- Mardigian Library
- Subject Guides
- Asian American and Pacific Islander Anti-Discrimination Resources
- Anti-AAPI Racism and Pandemics/Disease
Asian American and Pacific Islander Anti-Discrimination Resources
Books related to pandemics and Anti-Asian racism
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Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
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ISBN: 9780520935532Publication Date: 2001-10-29"Contagious Divides charts the dynamic transformation of representations of Chinese immigrants from medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Examining the cultural politics of public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco, this book looks at the history of racial formation in the U.S. by focusing on the development of public health bureaucracies. Nayan Shah notes how the production of Chinese difference and white, heterosexual norms in public health policy affected social lives, politics, and cultural expression. Public health authorities depicted Chinese immigrants as filthy and diseased, as the carriers of such incurable afflictions as smallpox, syphilis, and bubonic plague." -
Fit to Be Citizens? : Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939
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ISBN: 9780520246492Publication Date: 2006-03-13"Fit to Be Citizens?" demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups.
Understanding the intersection of Anti-AAPI Racism and COVID-19
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PBS News Hour: ‘We have been through this before.’ Why anti-Asian hate crimes are rising amid coronavirusThis PBS News Hour article describes the historical connection to the current swell of anti-AAPI violence related to the coronavirus pandemic.
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PBS News Hour: Racism targets Asian food, business during COVID-19 pandemicAs the coronavirus spread throughout the U.S., bigotry toward Asian Americans was not far behind, fueled by the news that COVID-19 first appeared in China.
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The Atlantic: The Other Problematic OutbreakAs the coronavirus spreads across the globe, so too does racism.
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Washington Post: The coronavirus and the long history of using diseases to justify xenophobiaOutbreaks often have been attributed to marginalized groups in society, or the “other,” experts say. Asian Americans are still seen as “forever foreigners,” no matter how long they’ve lived in this country. Time and again, they have been blamed for importing diseases.
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Wikipedia: Xenophobia and racism related to the COVID-19 pandemicThe COVID-19 pandemic, which was first reported in the city of Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019, has led to an increase in acts and displays of Sinophobia as well as prejudice, xenophobia, discrimination, violence, and racism against people of East Asian, North Asian and Southeast Asian descent and appearance around the world. With the spread of the pandemic and formation of hotspots, such as those in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, discrimination against people from these hotspots has been reported.
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Slate: The Panic Over Chinese People Doesn’t Come From the CoronavirusIt’s easy to read these incidents as the product of knee-jerk fear and ignorance. But that fear isn’t merely instinctive—it’s acculturated. “There’s a long history of thinking of Asians as disease carriers that’s at least 200 years old,” says Jason Oliver Chang, an associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut. “People don’t have to know that they’ve learned this racial story; it’s already a part of how you react, and it shows how pervasive it is in our popular culture.”
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Salon: "Wuhan coronavirus" and the racist art of naming a virusThe rhetoric around 2019-nCoV — the "Wuhan coronavirus" — plays on centuries-old racist sentiments against Asians.
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Virulent Hate: Anti-Asian Hate & Resistance During COVID-19"The Virulent Hate Project is an interdisciplinary research initiative that studies anti-Asian racism and Asian American activism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our mission is to serve the public by building knowledge and creating resources that can shape public policy, inform the advocacy work of community organizations, support educational programming, and improve understanding of Asian American experiences."
Scholarly articles on this topic
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Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality (2020)[American Journal of Criminal Justice]. "COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimes – situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia – have operated to “other” Asian Americans and reproduce inequality."
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The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society (2002)[Milbank Quarterly]. "In this article we explore why, at critical junctures in American history, immigrants have been stigmatized as the etiology of a wide variety of physical and societal ills. Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy have often been framed by an explicitly medical language, one in which the line between perceived and actual threat is slippery and prone to hysteria and hyperbole."
Video webinars on this topic
Podcasts and audio episodes on this topic
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NPR 1A Podcast: The Rise In Anti-Asian Attacks During The COVID-19 PandemicIn the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, violent attacks and harassment toward Asian Americans have spiked. What's behind the rise in anti-Asian attacks? And what might our past tell us about the fight to be seen and to feel safe? [40 minutes.]
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"Who Belongs" Podcast: Racism and COVID-19: The historical, political, and social foundationsIn this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from a three-guest panel of Berkeley faculty who provide various perspectives on the different forms of racism we’ve been witnessing since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hear about the experiences of Asian Americans who are facing a surge in hate crimes, the disparate impacts on black and brown communities in terms of the rates of death, and about how politicians are using the crisis to engage in racial fear mongering. But the panelists don’t focus so much on the incidents themselves as on the structures that have created the conditions for these forms of racism to emerge with such force. [41 minutes.]
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NPR: When Xenophobia Spreads Like A VirusNPR Radio story. "The global response to COVID-19 has made clear that the fear of contracting disease has an ugly cousin: xenophobia. As the coronavirus has spread from China to other countries, anti-Asian discrimination has followed closely behind, manifesting in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese. We asked our listeners whether they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments and tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country — regardless of ethnicity, location or age." [25 minutes.]