Coronavirus: as the pandemic spreads in the US, so do racist attacks, and not just against Asians
- Asians and Asian-Americans continue to be targets, but recent coronavirus webinars have included abuse and slurs of black participants
- The Zoom videoconferencing platform was used, and hacked, in both webinars
As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads across the United States, reports of racist attacks and abuse have spiked. While many accounts involve the targeting of Asians and Asian-Americans, the phenomenon is not limited to them.
In the past two weeks alone, two separate medical webinars on the coronavirus featuring minority health care workers were disrupted by hackers spewing profanity and racial slurs.
On Wednesday, a coronavirus webinar hosted by the Washington-based Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC) was intended to shine a light on racial discrepancies in the response to the outbreak. Instead, participants themselves became the targets of racial vitriol.
“Hate speech of all sorts – however, mostly racist comments – bombarded our chat,” said ABC’s president, Dr Michelle Albert, who moderated the discussion. “Nonetheless, we continued.”
As the frequency and tenor of the racist comments increased, so did the reaction of the audience, which responded by flooding the chat with declarations of support and gratitude and love for the doctors on-screen, swamping the hate speech.
Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Centre who was the first panellist to speak, was among the earliest to notice the racist comments.
