Societies facing novel pathogens have often engaged in scapegoating of marginalized populations, especially when the infective source can be linked to a distant place and the disease associated with a racially distinct “foreign” peoples. During the nineteenth century, rather than curtail commercial shipping, which ferried cholera around the globe, rattled cholera-stricken societies from New York to London turned their ire onto Irish immigrants instead. In 1832, a group of Irish immigrants, irrationally scorned as carriers, were first quarantined, and then secretly massacred and
buried in a mass grave. Erroneously blamed for spreading HIV in the early 1980s, Haitians were
beaten and harassed. Falsely scapegoated as carriers of SARS in 2003, Canadians of Chinese descent were kicked out of their homes and their businesses avoided.
There’s reason to suspect the pandemic of xenophobia in the wake of today’s novel coronavirus will wreak similar havoc. Public fears of contamination by invasive foreigners reached a fevered pitch even before the first case of pneumonia at the Wuhan seafood market hit the news. Right-wing populist leaders have for years singled out foreigners as vectors of crime, terror and disease, as if they alone posed such threats. In Bulgaria, a 2013 study of articles about migrants found that the two most commonly appearing words were
“threat” and “disease.” In Greece, right-wing vigilantes have marched into hospitals to
evict sickly migrants. In the US, Trump and his allies have long raised alarms about the contagiousness of unwanted foreigners, ignoring that of the rest of the populace. “
Tremendous infectious disease,” Donald Trump falsely proclaimed during his campaign for the White House in 2015, “is pouring across the border.” In 2018, Fox News featured a commentator who claimed that Central American migrants would contaminate the country with
smallpox and leprosy, an especially ludicrous claim, given that smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.
No comments:
Post a Comment