Covid-19 vs Racism

The rise of the coronavirus pandemic has caused an extreme amount of racially-aggravated crimes on people of Asian descent. I asked students why they think that is the case and how the pandemic has fuelled the hostility towards the Asian Community.

Some students think it’s based on the disruption the pandemic caused with Journalism Student Lily Morris saying: “I think because of the pandemic, a lot of people are more likely to generalise now, based off of their own frustrations- like personally. Because I see it in my hometown […]”

76% of Ethnic Chinese people had experienced someone using a racial slur directly against them on one occasion at least, according to a YouGov poll.

A lot of students blame social media for the spike such as Law Student Amy Meadows who said: “I think obviously the spike has been pretty high, especially with President Trump saying things, calling it like ‘The Chinese Virus’ it creates a lot, is it like xenophobia? And racism towards people of Asian descent.”

Marine Biology Student David Platzack said: “At first, when people didn’t know what caused it, people thought it was from people eating bats in China and people associated with Chinese people in the street and then thought that […} they inherently had it.”

Journalism Student Rummy Krasteva said: “They have been used as scapegoats and people have mostly been discriminating through just jokes so it hasn’t been actively like- active hate crimes […] but it’s things that we have normalised more that are still racist.”

Tech company Moonshot who specialise in monitoring online extremist content saw that between February and April racist hashtags against China and Chinese people increased by 300%. Out of 600 million tweets analysed, 200,000 of them had anti-Chinese conspiracy theories or hate speech.

Criminology Student Tori Trapnes took a different angle and stressed about Asian key workers being more likely to be exposed to the virus: “There was a big difference between some people that were in different fields of work, for example the ones are working at the hospitals now you see more Asians being put on the frontline to help people […]”

An inquiry carried out by Public Health England on the how the virus is disproportionately impacting the BAME community highlighted that BAME groups had the highest death rates. Asian people faced an extra risk of between 10% and 50% of dying from the virus.

A-level Student, Rhone Aguisanda looked closer to home. He explained: “I haven’t experienced [it] fully as myself but I have seen other people go through it and I have seen stories- I’ve heard stories about it happening to other Asian communities.”

Fear and ignorance fuels hatred and this pandemic has definitely been a reflection of that.