Five years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic shut doors and changed lives faster than we could learn its name. And amid uncertainty, people looked for answers, even if their searching brought consequences as serious as the virus itself.
This week, Stateside presents a podcast special, Revival: How COVID-19 changed us, reflecting on how the pandemic unfolded, and how we might lean into the challenges that remain. Our fourth episode considers the social consequences of the blame game, and how they've played out throughout human history.
The historic cycle of blame
This pattern of human behavior dates back at least to the 1820s, when doctors were accused of staging the English cholera epidemic and selling bodies for dissection. In 1889, influenza cases that originated in Russia spread, and people across the globe accused Russia of sending the virus as germ warfare.
A number of health-related conspiracy theories have historically targeted Jewish people. Amy Simon, an associate professor of Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University, said she begins many history lessons with one such example from 1918. At end of World War I, a flu outbreak collided with a destructive war.
“There were anti-Semitic conspirators that were writing newspapers and spreading lies about Jews, and there were rabble rousers that were going from town to town spreading violence,” Simon said.
The epidemic killed 50 million, and infected between 20-33% of the global population. But the American public generally didn't take epidemiology into consideration. Instead, many focused on the influx of immigrants — especially Jewish people fleeing Europe to escape persecution.
For a while, an open immigration policy defined America’s demographic makeup, but during the 20th century, new laws aimed to restrict immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as Asia.
“These Eastern European immigrants who came in, who were seen as backwards, as dirty, as uncivilized,” Simon said.
During this time, Michigan automobile magnate Henry Ford purchased the Dearborn Independent, a failing newspaper. Through the paper, Ford’s antisemitic views were translated into 12 languages and swept through America and Europe, Simon said. Ford quickly made his mark as an innovator of mass-produced conspiracy theories.
“That's been completely consistent since the 1920s to today, and every few years, there's another wave," she said. "It's different people, it's different immigrants, and their words are exactly the same.”
New century, new conspiracy theories
President Donald Trump’s first term was propelled by a numerous medical and political falsehoods. It wasn’t long before other political leaders attempted to align with his base by repeating similar claims, using language designed to inflame fears about China and COVID-19.
Melissa May Borja teaches American Culture at the University of Michigan and founded the Virulent Hate project, a research group that analyzes racist incidents and Asian American activism. Stop AAPI Hate, a group Melissa worked with, reported over 12,000 incidents of harassment in the first three years of the pandemic. Of these incidents,104 were reported in Michigan.
“We've seen Asian American people be shouted at while they're walking down the street,” Borja said. “Their restaurants … vandalized. We've seen them … pushed and shoved, spat upon. Kids being bullied in school.”
Through her research, Borja has noticed clear commonalities between misinformed political speech, and the phrases used by those who have committed acts of race-based violence and aggression.
"I think in the context of a pandemic, there was a tremendous amount of fear that made the reception of this nonsense more possible, because people were afraid, and everything was so unstable," Borja said.
Her research also tracked responses in Asian American communities, from artistic acts of resistance, to the organization of mutual aid systems that provide buddy systems or other safety arrangements for those concerned about attacks in public spaces.
Borja also noted that random aggression toward Asian Americans “is not going to be solved through insisting on better hate crimes laws or trying to use the force of the law in general to prevent crimes, because these aren't crimes."
"This is a social problem," she said.
Find more episodes of Revival here or wherever you listen to podcasts.
