Introduction: Viral Racisms: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Respond to COVID-19
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Outbreak narratives and the outbreak narrative have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and lifestyles, and they change economies.
Priscilla Wald, Contagious
Dear @WhiteHouse: This virus has an official name, Covid-19 and an unofficial name, Coronavirus. Your language will cause more discrimination against Asian Americans.
Ted Lieu, Twitter, March 18, 2020
Concerns over contagion, especially over diseases ascribed to minority communities, is not new. . . . it is important to recall the ways in which the fear of racial contagion, when framed within public health discourse or national security debates, has motivated policies more damaging than the "contagion" itself. Closed borders, legalized captivity, and governmentally sanctioned mob justice have been employed to eliminate or contain a threat closely aligned with a particular minority group at various moments within US history. . . . the challenge is to identify policy options that do not redeploy the abusive tactics of the past.
Harvey Young, Racial Contagion1 [End Page 313]
Wald's 2008 discussion of outbreak narratives is especially relevant today with how COVID-19 has become both nationalized as Chinese and racialized as Asian, affecting the lives of those perceived to be Asian, Asian American, and/or Pacific Islander. The pandemic has brought attention to long-standing racial and ethnic tensions. While the pandemic has fueled anti-Asian racism in North America, Latin America, and Europe, it also has reignited ethnic conflicts in Asia (e.g., India blaming Muslims for the outbreak; Korea blaming Chosŏnjok, ethnic Koreans with Chinese citizenship). Since mid-March, and resurging with the upcoming presidential election, the U.S. president, administration officials, and some politicians have been referring to COVID-19 as "the Chinese virus,"2 exhibiting an increasingly nationalist approach to the global crisis. Predictably, nationalist and racist rhetoric targeting China has been accompanied by an increase in microaggressions, discrimination, and hate crimes against those of Asian descent within the United States and in the greater Asian diaspora, particularly those identified as East Asian. This increased racism against Asian Americans reflects the ongoing structural racism inherent in U.S. white settler nationalism that continues to devalue the lives of people of color. The pandemic reveals ongoing disparities in health, health care access, and economic viability that render American Indian, African Americans, Latinx, and Pacific Islanders more vulnerable to infection and death. APM Research Labs reports that "African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans."3 While Pacific Islanders (PIs) often are excluded from public health discourse due to lack of representation in data and race misclassification, scant available data suggests that PIs have been hardest hit by COVID-19,4 with high infection and mortality rates among Marshallese communities throughout the United States.5 Although this special issue focuses on how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have been affected by and responded to COVID-19, the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Nina Pop, and Tony McDade6 are reminders that the U.S. system of racial violence is multifaceted, encompassing blatant violence, abuses of state authority, and a denial of an ethics of care that requires persistent organizing, intersectional solidarity, and coalition-building across racial and ethnic differences. We condemn the conditions that enable differentiated forms of violence against Asian, Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives, and recognize the continual need for AAPIs in the field of Asian American studies to resist nationalist logics, including settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, that we also have internalized. [End Page 314]
This special issue highlights the research, the scholarship, and the perspectives and experiences of AAPIs who continue to be marginalized in scientific research about the current pandemic.7 We have chosen to focus this special issue on more immediate accounts of COVID-19's effects on communities across differences of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other social factors, as well...
