As Coronavirus Spreads, Racism And Xenophobia Are Too

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Coronavirus is all over the headlines. Accompanying the growing anxiety around its spread, has been suspicion and harassment of Asians and Asian Americans. For more on this, we turned to Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch podcast, and his conversation with historian Erika Lee. We talk about how this wave of stigma is part of a longer history in the United States of camouflaging xenophobia as public health and hygiene concerns.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:04.8	Hey everybody, podcast reporter and occasional host Emily Quang here.
0:10.4	So coronavirus has been all over the news with new cases of the disease COVID-19 popping
0:17.2	up around the world and in the United States.
0:20.4	We begin with this, the deadly coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the U.S.
0:25.3	Now mounting fears surrounding coronavirus have forced some districts to cancel school.
0:29.9	The growing chance, the coronavirus outbreak causes a global recession.
0:34.2	And along with all of that covered, all the headlines and photos, there's a growing anxiety.
0:40.1	My family and I, we were going out to lunch.
0:43.1	Such that Asians and Asian Americans find themselves the targets of suspicion, discrimination,
0:48.8	and harassment.
0:49.8	They told my wife and son to get away.
0:53.1	Get out of here, go back to China.
0:55.4	People call us corona.
0:57.5	People ask us if we eat dogs.
0:59.4	And this kid said, well, you're Chinese, so you must have the coronavirus.
1:03.6	Coronavirus.
1:04.6	It's probably coronavirus.
1:05.6	The woman then replied that she isn't racist, but she just doesn't want to get sick.
1:13.3	These stories were all submitted to NPR's amazing Coatswitch podcast.
1:17.8	They did an episode on this.
1:19.0	So we reached out to one of the co-hosts, Jean Demby.
	...

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