Attacks Blaming Asians For Pandemic Reflect Racist History Of Global Health : Goats and... - 1 views
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The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19.
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As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year
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This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred.
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Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.
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According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best."
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Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.
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"What you're seeing in the U.S. is this pre-existing, deep-seated bias [against Asians and Asian Americans] – or rather, racism – that is now surfacing," says D'Silva. "COVID-19 is just an excuse."
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According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.
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there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.
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"[Western health workers] come in with a bias that in San Francisco or Boston, we would never let [these crises] happen,"
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doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.
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In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.
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reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together.
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the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others
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Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.