THE RACIST PANDEMIC A Semantico-Pragmatic Study of the Anti-Asian Overtones in COVID-19-related Twitter Discourse (original) (raw)
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From Yellow Peril to Model Minority: Asian stereotypes in social media during the COVID-19 pandemic
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Countering COVID-19-related anti-Chinese racism with translanguaged swearing on social media
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The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a spectacular rise in social media communication and an unprecedented avalanche of global conversation. This paper traces the emergence of the racist term “Chinese virus” used by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, on the Western social media platform Twitter and its reception and recontextualization on Chinese social media. Creative bilingual responses fusing English and Chinese resulted in a popular searchable meme “#用中式英语跨文化交流#” (“#Chinglish used for cross-cultural communication#”), on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. Such linguistic creativity involves a variation of swears to mock and condemn the racist phrase. Formally, linguistic practices such as self-coinage, transliteration, verbal repetition, and acronyms can be observed. Functionally, the recontexualizations evidence a defensive ideology linked to nationalism and modernism. Ultimately, combatting the English racist term “Chinese virus” with a creati...
Virtual Town Hall Examines Anti-Asian Racism during COVID-19 Pandemic, GW Today, April 20, 2020
GW Today, 2020
Asian Americans have been spat on, verbally assaulted and physically attacked in more than a thousand race-related incidents in the United States as a result of fear evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Alexa Alice Joubin, professor of English and international affairs, women’s studies and East Asian languages and cultures, provided a historical context for the discussion. She said connecting the language of disease to racism is not a new phenomenon. For example, it was seen in an 1886 soap advertisement “for kicking the Chinese out of the U.S.,” she said, and dubbed “yellow fever” in reference to white men who have a fetish for Asian women. Joubin said the language is associated with a history of discrimination against Chinese that made it into U.S. law, including the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Cable Act that prevented Chinese from becoming citizens even when they married U.S. citizens. It will take all of our cognitive ability, analytical reasoning “to concentrate and harness our resources to combat disinformation,” she said, “Our greatest fight is about fear.”
Health Education & Behavior, 2020
On March 8, 2020, there was a 650% increase in Twitter retweets using the term “Chinese virus” and related terms. On March 9, there was an 800% increase in the use of these terms in conservative news media articles. Using data from non-Asian respondents of the Project Implicit “Asian Implicit Association Test” from 2007–2020 ( n = 339,063), we sought to ascertain if this change in media tone increased bias against Asian Americans. Local polynomial regression and interrupted time-series analyses revealed that Implicit Americanness Bias—or the subconscious belief that European American individuals are more “American” than Asian American individuals—declined steadily from 2007 through early 2020 but reversed trend and began to increase on March 8, following the increase in stigmatizing language in conservative media outlets. The trend reversal in bias was more pronounced among conservative individuals. This research provides evidence that the use of stigmatizing language increased subc...
2021
COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of a group of people based on their perceived social value—in the United States in the cultural and political life. This article that analyzes the language of racism and misogyny. It also offers strategies for inclusion during and after the pandemic. Racialized thinking is institutionalized as power relations. Racial discourses take the form of political marginalization of minority groups, and cause emotional distress and physical harm. ::: https://gwenglish.org/the-roots-of-anti-asian-racism-in-the-u-s-the-pandemic-and-yellow-peril/
covid-19 and Anti-Asian Racism
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2021
This issue of adva responds to the covid-19 pandemic and the resulting highly-mediatized surge in anti-Asian racism and misogyny, which has exacerbated deeply-rooted anti-Asian Pacific racisms in North America and underlined continuing legacies of global histories of colonialism and empire. In order to hold space for collective grief, anger, frustration, and exhaustion, and to address the heightened sense of precarity we are experiencing, many of the contributions to this issue focused on how the pandemic affected Asian diasporic artists, activists, community organizers, curators, and scholars this past year. Our authors and editors were not immune to the toll of the pandemic. We were affected by illness, from covid or from pre-existing conditions, worsened by the overburdened healthcare system and global strain, first in the search for a vaccine and now in its administration and dispensation. Rather than rush back to a business-as-usual model, we extended our deadlines and engaged with slowness; we practiced a politics of refusal. Our emergency editorial
Stigma, Discrimination, and Hate Crimes in Chinese-Speaking World amid Covid-19 Pandemic
Asian Journal of Criminology, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to stigma, discrimination, and even hate crimes against various populations in the Chinese language–speaking world. Using interview data with victims, online observation, and the data mining of media reports, this paper investigated the changing targets of stigma from the outbreak of Covid-19 to early April 2020 when China had largely contained the first wave of Covid-19 within its border. We found that at the early stage of the pandemic, stigma was inflicted by some non-Hubei Chinese population onto Wuhan and Hubei residents, by some Hong Kong and Taiwan residents onto mainland Chinese, and by some Westerners towards overseas Chinese. With the number of cases outside China surpassing that in China, stigmatization was imposed by some Chinese onto Africans in China. We further explore how various factors, such as the fear of infection, food and mask culture, political ideology, and racism, affected the stigmatization of different victim groups. Th...
The Resurgence of Cyber-Racism: COVID-19 Pandemic and its After Effects (Preprint)
2020
BACKGROUND With the increasing number of patients of COVID-19 all over the world, a particular section of the world population has been blaming China and World Health Organization for the spread of this disease. Due to this, a number of cases related to racism and hatred have been encountered all over. With Donald Trump using the term Chinese Virus, this cause has gained momentum and Ethnic Asians are now being targeted. The online situation also looks the same where certain segment of people are posting hateful comments and posts. OBJECTIVE The research study has been done to analyze the increasing racism online during COVID-19. This research aims to analyze the emotions and sentiments that have been associated with the terms like CHinese Virus, Wuhan Virus and Chinese Corona Virus. METHODS 16,000 tweets ranging from 11th April 2020 to 16th April 2020 were analyzed to find out the sentiments and emotions associated with the posts. This research has been done on R. Twitter API and S...