Published on: May 28, 2020
Saffanat Sumra

Racism’s cruel history and present conditions have for centuries been in a vicious feedback loop with medical care and economic hardship, and the current COVID-19 pandemic is no exception to history. Race, religion, sexuality — such factors have far reaching implications on whether or not people receive medical care, what quality of care they receive, and how the public treats them in general. A virus is strong enough to deepen divisions in humanity, despite its microscopic size, and despite the fact that viruses have no race, gender, or class nor do they discriminate between people when infecting them.

While some people may be more susceptible to a virus than others, there is no reason for us to torture individuals by taking away their basic human privilege of respect. Indeed, one of the most distressingly common yet significant consequences of pandemics is the hate that emerges for groups of people who are blamed for the virus. Many scientists and researchers have concluded that blame is our way of finding reason behind the mysteries of a disease and its peculiarity. Let’s explore how certain ethnicities and races suffered from discrimination during two of the deadliest pandemics in human history.

The Black Death

The Black Death (1346–1353), caused by the bubonic plague, killed between 75 and 200 million people. This was also when the word “quarantine” was invented. Merchant ships bearing flea-infested rats were a likely cause of the plague, but given the state of scientific development in that time period, it was difficult to find the roots of the disease. As people searched for answers, a popular myth that circulated was that of Jewish communities were responsible for the plague and such tales spread across France, leading to some of the most cruel massacres of Jews.

Image credit: StopAntisemitism.org

Men, women, and children were locked up in synagogues or burned to death. Even courts of justice convicted Jews of poisoning wells and food. The persecution of Jews was pervasive even before the Black Death, but intensified as they became a scapegoat for the spread of the plague. People wanted to drive out and to destroy entire Jewish communities, and in too many cases were successful.

Even today, again, multiple Jewish communities are becoming scapegoats for the spread of COVID-19.

In France, former health minister Agnes Buzyn, who is Jewish, was depicted pouring poison into a well, and this graphic has been circulated throughout social media.

Other anti-semitic posts include videos accusing Agnes Buzyn of withholding chloroquine from the general public for personal gains. In Baltimore, a radio host blamed Jews for moving to Baltimore from New York, igniting Baltimore’s coronavirus outbreak. People have vandalized synagogues in Maryland and Massachusetts with hateful language and swastikas. Jews have had a long history of bearing false accusations for the spread of viruses and diseases, and the coronavirus has provided another medium for targeting innocent Jewish residents when the virus has nothing to do with them.

The Spanish Flu

The 1918 flu pandemic infected more than 500 million people, with over 50 million fatalities, about 675,000 of which were from the United States. Let’s talk about the name of the flu: the Spanish Flu. Many people called the flu Spanish believing that it originated from Spain. The truth is that it didn’t. Multiple forms of media resorted to calling the influenza virus “Spanish Flu”only because the Spanish journalists were the first to report it.

That’s right, the Spanish flu didn’t even originate in Spain.

Yet many people believed that it did and blamed the entire Spanish community. Even if it did originate in Spain, does it really give the virus its identity? Since when did viruses have nationalities?

You might be wondering then, “where exactly did the virus begin?” To our dismay, we cannot pinpoint where exactly the virus first originated with certainty. What we can say is it could have either been a result of poor health conditions of soldiers during World War I. In fact, scientists and historians have suggested the virus could have originated in France, China, Britain, or the United States. During World War I, Spain was one of the few countries to remain neutral, reserving its right to free press. Countries that were either associated with the allied or the central powers suppressed any news about the flu, while the Spanish media went on to display the news with freedom, where the first headlines were made in Madrid. A lot of countries where Spanish media was the only source of input for the news therefore assumed that Spain was the flu’s birth place.

Within the United States, Black people in general got infected at a higher rate than the general populace. Segregated hospitals resulted in suboptimal care and disproportionately large death rates when compared to their white counterparts. Black people were only allowed in hospitals that cared for Black people. Well-educated individuals came up with outlandish theories of why Black people faced more mortality than other races.

A statistician named Frederick Hoffman threw logic out of the window and viewed the excessive infection and death rates of African Americans as a direct result of their race being inferior instead of considering the conditions surrounding their health.

He believed, in a truly spectacular fit of faulty rationalization, that African Americans were healthier while under slavery and that emancipation had caused them to lose their healthy status. Du Bois, a prominent figure in American history, did also notice that African Americans indeed had higher rates of infection of the flu, and they were more likely to contract other diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia.

However, Du Bois stated that none of this reflected anything about them being Black, but was instead a result of the poor social conditions surrounding their survival, especially in a segregated society where people still oppressed them.

It has been a century ever since the Spanish Flu occurred, yet even today, during the COVID 19 pandemic, people have held particular races responsible for the virus, including anti-black racism in China as well as anti-chinese racism internationally, and our medical and economic systems still neglect marginalized groups.

What Can We Learn from These Pandemics?

A common feature between the Black Death, the 1918 flu, and the 2020 COVID 19 pandemic is the widespread ignorance that leads people to look for scapegoats. It is essential to recognize these biases and act in order to provide individuals with adequate care and safety measures.

The Unconscious Bias Project #TogetherAgainstBias

Our organization, The Unconscious Bias Project, believes in acting together against xenophobia and racism by offering workshops regarding bias reduction and navigating implicit bias, especially during a time conquered by this pandemic. Keep following along with our accounts as we post more information regarding experiences and disparities during the pandemic and as we highlight new opportunities to fight bias and discrimination.