NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

As of Tuesday afternoon, only 11 people in the U.S. have been confirmed to have the virus, but Asian Americans across the country are reporting racist jokes ("They say we eat dogs," one Boston student told the Boston Globe) and being shunned (Asian Arizona State University students say white classmates have avoided them). Asians in the U.K. and Australia have described similar treatment, despite only a handful of few cases in each country, and in Canada, where there have been four confirmed cases of the virus, Toronto mayor John Tory went as far as to formally discourage racism against Chinese Canadians. And the profiling isn't limited to countries in which Asians are minorities: In Seoul, stores are posting "No Chinese allowed" signs; airlines are cancelling flights to mainland China. This level of panic befits a global pandemic, but so far, the Wuhan coronavirus has yet to reach that point. Outside of China, there have been fewer than 170 reported cases of the virus, and many of those infected have shown mild symptoms similar to the average flu, and have recovered at home.

Perhaps the most telling incident occurred last week at the University of California at Berkeley. Its student health center posted a list to Instagram of "normal" reactions to coronavirus including anxiety, hypervigilance, and xenophobia, which it defined as "fears about interacting with those who might be from Asia and guilt about those feelings." After alumni complained that the post normalized racism, the university deleted the post and tweeted an apology. Nonetheless, the post makes explicit what has largely remained implicit: that because the Asians you encounter in your day to day are somehow more likely to be carrying the disease, it's reasonable to avoid them.

It's easy to read these incidents as the product of a 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."

That belief started in the 1800s, as colonial powers conscripted Chinese laborers into the coolie trade. These laborers were typically living in cramped, unsanitary conditions without access to medical care, an environment ripe for disease. When outbreaks inevitably struck in coolie camps or on boats carrying laborers, local communities grew paranoid and associated the Chinese workers with disease. "It's always been a part of the racial fiction, the racial story that people tell about Asians in the 19th century: that they're the bad apples, the diseases are the result of bad food, bad culture--that it's an outcome of being racially inferior," says Chang. That stereotype can still be found in the current discourse around the Wuhan coronavirus: that the Chinese brought the disease upon themselves by eating the "weird" animals where the virus originated.

It wasn't long after the arrival of Chinese workers that the narrative of Chinese as disease carriers began to be deployed as a political device to justify Asian exclusion. Being clear about who was "out" also served to define who was "in." Marginalized communities like Irish Americans used anti-Chinese sentiment to align themselves with white communities in power. During the 1900s San Francisco outbreak of bubonic plague and the more recent 2003 Toronto SARS outbreak, people shunned city Chinatowns, leaving local businesses in dire straits. Chang, who has studied anti-Chinese racism in Mexico, says that some Mexican states chose to pass laws against Chinese immigration in the early 1900s, even though there were few Chinese residents at the time. "That shows it's not actually about [Chinese people] or the presence of them, but what the politics affords," he says. "Anti-Chinese politics is flexible."

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