While scientists, doctors, public health officials, and all other intelligent people in the known universe refer to it as coronavirus or Covid-19, there has been a concerted effort on the part of conservatives (surprise surprise) to rename the disease “Chinese Virus”. The excuse that conservatives — who almost to a person have all been White from what I can tell — have given for this rebranding is that it’s aimed at holding the Communist Chinese government accountable for their mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak, and that it’s got nothing at all to do with racism.
Conservative commentator Erick Erickson has been particularly adamant in insisting that calling it Chinese Virus is not at all racist and that it’s ridiculous for people to say it is.
Of course, conservatives being conservatives, they just can’t hide their racism no matter how hard they try. Yesterday CBS correspondent Weijia Jiang reported that:
In response, a number of conservatives alleged that Jiang was making this up. I’m not going to post their tweets, you can go look for yourself. But ironically enough, in a since deleted tweet, guess who couldn’t help letting his racist out?
But it gets better. Today under questioning from White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor (who seems to be only real journalist in the White House pool), Trump admitted that he found nothing wrong or offensive about the term.
And if you look at the responses to Alcindor’s tweet, you’ll find many conservatives cheering the President on for his remarks. So the day after they accused Weijia Jiang of lying about a WH official using the “kung flu” slur, the same conservatives were out there applauding President Trump for his personal approval of the “kung flu” slur.
Clearly, self-awareness isn’t their strong suit. To give yet another example of how conservatives either don’t seem to be aware of how racist they are or perhaps just don’t care, here’s Ben Shapiro, who passes for an intellectual in conservative circles, which shows you just how low that bar is for them.
And here’s Senator John Cornyn of Texas, not even trying to pull the “But I’m not being racist” card, instead just leaning right into going full-blown racist.
Of course, that’s where the dunking on Cornyn began.
And here was my own contribution.
What also makes what Cornyn and Shapiro said so bigoted was the utter hypocrisy of it — people in Red State America are known for eating squirrels, raccoons, possums, frogs, and gators, and eating roadkill is legal in some places. In John Cornyn’s Texas, they eat armadillos and just ten days ago they had a rattlesnake festival where, among other things, they ate rattlesnakes.
This is not to say I approve of these open air markets in China where they sell pangolins and bats for consumption, I'm Chinese and I think that shit is disgusting and unsanitary — but no more or less so than eating roadkill.
For people like Cornyn and Shapiro and other conservatives to single out Chinese people for eating exotic animals when they’re eating roadkill in many of the most conservative regions of the country just highlights how racism is so inherent in their critiques of Chinese people and culture, and their transparently bigoted attempts to rename coronavirus “Chinese Virus”.
Of course, what makes this especially despicable is that the coronavirus outbreak has led to an increase of attacks on Asian American people worldwide, which labeling it “Chinese Virus” will undoubtedly lead to more of.
As with any pandemic, people have been on high alert, postponing travel plans and practicing social distancing to try to prevent themselves from contracting the virus. But as more cases are reported each day, more misinformation and wide-spread panic have contributed to racially motivated attacks on people of Asian descent or anyone who looks East Asian.
Hate crime task forces have been responding to calls and social media users who have been posting videos and tweeting stories of attacks — both verbal and physical — that have been posted online to try to find perpetrators who’ve been targeting Asians.
But you know what? If conservatives want to play this game, fuck it, from now on I’m calling the 1918 flu epidemic, which was the most deadly plague since the Black Death, the Kansas flu or American flu since, after all, it was spread from Kansas.
Ground Zero in one of the world’s deadliest influenza pandemics started quietly, inconspicuously.
It was winter, 100 years ago. And it was here, in Kansas.
The virus began on the windswept Kansas prairie, where dirt-poor farm families struggled to do daily chores — slopping pigs, feeding cattle, horses, and chickens, living in primitive, cramped, uninsulated quarters.
It’s not known whether it started in the pigs or chickens or birds flying overhead. But it spread to young farmers who, drafted for World War I, reported for duty at Fort Riley.
www.kansas.com/...
Something tells me that these racist White conservatives won’t take very kindly to that characterization.