Láolú Senbanjo is a Nigerian performance and visual artist, human rights lawyer and activist based in Brooklyn...
The xenophobia has just moved to Asia...
That point was made painfully clear when, rather than taking the opportunity to unite and embrace a rising spirit of generosity and togetherness emanating around the globe, the president of the United States made a choice to sow division, publicly labeling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus.”
The lesson many people still need to learn is that disease is something that afflicts the human body — not the Chinese body, the African body, or the Western body. The moment a disease is regionalized, humanity is erased in a dishonest and dangerous attempt to reduce one another to a nationality.
It is detrimental to the well-being of everyone to pretend that a virus is African or Chinese or American or French.
But this goes far beyond physical ailments. There must be a collective understanding that social ills, economic challenges and, of course, the looming environmental disaster, belong to us all. For better or worse, they are a part of who we are; and we are a part of them.
https://nyti.ms/3dTQkSJ