Daily Times

The coronavirus pandemic has Americans across the country fearful for their personal health and well-being, but for Asian Americans, the virus has stirred up another threat: a wave of verbal and physical attacks.

In the most egregious hate crime thus far, an Asian American family, including a two-year-old girl, was stabbed at a Sam’s Club Store in Midland, Texas. The attacker admitted to police that he tried to kill them because he believed they were Chinese people infecting Americans with the coronavirus.

Another victim Julie Kang, 30, said she was first verbally assaulted in December, when coronavirus cases were just beginning to surface in China. A man walked up to her in the middle of downtown San Diego, got in her face, and called her racial slurs. It took a moment for her to register what happened, she said, and she tried to shrug it off.

Joe Biden, the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, has publicly condemned the rising violence and number of attacks directed at the Asian American community related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his statement, Biden brought up several recent instances of violence toward Asian Americans. One woman, Yuanyuan Zhu, was spit on last month on her way to the gym as the perpetrator shouted a China-related expletive at her. In a separate incident, an Asian woman was doused with a substance outside her home in Brooklyn, New York, resulting in chemical burns to her face and body.

“These disgusting and racist acts must stop. They are grounded in an impulse that is as ugly as it is dangerously ignorant,” Biden said.

It doesn’t help that President Donald Trump and the GOP have been calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus,” putting a target on East Asian Americans. It fits into his administration’s pattern of xenophobia (referring to Mexicans as “rapists,” and labeling some places “shithole countries”), which also fits into his pattern of deflecting blame — this time as criticism mounts against the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

After a week of this rhetoric, Trump tweeted that “it was very important we protect our Asian American community” (before othering Asian Americans — “they” and “us” — one tweet later) on Monday, but the damage has already been done.

The “Chinese virus” rhetoric coming from the White House has real-world consequences for Chinese-Americans (and relationships with China broadly).

As coronavirus has spread across the U.S., so have reports of violence against people of Asian descent, and the FBI warns a surge in hate crimes could be yet to come.

Let us be clear. COVID-19 is not a “foreign virus.” It is not a “Chinese virus.” It is not the “Wuhan virus.” It is a human virus that does not discriminate based on ethnic background or race.