Zhou Xun and Sander Gilman show how fear and poor terminology have fuelled racial prejudice during the pandemic
It’s not surprising that Covid-19 has made people angry: their lives have become disrupted in unimaginable ways. People have lost family members to the disease, or suffered for months with long Covid. With the restrictions needed to keep health services afloat, small businesses have gone under, city centres have been shuttered and people have spent months without seeing loved ones. Basic freedoms that we took for granted were taken away in order to stop the spread of a dangerous virus. The questions of where it came from, and just who is responsible for all this devastation and loss, have assumed outsize importance.
This is perhaps why blame has become central to many discussions, with all the problems that brings. People want to know whose fault Covid-19 is. Professors Zhou Xun and Sander Gilman explore this territory in their book ‘I Know Who Caused Covid-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia. The authors examine the experiences of, and attitudes towards, a number of groups that have found themselves in the spotlight at various points: Chinese people, ultra-Orthodox Jews, black and brown people and, finally, Donald Trump-supporting white Americans. Some key themes emerge from their analysis.
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