The dubious connection between migrants and viral contagion is an enduring theme in U.S. history. This toxic theme has been used by nativist to demonize immigrants as a threat to public health and the white body politic. The stereotypical linkage between immigrants and disease/illness functions as a symbiotic unity and is operationalized via the unequal distribution of power. Consequently, the immigrant/illness duality cannot be untethered from the overarching political economy of power.
Octavio Paz, the world-famous Mexican writer has posited that North Americans are fixated on the notion of racial purity. A purity that is operationalized by fomenting physical separation and fostering a “cult of hygiene.” This optic assumes that racial purity and pathogenic contagion can be contained by constructing unbreachable borders that keep out inferior and diseased non-white bodies from a healthy Anglo-Saxon United States.
The United States is currently mired in the throes of a divisive authoritarian right-wing nativist movement that virulently espouses a specific version of exclusionary ethnonationalism. As an implosive exclusionary socio-political movement, the contemporary U.S. version of ethnonationalism stridently adheres to a non-historical construct of racial purity and a nostalgic notion of “American Exceptionalism.” Ideologically, this optic reduces culture to an immutable set of inherited genetics and – as such – rejects the idea of diversity and ethnic pluralism. In a nutshell biological determinism ranks a given culture’s place within a superimposed racial hierarchy. This fictitious racist narrative found safe haven in the Trump administration’s project to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). And as an explicit political project, MAGA espouses isolationist disentanglement from the post 1945 global multilateral architecture, and posits a reimaging of the United States as a walled citadel that could deflect noxious foreign intrusions and contagion.
Susan Sontag in her seminal text: Illness as Metaphor – argues that the disease discourse has been used consistently to convey stereotypes of national character. In the quest to construct an ethnically homogenized exclusionary kingdom of whiteness, radical authoritarian right-wing disrupters have excavated and resuscitated a crude language and stereotypical themes that served their nativist forefathers well. Language is powerful instrument. It’s deeply embedded in the systemic mechanics of power. In effect, the use of racist linguistic metaphors function to efficiently convey – in a few words – a web-like assemblage of interrelated stereotypes. As the old adage states: a picture is worth a thousand words.
The Trumpian response to Covid-19 pandemic has strategically invoked the use of ethnic stereotypes to mark the global virus as a uniquely Chinese phenomenon that invaded and contaminated the U.S. homeland. Consequently, it would add analytical value to briefly discuss how the illness/immigrant metaphor has been historically marshalled as an integral element in ethnically restrictive nativist discourses. Immigrants were consistently problematized, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as both vehicles of contagion and as non-assimilated ethnics that defiled core North American values and essentialist notions of racial purity. In this nativist context, the Irish were framed as carriers of typhoid fever; Eastern European Jewish immigrants were identified as bearers of cholera and tuberculosis; while migrants from Southern Italy were typecast as unhygienic, illiterate, and vectors of anarchism and un-American socialist doctrines. And if fast forward to the third quarter of the 20th century we can observe how Black Hattian migrants were tainted as purveyors of the AIDS epidemic. It would also be analytically remiss to fail in mentioning how Mexican and Central American immigrants were stereotyped by the Trump administration as a diseased and a cultural threat, thus activating the implementation of presidential executive authority to exclude them from entering the United States.
What insights or lessons can be taken away from this brief historical survey? Clearly, we can posit that the eventual outcomes associated with the Covid-19 pandemic are tierra incognita. Nonetheless, we can tentatively assert that the current crisis will exacerbate prevailing ethnonationalist tendencies, and heighten the possibility that as the nation grapples with the overarching crisis, that the U.S. may ultimately revert – as a simplistic exit option – to a retrogressive mode of racial exclusion. Borders will harden and the stranger and outsider will be roundly unwelcomed and aggressively excluded.
This dystopian scenario is not chiseled in stone. The destabilizing discontinuities that erupted across the U.S. landscape, as a function of Codiv-19 plague, can also ignite countervailing mass social movements that will agitate for a more open and just social order. Historical outcomes are variable/contingent evolving socio-political processes that are not predetermined. As historical actors we respond to concrete circumstances in distinct ways that are ultimately mediated by our ability to envision – via active and progressive mass collective political engagements – in a constructing a more inclusive social and political order. The political choices are ours to make collectively. ________________________________________________________________________________
Arturo-Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is an urban planner and the former chairperson of the “Newest New Yorker Committee” of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and various Latin American universities.