By Raymond Chang
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
- George Orwell
Words matter. They matter because they contain ideas that often hold symbolic value that can change the destiny of entire people groups. As rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel said, "Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed."
Since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the United States, certain words and phrases have been frequently used by our political leaders and their spokespeople: Foreign virus. Chinese virus. Kung flu. Wuhan flu.
Pundits and commentators have provided plenty of speculation as to why these terms are being used, but my primary concern is how it inextricably links a people group--namely people of Chinese descent--with COVID-19. It also connects Chinese people with everything associated with the virus, including suffering, loss, and a dangerous threat.
In all likelihood, the clearly documented rise in hate crimes, verbal abuse, and racism against Asian Americans can, at least in part, be traced to this harmful rhetoric.
There are other words that can inflame mistrust and fear of particular people groups, even unintentionally. On April 5, for example, the Surgeon General said, “This is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives. This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11.”
I understand the Surgeon General’s desire to express the great degree of tragedy and loss in this period in our nation’s history. The number of deaths we have already seen from COVID-19 is staggering. We should pause and lament this tragic loss, especially as the virus affects the most vulnerable populations, from the elderly to the immunocompromised, and to those from Black and brown communities who are dying at disproportionately high rates.
But it concerns me that the Surgeon General would use the two particular analogies of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 to describe the pandemic.
Some who heard his comments may not have thought about the larger implications of his words, as the ways that race and racialization operate for those perceived as perpetual foreigners (Asians and Latino/as) are often overlooked. Our churches have lacked discipleship and our educational systems have lacked engagement on this extensive reality. Many of us have not developed the eyes to see and ears to hear racially charged language, attitudes, behaviors, and structures that disadvantage those who are not considered “American enough” or “from the United States.”
In referring to the trauma on American society, the Surgeon General could have said it would be like the collective shock of the Oklahoma City Bombing or the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. He could have referenced the mass shootings that occur regularly, killing hundreds each year. (In fact, March 2020 was the first March without a school shooting since 2002.) A far more accurate analogy, though further back in history, might have been the smallpox epidemic that wiped out a vast number of First Nations people.
Associating our current moment with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 escalates the description of COVID-19 to the significant threat of an invasion by Asian peoples from Japan or parts of the Middle East. In the past, this form of escalating rhetoric ultimately led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps in 1942. It also led to racialized suspicion, profiling, and violent hate crimes against Americans of Middle Eastern descent and those perceived to be Middle Eastern.
It didn’t help when former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before. We need to step up, help our neighbors, donate gear, vote, wear red white and blue, volunteer, fund aid organizations, and do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis. We should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.”
Most of Yang’s article is heartfelt and helpful. He talks about the racism he experienced on the campaign trail and at the grocery store in the midst of the pandemic. But then he says, “It barely registered when a teenager yelled ‘Chink’ at me from the window of his car in New Hampshire a number of months ago. My only reaction was to think, ‘Well, I’m glad that neither of my sons was around because then I might have to explain to them what that word means.’”
To me, this is problematic. I get Yang’s desire to protect his children from harsh realities, but if we can teach our children to identify their private parts to protect them from abuse, we can teach them to identify racism to make sure they don’t get targeted and bullied.
Yang’s racial consciousness is so low that even something as grotesque as the c-word barely registered when it was directed toward him. But I don’t necessarily blame him; his perspective exemplifies the hard decision that Asian Americans have had to make for centuries. We have had to choose between gaining and maintaining an honorary white status as we are used as wedges against other communities of color, or losing favor in the eyes of the dominant racial group.
Yang’s call for us to “embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before” also concerns me. Is my Korean American-ness not American enough? Is my cookout-loving, ballpark-going, firework-admiring, kimchee-devouring, Korean-drama-fiending, street-taco-obsessing, Spanish- and Korean-speaking, talking-back-to-a-black-preacher-self insufficient as an American? To me, my Korean American-ness is just as American as any other white or Black or brown person’s American-ness.
Where could this rhetoric lead? Based on history, exclusion, incarceration, hate crimes, and more are all possibilities. Perhaps we would be subject to mass quarantine by race.
As Christians, we can determine whether the words we use and amplify will build up or tear down. We can also determine what our words build up or tear down. Our words have power.
Let us use and encourage words that build unity and solidarity. Let us use words that tear down division and strife. As Paul writes in Ephesians 4:29, "Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”