Racism and Xenophobia in a Pandemic: Interactions of Online and Offline Worlds.

Abstract

History suggests that disease outbreaks have often been accompanied by a rise in xenophobic or racist sentiment 1,2 Such attempts at othering reflect misguided efforts to assign social meaning and responsibility to disease, even though illnesses do not recognize socially constructed categories such as race 3 Although systems exist to closely monitor and report on COVID-19 infection and death rates, we currently lack the capacity to monitor racism in response to the pandemic [ ]a recent experimental study showed that compared with a neutral description of the origins of the coronavirus, descriptions emphasizing a connection with China increased negative attitudes toward Asian Americans and general xenophobia, suggesting that language used to describe a disease can actually activate prejudice and racial bias 4 Another study tracking changes in implicit bias after conservative media channels began using terms such as Chinese virus in March found that after declining for nearly 13 years, implicit Americanness bias (the subconscious belief that Asian Americans are less American than European Americans) began to increase- a trend reversal that was especially pronounced amongthose self-identified as being strongly conservative 8 Beyond the greater anti-Asian sentiment associated with #ChineseVirus, the more striking findings of Hswen etal concern the shifts that occurred when the term started garnering more attention owing to a tweet posted on March 16 (see page 956 for details) [ ]growth in the use of the hashtag #ChineseVirus and the fact that it became more strongly associated with anti-Asian sentiment after March 16 suggest that the phrase may have become a way to signal identity and ideological affiliation [ ]the editorial by Hswen et al largely focuses on harms, but it is important to acknowledge that social media also has the potential to be a force for good