The double pandemic: Covid-19 and white supremacy

Abstract

Often called the double pandemic, the interconnectedness of the Covid-19 pandemic and the pandemic of racism (both anti-Black and anti-Asian) in 2020 have exacerbated inequalities and followed predictable historical pathways. However, as most individuals from marginalized backgrounds know, the pandemic of racism is nothing new. It has been superimposed on top of the pre-existing racism, xenophobia, blaming, and “othering.” The common roots of all this lie in White supremacy. As details of the novel coronavirus first emerged from Wuhan, China, global leaders—including Italian officials and President Trump in the United States— began dubbing it “the Chinese virus,” insinuating that the Chinese government was mismanaging the pandemic (Lee, 2021). In the United States, anti-Asian racism surged in the early months of the pandemic exacerbating the feelings of being a “perpetual foreigner” (Choi, 2021). Despite the effectiveness of wearing masks in managing the spread of Covid-19 in countries like China, Korea, and Japan, in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not issue a mask-wearing recommendation until April of 2020. Early misinformation about wearing a mask as a virus mitigation strategy, coupled with tensions stoked by anti-Asian rhetoric, resulted in attacks against East Asian Americans and immigrants (Lee, 2021). The racism associate with mask wearing and its relationship to White supremacy took on complicated secondary forms in the United States. Many Black men feared wearing masks. It was a fear rooted in a long history of being characterizing as criminal and hyper-policed. At the same time, White men stormed the state