The 'COVID-19' coronavirus is plaguing the world, and while people are seeing hope for a post-pandemic world, many are still blaming others for the cause of the deadly virus spread.
The U.S. is one of the worst affected by this pandemic, with more than 30 million cases and more than 500 thousand deaths.
The world is still trying to recover, but racist hatred continues.
It was Donald Trump who first tweeted the phase "Chinese virus" to name the coronavirus on March 17, 2020. As the spread began to spread from Wuhan, China, the President often made crude remarks on the virus, as if blaming Asians, or Chinese citizens in particular, for the pandemic.
"The United States will be powerfully, supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!" Mr. Trump tweeted on March 17, 2020.
He argued that the term “Chinese virus” was not discriminatory or racist because the virus “comes from China.”
That tweet from Trump when he was the President of the U.S., fueled backlash the World Health Organization (WHO) has been fearing: a spike in hatred for Asians.
And when the #chinesevirus began trending, there is no stopping the rise of other anti-Asian phrases, and even WHO cannot stop people from using racist terms against Asians.
Things got worse on March 16, 2021, when a gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, in three spas in Atlanta.
Shooting suspect Robert Aaron Long, was arrested outside of Atlanta and charged with the murders. The 21-year-old Woodstock native had professed a passion for “pizza, guns” and “God” on his now-deleted Instagram page.
While the suspected gunman allegedly blamed his “sex addiction” for the rampage, authorities have not ruled out whether the his killings were racially motivated.
In a report that was made public after the shooting, it was revealed that the killer may have made things personal, in his racist-inspired backlash against Asian-Americans.
“We wanted to provide evidence to show that the term ‘Chinese virus’ is associated with racist undertones,” said UCSF epidemiology and biostatics assistant professor Yulin Hswe.
“These results may be a proxy of growth in anti-Asian sentiment that was not as prevalent as before,” Hswen added.
“Using racial terms associated with a disease can result in the perpetuation of further stigmatization of racial groups.”
To test his theory, Hswen and his team of researchers analyzed nearly 700,000 tweets containing the hashtags #covid-19 and #chinesevirus published between March 9 and 23, 2020, corresponding to the week before and the week after Trump’s tweet.
The research only analyzed tweets in English, regardless of the users' location.
The research found that the week after Trump first tweeted the phrase “Chinese virus,” the number of users tweeting the hashtag increased more than 10 times, if compared with the time before his post. Most of the tweets used phrases that are either negative in connotation, or were more likely to display anti-Asian hate.
Half the users who tweeted the #chinesevirus hashtag also used other anti-Asian hashtags, while only 20% of Twitter users who used the #covid-19, the study finds.
“It perpetuated this idea that the disease was the fault of the Chinese,” Hswen said.
“It normalized these racist attitudes. That might have perpetuated these beliefs and behaviors offline.”
“Chinese virus, China virus, Wuhan virus, or any derivative of these terms is not something we should be using,” Hswen said. “We should not be attaching location or ethnicity to diseases.”
The biggest spike of anti-Asians in the U.S. happens in New York City, where racially-motivated violence against Asians went up with a whopping 28 anti-Asian assaults in 2020 alone - compared to just two incidents the year prior.
Following the shooting, outraged and angered citizens and people in many places around the world who condemn the incident, started tweeting with hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #AsianLivesMatter.
