Eat Chinese, You Racist!

I suppose it was inevitable. The coronavirus scare has now been declared to be racist, at least by Global News.

Global does not give a lot of details on the supposed racism; they feature a political cartoon showing a rat looking ill, captioned “Welcome to the Year of the Rat.” If there is racism in that, they do not explain it. It seems that it is now racist to even vaguely associate the coronavirus with China, even though it began there, and almost all of its victims, so far, are there.

Supposedly racist cartoon by the Toronto Sun's Sue Dewar.

They cite as “ignorant” and “misinformation” suggestions they find on social media that the virus is a product of Chinese food.

Of course, it is a product of Chinese food. According to the authorities, at least, the virus crossed over to humans from exotic food animals in the Wuhan wet market.

Ignorance? Misinformation? It is Global News that seems to be spreading misinformation. By the nature of the beast, social media works against this, by improving the information flow.

The striking thing is that the legacy media still do not seem to have figured this out. The news is the last to hear the news.

The core evidence of racism in the story, the core complaint, their lede, seems to be that business is down in Canadian Chinatowns. People are avoiding them for fear of the virus.

Problem: avoiding Chinatowns is probably sensible. It is obviously more likely that, in Chinatown, you could encounter someone who has recently been to China. And so, the risk of catching the virus is greater. Tough for the Chinatown businesses, but the virus is tough on a lot of businesses.

Global News’s report is giving poor health advice. “Visit Chinatown, make a point of eating there, or you are a racist.” Racism, real or imagined, is more important to them than the public health.

Worse, the report identifies common sense as racist. The obvious corollary: racism is just common sense.

It is hard to believe they are not intentionally promoting racism. I think they are, at a minimum, racist in their own thinking. As someone once wisely said, if you keep hearing dog whistles, you must be the dog.