between the indigenous Ayurveda and Yunani medicines with the western ones dominated colonial India. There was also a shared imagination in the west that the ‘orient’ was the land of magic and that the people of the orient performed mystic rites to heal.
The colonised areas often became the laboratory for experimenting with the medicines of the unknown diseases. For example, British colonisers’ encounter with several unknown snakes in India shattered their idea of a single antidote for all snakebites. Thus, India served as the site from where venoms of the snakes were collected for producing ‘anti venom serum.’ The western medicines were initially used for the sailors and the settlers to acclimatise them in the tropical climates. Later, these medicines began to be experimented on people in the ‘diseased countries’ to check the impact and also to instil a feeling of superiority and covert imperialism. David Arnold in his book Colonising the Body rightly described the human body as the site of contestation between the colonisers and the colonised. There was a general belief that unknown diseases did not emerge from the “White man’s domain”. There were often remarks passed such as Lord Wellesley’s comment in 1803 about Indians defecating everywhere and leading to a rise of diseases in the country. The real reasons were overlooked.
A group of scholars in an essay titled “Burden of infectious diseases in South Asia” published in May 2004, pointed out that “people in South Asia are at higher risk of developing infectious diseases and dying from their illness than people in industrialised countries. The root causes were poverty and its associated problems of unhygienic living conditions, malnutrition, illiteracy, and poor access to clean water, toilet facilities, and quality of health care.” It is interesting that diseases like the coronary heart disease, prostate cancer, colon cancer which are most common in the developed world, are not defined in terms of geography.
Need For Governmental Awareness
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the former Assistant Director General for Health Security, WHO in 2015 observed, “We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences to the people’s lives and livelihoods.” Despite the understanding of the graveness of the issue, the efforts taken are insufficient.
The United Nations (UN) has been working towards fighting the menace. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1962 had requested the governments of 182 countries to take up “National Action Plans against Racial Discrimination”. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on its eighty-first session held on 28 August 2012 had asked the governments to take up “information campaigns and educational policies calling attention to the harms produced by racist hate speech.” Yet the current situation is dismal.
As the world enters a ‘new normal’, it is imperative that along with the focus on development of weapons, economies and medical facilities, there is some strong mechanism developed to address the issue of racism. US President’s remark on the virus being “Chinese”, and the eventual defense of that is a clear indication of the feeble power of global awareness of a basic understanding of racism. The global world order needs to develop a system to study and work towards eradicating racism and maintaining an inclusive programme of medical sciences. COVID-19 has proved that the intensity of non-traditional threats does not confine itself to geographies. It is time that the governments around the world realise it too.
