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08-01-2023, 08:51 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/opini...a-usa.html
Why does the administration drag its feet on XBB.1.5 but treat the “China variant” as a dangerous, volatile plague that must be kept from invading America? This echoes the travel ban in early 2020 on passengers from China, a racist policy decision that focused on the spread of the coronavirus from China while ignoring European travelers who brought it to New York.
By treating only Covid from China as a real danger and domestic cases as presumably milder, the U.S. government effectively endorses the centuries-old tropes of Asians as the “diseased other” and the notion that the coronavirus is, in fact, the “China virus.” This places Asians in America once more in the cross hairs of racist scapegoating. The days of heightened anti-Asian violence are barely behind us, and I fear a return of vulnerable elders being harmed in public, of shouted slurs. Just last year, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act addressing anti-Asian violence passed with rare bipartisan support from both chambers of Congress. Even this legislation could prove to be an empty gesture now that the Biden administration is creating policies that actively promote the xenophobia it claims to stand behind eradicating.
Why does the administration drag its feet on XBB.1.5 but treat the “China variant” as a dangerous, volatile plague that must be kept from invading America? This echoes the travel ban in early 2020 on passengers from China, a racist policy decision that focused on the spread of the coronavirus from China while ignoring European travelers who brought it to New York.
By treating only Covid from China as a real danger and domestic cases as presumably milder, the U.S. government effectively endorses the centuries-old tropes of Asians as the “diseased other” and the notion that the coronavirus is, in fact, the “China virus.” This places Asians in America once more in the cross hairs of racist scapegoating. The days of heightened anti-Asian violence are barely behind us, and I fear a return of vulnerable elders being harmed in public, of shouted slurs. Just last year, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act addressing anti-Asian violence passed with rare bipartisan support from both chambers of Congress. Even this legislation could prove to be an empty gesture now that the Biden administration is creating policies that actively promote the xenophobia it claims to stand behind eradicating.
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