0:11, Madeline Laguaite: Hello, and welcome to “To Health and Back,” a podcast about how health, medicine and wellness decisions from the past help inform us today. I’m your host, Madeline Laguaite. In this episode, I’m sitting down with Dr. Alexandre White to talk about past instances of xenophobia and racism in the context of disease and the implications these past instances have. Here’s a snippet of our conversation.
0:40, Alexandre White: What we’ve seen in the last year or so, especially in the relationship between pandemic threat and the rise globally, but especially in the United States, of anti-Asian racist violence, really fundamentally how dangerous not only words and phrasing and framing of disease can be, but also, I think, more specifically, the ways in which racist legacies continue to inform our present and the ways in which racism is structurally built into the United States in the ways that we need to confront this not only in the field of civil rights or through legislation, but also you know, deeply rooted in public health and medical practice access to care, access to treatment and the ways in which racism operates in every aspect of life, and we need to as a result confront it fundamentally in every aspect of life.
1:38, Laguaite: The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled xenophobia, specifically anti-Asian sentiment, across the globe. About a year ago in May 2020, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, had this to say.
1:53, António Guterres: We must act now to strengthen the majority of our societies against the virus of hate. That is why I’m appealing today for an all-out effort to end hate speech globally.
2:03, Laguaite: Guterres is just one of many public health officials to condemn xenophobia. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Asian Americans, in particular, have seen spikes in discrimination, anti-Asian sentiments, and violence. In fact, just a week before our conversation, eight people, many of whom were Asian women were murdered in shootings at spas in Georgia. Though the motive has yet to be confirmed, the killing sparked fear, outrage, and uncertainty in the Asian American community.
Laguaite: Here to talk more about xenophobia and racism is Dr. White, I connected with Dr. White through some of his published work centered around the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks.
2:48, White: My name is Alexandre White, and I’m an assistant professor of sociology and the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine.
2:56, Laguaite: Because we’re talking about anti-Asian sentiment and violence, Dr. White pointed out the implications of having a single racial category for the 48 countries that span the continent of Asia.
3:08, White: And I think it’s also important to note that, you know, the racial category, Asian—obviously, lumping the largest continent of the world into a single racial category—was itself a bureaucratic flattening of difference and categorization for the purposes of American racial categorization. So even when we talk about anti-Asian violence, it’s reflective of these particular forms of racial categorization that really emerged in the late 19th century.
3:35, Laguaite: So during the past two years especially, we've seen lots of anti-Asian sentiment, attitudes, and violence. And in your article, “Historical linkages, epidemic threat, economic risk and xenophobia,” you mentioned that the U.S. has a history of anti-Chinese sentiment, in particular, in response to epidemics. So can you talk a little bit about that as well?
3:57, White: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's really important, especially right now, to recognize the ways in which particularly anti-Asian racism is deeply structural, and is as structural in the United States as any other form of racism that we see today. I think some of the most dangerous and pervasive stereotypes around racism against the Asian community and populations of Asian descent is that either it's purely interpersonal, as we see in kind of the narratives of especially and prior to the attacks of the last week and the week before, these attacks seem to be caused as we normally see by just “bad apples,” who were doing terrible things, and that really ignores the ways in which actually, the racialization of people of Asian descent and exclusions are deeply human into the fabric of America's racist history.
Laguaite, 4:56: The Page Act of 1875 was the first restraint federal immigration law in the United States. The law was named after a Republican in California, Representative Horace Page, and aim to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women,” according to Dr. George Anthony Peffer, in his article “Forbidden Families.” Dr. White also spoke on the Page Act and its implications.
5:26, White: We can go back to 1875 with the passage of the Page Act, which was the first racially exclusionary immigration law passed in the United States, that banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States who were perceived... a justification for this largely emerged out of this perception that Chinese women were more immoral or guilty of sexual misdeeds, or were going to come over and engage in sex work that would then corrupt the morality of largely white American men.
Laguaite: Wow.
White: But within that, there was also this powerful and dangerous public health narrative that the Asian population somehow carried more virulent venereal diseases that would upset the epidemic landscape of the United States.
6:13, Laguaite: But the Page Act wasn't the only racially exclusionary law passed in the US.
6:19, White: Later, in 1882, the more encompassing Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, which banned all immigration of both men and women to the United States on similar grounds, ultimately that were intersectional in nature. These are gendered sexualized, as well as racialized justifications, for exclusion. And the Chinese Exclusion Act also focused on this particular justification of the threat of infectious diseases emanating from Asia.
6:46, Laguaite: OK. And these like exclusionary acts in the 19th century, what were typical American attitudes regarding that kind of law?
6:57, White: I can't speak to it in full but I do know that there was significant and virulent anti-immigrant and especially anti-Asian immigrant fervor in the United States. So, these policies were supported. And, and they were intrinsically exclusionary in their force. We see in these acts and in these histories, and in many ways, the ways in which racial categorization and racialization is fundamentally relational.
7:30, Laguaite: One of the specific outbreaks Dr. White has studied is the 1901 bubonic plague outbreak that swept through British colonial Cape Town. Colonial officials use the outbreak as an opportunity to turn to racist responses to public health concerns. Officials rationalized “existing and unfounded racist segregationist beliefs and forcibly removed most of the city's black population from its homes and neighborhoods.” And that's just one example of racialized quarantine. In 1899, during a plague outbreak, authorities in Honolulu quarantined and burn the city's Chinatown.
8:14, White: But on top of this, you know, there were also numerous moments of racialized quarantine that looks very similar in many ways to the quarantine we discussed in Cape Town. When plague arrived in Honolulu, the response by American public health authorities there was to quarantine off the entire Chinatown section of the city of Honolulu.
8:35, Laguaite: So what did this quarantine look like?
8:37, White: This, of course, was not a was not an equal quarantine. And in fact, borders of the quarantine space was gerrymandered in ways that allowed for white-owned businesses and white homes to be excluded from this quarantine and ultimately, in a devastating moment of violence. As public health actors traveled through attempting to sanitize and quote-unquote cleanse homes of bubonic plague with essentially burning infected homes down. The fire expanded, got out of control, and burned much of the city's Chinatown to the ground, obviously, leaving many people homeless and also without places of work, which would go on to have devastating effects.
9:21, Laguaite: These types of racialized quarantines have had lasting effects, Dr. White said.
9:26, White: And we saw similar forms of racialized quarantine against Asian populations also in response to periodically when it arrived in San Francisco from 1900-1904. They've reflected very similar patterns. So we see this long history of the invocation of disease threat and racial anxieties when it comes to people of Asian descent that I think, you know, we've seen invoked again, very disturbingly, into tremendously violent and oppressive effect in 2020 and 2021.
9:57, Laguaite: Dr. White mentioned the historical importance of the exclusionary acts, and explain to me the implications these acts had for future U.S. legislation.
10:07, White: So many Asian migrants came to the United States in the 19th century, in some ways in response to the lack of free labor that was eliminated through the abolition of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. And thus, migrants were forced, coerced, and brought into the United States to make up for that loss of labor. And as a result, especially early Asian immigrants of the United States were associated with, negatively, with African Americans, with formerly enslaved black people, and the connotations were very similar in terms of the racial categorizing. And also, we can see that these exclusion acts that I mentioned, also laid the groundwork for things like Donald Trump's Muslim ban, as well as other exclusionary immigration policies in the 20th century. So we can see here how systems and structures of racism, build on one another and interrelate different groups that are racialized and powerful and devastating and oppressive ways.
11:11, Laguaite: Having studied social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks was xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment and violence today something you expected when COVID-19 first began?
11:26, White: It was certainly something I was very concerned about.
Laguaite: OK.
White: And, you know, I think what we've seen in this pandemic is the invocation of a host of historical tropes that we've seen before, through the 19th century and 20th century and beyond. were, you know, especially particular anxieties about the ways in which epidemics are going to affect commerce effect, trade effect, global economics, become co-constituted or co-constituted with particular anxieties about populations within blamed for spreading disease. And we've seen time and time again, that disease and epidemics are a very powerful justification for ascribing human difference, especially in culture, you know, when we can assign some sort of pathological flaw to cultural behaviors that were and are, you know, incredibly but now, outside of a pandemic situation, you know, it becomes a very effective way of mobilizing racist anxieties. And I think very unfortunately, we're seeing that continuing in the present.
12:35, Laguaite: On that note, do you think that former President Trump's usage of phrases like, “the China virus” or “Kung Flu,” do you think that worked to perpetuate some of these stereotypes and violence?
12:49, White: Absolutely. I think that there's little doubt to that. The history of racial anxieties when it comes to diseases that can emerge from ages is long-standing. And this becomes a way of, and I think we see this very much former President Trump's narratives of or the ways in which he narrated the COVID-19 pandemic, we see the ways in which there's a civilizational superiority logic that comes through in attempting to assign blame to an entire geography for the emergence of a disease so that I really would not only not give these ostensively racial slurs any credence, but I would also ask a philosophical question, which is, you know, to what extent do origins of diseases actually matter when, you know, pandemic epicenters move? And the fact of the matter is, you know, the United States has been the epicenter of this pandemic for some time, until unsurprisingly, like so many things. When it comes to racist ideologies. The concept holds no water, but also the justifications are paradoxical and make no sense.
13:53, Laguaite: Dr. White said there are many important lessons we can take from historical instances of racism and xenophobia.
14:01, White: Most critically, we need to stop thinking about the spread of infectious disease as somehow being the result of inferior unhygienic, unsanitary practices that can be leveled across an entire population, right, or an entire group or a culture or an ethnic group or a racial group. You know, these are not epidemics are not, they don't they just, they simply don't work that way. Diseases emerge in different places at different times. And you know, it's for this very reason, that the World Health Organization, for instance, does not or no longer advocates for the naming of novel diseases, and ascribing that name to a place we know COVID-19 is COVID-19 in large part because of the stigmatizing effects that you know, locating a disease or interpreting a disease name with a particular location as we try to avoid that. Now for these precise reasons, and you know, what we need to recognize this is far from any sort of cultural, behavioral or social practice carried by individuals or groups or the blame that we ascribe to them in various racist, gendered or ethnically insensitive and violent ways, we need to recognize how the social factors that exist within a society fundamentally lead to the perpetuation of an epidemic lead to greatest or more severe outcomes and epidemic we've seen, especially in United States, the ways in which economic and racial inequities and inequalities in our society are leading to very significant deaths morbidities, but also inequalities in how this pandemic is being felt across the United States and who is living and who is dying. You know, we see that racism, far from being able to explain any sort of differences in or being able to explain any sort of cause for an epidemic actually kills at far higher rates during an epidemic. And these racist logics are incredibly violent, incredibly dangerous, and hinder public health practices and legacies of racism, structural racism, very much have lasting and pertinent effects on how pandemics play out.
16:10, Laguaite: Well, thank you so much for talking to me, Dr. White.
16:13, White: Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure.
16:17, Laguaite: Across the U.S., protests have called for an end to Asian discrimination in anti-Asian violence. If you're looking to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in philanthropy, which is also called the AAPIP, has a list of resources to combat the rise in anti-Asian violence. You can find it at apip.org.
Laguaite: This has been “To Health and Back.” Thanks again for joining me on this health history journey. Tune in next time for a bonus episode featuring another discussion on xenophobia. Until then, don't forget to rate the podcast and subscribe. Feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected]. And I'm also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as @healthandback. Thanks. See you next time.