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The Sunday Paper – From Fear to Hate: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Sparks Racial Animus in the United States

In the United States there’s been an escalation of hate crimes directed at Asians during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Runjing Lu and Yanying Shen from the universities of Alberta and California San Diego respectively have analyzed Google searches and Twitter posts to see if an increase in the use of a certain racial epithet* is related with this trend and, sadly, it is.

[*They use the word in full in their work, along with some other unmentionable epithets, but they’re scientists and that’s necessary. Here, if you don’t mind, I’ll just write ‘ch–k’ or ‘ch–ks’ by way of explanation.]

Here are the main findings:

  1. The pandemic has led to a surge [To remind; the paper refers throughout only to experience in the U.S.] in racial animus against Asians (which correlates with a rise in hate crimes)
  2. The increase of the C-word(s) on Twitter comes as a first-time use for many existing users i.e. racists haven’t suddenly gotten on to the service
  3. Animus increases on days when the Twitter-In-Chief (President Trump with over 82m Twitter followers) uses China and COVID-19 simultaneously
  4. Animus appears to be related to concerns about personal safety and not the potential economic effects of an escalation of the pandemic
  5. Visits to Chinese restaurants go down when animus goes up
  6. The researchers suggest that confining their observations to C-word(s) usage understates the problem. Using a wider search for phrases indicating racial animus in general towards Asians they found around 5x the number of examples

This is a depressing piece on two accounts.

First, this exploration into some of the darker patterns of behavior in a country struggling to manage the reality of its diverse citizenry is vexing.

Second, that the leader of this country has (knowingly or otherwise, and repeatedly) exacerbated this behavior puts him in the position of having crossed a line from dumbly malignant to viciously unprincipled. Supporters however seem to have been OK with this for some time; vexing indeed.

You can read the paper in full via the following link Race-Hate and COVID-19 Coverage in the U.S.

Er, Happy Sunday?

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