obvert
Posts: 14050
Joined: 1/17/2011 From: PDX (and now) London, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: witpqs quote:
ORIGINAL: obvert quote:
ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake Can we change the name of the thread to China Virus? "Hall monitor" Words matter. This isn't funny. I see the intended humour, but you may not realise that for people of any asian decent that has dire consequences. You're a reasonable person (mostly) and can understand that the government of China is the issue, not the people. Using this phrase though, for people who already have some bias or overt racism, enforces those beliefs and is causing them to act on them. Here in Britain and from reports around the world, East Asians, whether Chinese or not, have been verbally abused, ostracised and physically attacked after the Corona Virus began moving out from China. This is from yesterday in NYC https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/woman-needs-stitches-after-anti-asian-hate-crime-attack-city-n1177146 Here is another. The anxiety of moving through an environment that is turning against you is also damaging. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/chinese-coronavirus-racist-attacks.html As bigots blame them for the coronavirus and President Trump labels it the “Chinese virus,” many Chinese-Americans say they are terrified of what could come next. Yuanyuan Zhu was walking to her gym in San Francisco on March 9, thinking the workout could be her last for a while, when she noticed that a man was shouting at her. He was yelling an expletive about China. Then a bus passed, she recalled, and he screamed after it, “Run them over.” She tried to keep her distance, but when the light changed, she was stuck waiting with him at the crosswalk. She could feel him staring at her. And then, suddenly, she felt it: his saliva hitting her face and her favorite sweater. In London a student from Singapore was beaten so badly by thugs in the middle of the biggest shopping area in London, Oxford St, in the middle of the afternoon, that he may require facial reconstruction. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/03/uk/coronavirus-assault-student-london-scli-intl-gbr/index.html None of this is funny. Sadly, there is nothing new about this. I've heard stories about racists assaults on Chinese going way back. Coupling Trump striking back at the communist government's propaganda (that the US military gave COVID-19 to civilians in China) and for Trump seeking to hold the government of China accountable for what it has done (withholding and faking information, among other actions) is wrong on the part of those media outlets, but politically consistent. Did any of those reports mention that the Chinese government's handling of the crisis has helped inflame the behavior of those horrible bigots? Probably not. I'm not going to get political here. I will say that some of us do understand the difference between the Government of China and it's history of abuses and people who look to be from an East Asian country. There are a lot of people who don't and who equate the two things. They hear these comments and they act on them against real people. We don't need to support the use of terminology that could be interpreted as biased against a nation and its people, in spite of its government's culpability in this crisis.
< Message edited by obvert -- 4/7/2020 6:36:47 PM >
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"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
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