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Covid-19 fostered Racism
With Coronavirus spreading all over the globe at a rapid pace, the global community now is coming across a problem that we thought was long gone. Covid-19 or ‘the Chinese virus’, which has led to a worldwide lockdown, is reviving the racist and discriminatory traditions in the society. From world leaders to individual citizens, everyone denunciates China and blame Asian people for the outspread of the virus. They hold China, where over three thousand people have lost their lives due to Covid-19, accountable.
While people from the Asian community have been made subject to xenophobia, in India, it is the northeast population that is facing the heat. Deemed to be Chinese, by their looks, members of the northeastern region of India are being treated harshly by the Indian society. Many individuals have faced eviction by their landlords, while others suffer due to the ill-treatment of the masses.
The pandemic also gives rise to the long-forgotten practice of untouchability and has encouraged the public to overly distance themselves from Asiatic and North-Eastern people and take the idea of social distancing to a whole new level.
Such type of societal behavior is not new. Whenever a pandemic breaks out, it is customed for the society to behave in a defensive manner and practice denigration of a certain class or section of the society, which tends to be the most affected or which are the first ones to be affected. Diseases, especially those which are contagious and life-threatening, foster fear among the masses which in turn cultivates discrimination. In the mid-eighteen hundreds, with the outbreak of the yellow-fever epidemic in the United States, European immigrants, who were perceived to be more vulnerable to the disease, bore the brunt and were sidelined by the society. Similar behavior was observed with the SARS epidemic, which originated in China, and the East Asian society was made the primary target of stigmatization.
