Schools are shutdown. Spring Breaks have been extended. Schools that aren’t closing are applying social distancing and teaching online.
Layer that over an economy that will require at least a $3 trillion bailout– not a $1 trillion bailout–and you can understand why anxiety abounds. It’s par for America these days, and Trump, if nothing else, understands par. Par means everything in life is disrupted. But should that also include our diversity values?
If we are “all in this together” in crisis, why does the president keep playing the great divider?
At what has become daily briefings, Trump insists on calling the COVID-19 virus, the “CHINESE VIRUS.” He even has crossed out the right name and scrawled in “Chinese” in his scripts. He claims, doing so is a matter of accuracy. It does accurately describe his political animus and bias. But that’s different from the truth.
While he is right that the virus is suspected of starting from the live markets in Wuhan, China, he’s wrong to give the virus an “ethnicity.”
People have ethnicities. Germs are germs. The fact is, when an American is sick with COVID-19, he or she is infected as an American with unaffiliated germs looking for a human to infect. To call it a “Chinese Virus” is just racist.
While there is no vaccine for COVID-19 we do have a vaccine for the ignorance of xenophobia. It’s called knowledge. The president can use a little of that right now, instead of shooting from the lip as he did numerous times on live television last week. In one instance , ABC News reporter Cecilia Vega asked: “Why do you keep calling this the ‘Chinese Virus’? There are reports of dozens of incidents of bias against Chinese Americans in this country. Your own aide, Secretary Alex Azar, says he does not use this term. He says ethnicity does not cause the virus. Why do you keep using this? A lot of people say its racist.”
