On Jan. 31, Adamson University published a memo in light of the news that the coronavirus has reached the country. “We have made a decision that all Chinese students, both graduate and undergraduate, observe self-quarantine starting today until Feb. 14,” it said, adding that Chinese students must also postpone financial transactions with the university. It also noted that local “and other international students” will be going on with classes like normal.
After receiving tremendous backlash, the university amended the initial memo, this time saying that “all students, staff, and stakeholders who have traveled to and from countries with confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV” (and not just the Chinese students) are advised to seek medical attention and self-quarantine for 14 days.” It also clarified that Chinese students who do not fall into that description are allowed to come to school.
Credit where credit is due: It’s good that the university swiftly amended its statement over the weekend instead of sticking to its guns like other schools might have. Still, the first memo should have never been sent out in the first place.
What’s the problem with the original memo?
As many people on the internet have pointed out, calling out all Chinese students point blank encourages racial profiling. Just because you’re Chinese doesn’t mean you’re a carrier of a disease. The opposite is also true: People who aren’t Chinese, as long as their recent travel history includes the affected areas, can also be carriers. You can’t tell if someone can be a coronavirus carrier just by looking at them or checking their nationality. This should go without saying.
Unfortunately, this incident is par for the course of a growing sentiment of xenophobia in the country. As we mentioned in a previous article, the crisis has emboldened many racists to come out of the woodwork, and it’s exposed large-scale sinophobia. If the disease came from Westerners, would people react the same way? If the coronavirus outbreak started with, say, America, would we also be seeing university memos saying that all American students should stay at home so they won’t infect the rest of the student body, regardless of whether or not they travelled to the U.S. within the past two months?
Well, no. Americans brought back measles last year and that didn’t happen.
We need to be better at talking about the outbreak. It’s possible to talk about quarantine, travel bans and other important measures to quell the spell of the disease, without using racist narratives, without launching discriminatory tirades about the worthiness of an entire group of people.
Featured photo courtesy of Inquirer.net
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Don’t use the coronavirus outbreak as an excuse to be racist
