As the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus COVID-19 continues to register mounting deaths worldwide, the Arab American Studies Association (AASA) denounces all forms of racism and racial capitalism that render migrants, communities of color, and occupied people everywhere more vulnerable to the illness and to its economic aftermath.
The metaphor of contagion has long been linked to racist and imperialist discourses describing people of color and formerly colonized people as uncontrollable, dangerous pathogens. Despite an abrupt and recent shift, in the crucial early days of holding press conferences about the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump’s insistence on referring to coronavirus as the “Chinese” virus continues his legacy of using xenophobia as a tactic to appeal to both implicit and explicit white supremacy. We note that these kinds of insinuations and statements build on the history of xenophobia in the US in general, and connect in particular to the “Muslim ban” rhetoric and subsequent Executive Order issued by Trump’s administration.
We recognize, also, that the underlying system of racial capitalism puts people of color and underpaid grocery and delivery workers at particularly high rates of risk, not only for contracting the virus (e.g., migrant farm workers still expected to work), but perhaps even more vastly for the hazards of financial precarity, especially given that most flexible, service industry jobs have disappeared and that undocumented workers are ineligible for stimulus checks.
We are concerned that local, state, and federal systems of warehousing and detention, including prisons and immigration detention centers, create huge and unnecessary risks for the people who are housed there, particularly given that such facilities cannot ensure social distancing nor the amount of soap and cleaning products required to mitigate the spread of the virus.
We are wary of the use of the metaphor of war to describe the response to the global pandemic. We know all-too-well the ways that a declared State of Emergency can erode civil liberties, deepen invasive forms of surveillance and data-collecting, and harden the policing, carceral, and border-enforcement logics of the state in ways that disproportionately impact already-vulnerable communities.
All of this underscores the deadly impact of settler colonialism and imperialist aggression. Decades of US-backed wars and US- and Israeli-armed military aggression have dispossessed millions of Syrians, Palestinians, Yemenis, and Iraqis (among others), many of whom are refugees living in conditions that make them extremely vulnerable to the spread of coronavirus. The logics of occupation, extractivism, and dispossession create a structural disparity that disproportionately exposes communities of color, indigenous and all colonized people, and migrants and refugees of imperialist aggression and global capitalism to the unacceptable risk of death, whether from the virus itself or the structural conditions of economic precarity and war that will be justified in the fallout.
We support the calls to foreground radical care, mutual aid and collaboration as the only just ways to respond to the current pandemic and the ravages it leaves in its wake.
