Coronavirus has put the world on having sex with cleaner videoshigh alert. But the spread of the virus has been matched by the spread of racism and misinformation.
First observed in China, the deadly virus has killed 213 people and infected nearly 10,000. It has been confirmed in at least 16 other countriesso far, prompting many governments to issue warnings or restrict travel. It’s a frightening time, particularly for those trapped in China’s quarantined cities.
As the panic has spread, warnings to avoid Asians and Asian-populated areas have gone viral. Many of them are blaming the coronavirus outbreak on Chinese people eating bats. There really is no bad thing humans can't make worse.
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The racist narrative has engulfed social media. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are filled with posts calling Asians "barbaric" and "disgusting." Some even say they "deserve" the coronavirus outbreak because they consume bats.
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Some people in Chinado eat bats. However, the animals are also consumed by people all over the world, including in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and even the Americas. It's also true that bats and other animals can carry coronaviruses — though, according to the CDC they rarely spread to people, as was the case with the MERS and SARS outbreaks.
Beef, pork, and chicken can also transmit disease — most famously mad cow disease, swine flu, and salmonella. Yet nobody was vilified for having previously eaten pork during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
The notion that eating bat is inherently barbaric, disgusting, or immoral is based entirely on the food practices that have been normalised in predominantly Western societies. The coronavirus panic has provided an opportunity for a pile-on of disinformation.
Particularly upsetting are the videos of Asian people eating bats that have been shared widely on social media in recent days. The comments are exactly what you’d expect, and incredibly familiar to anyone of Asian descent.
"The most disgusting people with no damn culture expect eating every other freaking animals they see they deserve they type of viruses karma bi**h."
"I guess they just take the rats in their kitchen, deep fry them and serve them on the menu as well…"
"these ppl eat anything that has 4 foot in it except a friggin Table. And now their jnfected are not quarantined, they free to travel anywhere in the world. its like they are the disease themselves"
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In one of the videos, a Chinese woman holds a bat up to show the camera before tucking in. Various media outlets have labelled the footage "gruesome," unable to handle the notion that not everyone gets all their protein from plastic-wrapped cutlets of factory-farmed chicken.
However, the clip wasn’t shot in China. The woman was in Palau,an island nearly 3,000 miles away. Nor did this happen recently. It was part of an online travel show filmed in 2016 and released before 2018. Host Wang Mengyun was simply trying the local cuisine, which included bat meat. (According to her, the bat she consumed was a fruit bat that had been raised by locals, not a wild one.)
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.SEE ALSO: Watch out for this extremely fake, weirdly racist viral post about coronavirus
Of course, none of this stopped people from piling on Wang, forcing her to issue an apology. Neither did it stop them from spreading the video. Many who have shared it clearly consider the behaviour subnormal, conflating "unfamiliar" with "disgusting" and perceiving their normality as superior. It is sadly not an unfamiliar reaction.
"Ignorance plus distrust plus saber rattling are a deadly combination," said historian John Kuo Wei Tchen, speaking in 2014 on anti-Asian racism in the U.S. "It’s not all hate, but the line in the sand is drawn between we civilized, normal, hence superior people versus 'them.'"
Beef, pork, and chicken have become staple foods around the globe, normalised and commercialised on an industrial scale, but bat meat has not. Many people are familiar with the concept of eating a cow or pig, but would have never turned their mind toward eating a bat.
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Some of the repulsion also comes from the fact that the bats being eaten in the videos are clearly identifiable as animals. Again, this disgust is rooted in the psychology surrounding meat consumption rather than the behaviour itself.
Supermarkets stocked with pre-cut, commercially farmed meat have contributed to a psychological disassociation in consumers between meat and the animals it comes from. Studies have demonstrated that people are more disgusted by meat when it visibly resembles the animal, or even when it is referred to as "cow" instead of "beef."
In contrast, many Asian people have a greater connection with their food's source, as evidenced by the history of live animal sales at wet markets. China does have prepackaged meat, but the value Chinese people place on the "freshness" of food means they're also accustomed to carcasses that still look like animals, or even butchering animals themselves. It's a different way of approaching food, but no less legitimate.
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In reality, scientists don’t yet know exactly where this coronavirus originated and how it was transmitted to humans. There is good evidence that bats were the source of this outbreak, but even if that is ultimately found to be the case, it doesn't warrant the ill-informed and often racist memes making the rounds.
Though this coronavirus outbreak is new, the persistent, racist idea that Chinese people are filthy and will indiscriminately eat anything with a pulse is far from it. The outbreak has simply brought these xenophobic sentiments to the fore, strengthening them with confirmation bias and fear. Asian and particularly Chinese communities around the world are facing ostracisation and hostility, being turned away from restaurants and racially abused.
It's important to be cautious in the face of this global health emergency, and to take reasonable precautions to prevent infection. But it's just as important not to give in to racism and hatred, or pile more harm onto an already painful situation.