Racism acts as a major problem in America for a hundred years. It seems like racial discrimination has eased after the 1970s since African American people gained their civil rights at that time. However, I believe that racism still exists in the US, it just changed from “surface to underground”. If you don’t believe what I’m saying, xenophobia is the new racial discrimination that happened in 2020.
Xenophobia occurs as a social issue at the beginning of Covid-19. Massive online comments including anti-Chinese or hate-Chinese hashtags, “Between February and April they saw a 300% increase in racist and violent hashtags against China and Chinese people. They analyzed over 600 million tweets, of which 200,000 contained hate speech or anti-Chinese conspiracy theories.”(URL: https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/i-am-not-virus-anti-chinese-racism-and-coronavirus) Question is, how to deal with this issue? In order to tell everyone that its the discriminators’ fault, what should we do?
The answer is the slogan. What this picture expresses is crystal clear, a young Chinese lady in red cheongsam hold a white paper written with “I AM NOT A VIRUS”. During COVID-19 breaking out period, numerous people blame disease on Chinese, people like me who study, live in America feel insecure and fearful. If you are Chinese and walk on the street(no matter wearing a mask or not), you probably hear something like “Go back to China; Don’t spread Chinese virus.” Interestingly, COVID-19 should be hated by everyone, Chinese people suddenly became the culprit.
This slogan is trying to persuade people who are misguided by unrealistic media reports and speeches. Several examples are:
Rumor 1: Chinese people love to eat all kinds of wild animals, as well as bats and mice.
Rumor 2: The Chinese government was not effective in preventing the epidemic and deliberately concealed the epidemic.
Rumor 3: More than 40,000 people have died of COVID-19 in China.
Rumor 4: China’s medical supplies exported to Europe are of poor quality.
Rumor 5: The protective materials aided by China all have political purposes.
Those misinterpretations could spread quickly among the public due to the lack of understanding of Chinese society. Of course, we shouldn’t blame citizens for stating some arguments with either slight or extreme discrimination. After all, it’s not their fault. Our reading material “The essential guide to rhetoric” explains clearly that “language is a strong means of giving citizens understanding, and it’s basic to all social actions and relations” (The essential guide to rhetoric, page 19). An ordinary person (not working in a bureaucratic agency) probably receives information through news or social media. And what you see and hear may or may not be authentic, who knows? Our worldview is influenced by society all the time directly or indirectly.
Fortunately, there’s commonplace and ideology exist, which allow people to rethink their behavior. Rights of assembly, procession, and demonstration allow Chinese students and Chinese-American to fight against xenophobia. The commonplace beneath under this short slogan is all ethnicity should be treated equally, especially in such a critical moment. Advocators of slogan hope to form an ideology that our true enemy is a disease, we should never, ever raise it to a specific ethnic group. Inner conflict will only exacerbate the deterioration of the COVID-19 pandemic (Today’s statistic is the best evidence).
Until now, this slogan exerts its function substantially. After a huge disseminate on social media, more and more international volunteers join us and keep expanding our positive value into the wider public.
Picture URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=I+am+not+virus&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi6otiuwuLrAhWWqZ4KHSwWAooQ_AUoAXoECAwQAw&biw=1440&bih=736#imgrc=5_p7qb1J6NnIwM
This is a great example of logos! Many people have used this pandemic as an excuse to be racist towards Chinese people and even Asian people in general. This slogan is a very effective way of communicating that this virus is not exclusive to or the fault of one group, and is a common enemy to all of us.