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Diversity Team
Mar 20, 20203 min read

Racism within Coronavirus (Submitted by Kevin Huynh, Asian Heritage student leader)

Hi everyone! My name is Kevin! I’m the Asian Heritage initiative leader!

Before we start, I want to talk a little about the Coronavirus.

  • Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which may cause illness in animals or humans.

  • The current outbreak is a newly discovered coronaviruses, it was unknown of until the outbreak in Wuhan China in December 2019.

  • COVID-19 refers to the current coronavirus outbreak

  • The coronavirus spreads through small droplets from the nose or mouth from an affected person

  • The symptoms of the coronavirus are fever, dry cough and tiredness but some may experience aches and pains, nasal congestion, runny nose, sore throat or diarrhea.

  • COVID19 and SARS are not the same thing, but they are related genetically though. SARS was much more deadly but less infectious compared to COVID19 (https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses)


Here is a Video that sums up COVID19

A question you may ask is “how do I protect myself?”

I looked up some ways to protect yourself and here are some few I found. Please check out the link I posted here or further below to learn more learn more! Or this link! https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses


  • Wash your hands with warm water and soap, or alcohol based hand rub

  • Maintain at least 3 feet distance between someone who is sneezing or coughing

  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth

  • Make sure you, friends, and family follow good respiratory hygiene

  • Stay at home if you aren’t feeling well

  • Social distancing!
















COVID19 clickable links: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html - a visual map


Racism within Coronavirus

With the scare of the outbreak, xenophobia and racism will spread along with them.

Here are the definition of xenophobia and racism:

-Xenophobia is dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries.

-Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.


Here is the video..

My thoughts:

I think it’s important to value your health and safety because it will also affect the people you care about. I also think it’s not fair to link a disease with a group of people. This is how fear spreads faster because it’s easy to jump into conclusion. I think the best tool to fight a pandemic is to educate each other and to remain calm in situations like this.

What do you think about this?


Unfortunately COVID19 isn’t our first global disease panic to happen.

-When the Ebola outbreak happen, people were prejudice against people of African descent regardless if they showed symptom of the disease or not.

-Another time was SARS during its first outbreak, people were hating on Chinese because its outbreak was in China.

-HIV was a big one way back in the days, when it was first discovered. Back then AIDS was actually called GRIDS, gay related immunodeficiency syndrome before they discovered that it can be transfer by anyone, not just between two men.

Fun fact about the Spanish flu was that it originated on U.S. army base (click here to read more about this!)


The problem

I think the problem about this COVID19 has multiple factors that is affecting us.

One is not knowing the cure

Two is the fear of catching it

Three is being severely ill because of COVID19

Four is the fear of being quarantined for a long period of time

Five is the fear not knowing how this pandemic will turn out

I think the best mindset is to be cautious but understand that not all Asian people have the virus and practice good respiratory hygiene.


Additional videos and articles on this subject that may interest you:

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-using-racism-against-china-to-distract-from-coronavirus-failures-2020-3 - Republicans are using racism against China to try to distract from Trump's disastrous coronavirus response

https://time.com/5806921/daniel-dae-kim-coronavirus-racism/ - Actor Daniel Dae Kim responses

https://abc7news.com/society/-covid-19-related-discrimination-increase-prompts-calls-for-change-/6029269/ - abc new 7 summing up their story about racism

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/trump_anti_chinese_racism_coronavirus_covid19 - This is a video about Trump using “Chinese virus” as a term referring the coronavirus

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/us/coronavirus-racist-attacks-against-asian-americans/index.html - An article about how racism is spreading faster than the coronavirus is



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