I see a more and more press reports these days about burgeoning sentiment against Asians in the U.S. My sense is that some Americans are blaming our Asian-American population for the covid-19 pandemic in our country. They censure Americans of Asian origin because the covid-19 virus originated in China. By a logic that escapes me, they hold our Asian-American population responsible for the pandemic because it started in the Far East.
President Donald Trump encouraged the bias and maybe was the original accuser who denounced our Asian-Americans as the source of what he called the “Chinese virus.” He failed to explain how people born in this country who had never visited the orient were somehow to blame for the infestation. The Asians, like the Blacks and the Latinos, were, in his book, the cause of myriad problems.
Like all prejudice, anti-Asian bias can prosper only in ignorance. When judgments are based on fact, racial hatred fades to nothing. Let’s hope that as we grow as a nation and we learn all over again in the post-Trump era to rely on truth rather than lies, we can erase the fabrications that have divided us.
Tom Glenn, Writer 