Glances in the corner, derogatory reflections, a refusal to shake a hand or to kiss, sometimes even gestures of retreat in the street or in public transport ... The 2019-NCov coronavirus epidemic, including the epicenter is located in the city of Wuhan, in China, has awakened for a few days an uninhibited speech which reactivates anti-Asian racist stereotypes in France.
Under the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus, launched Monday on Twitter, many are witnessing a resurgence of discrimination linked to their supposed belonging to the Asian community, pointing to a problem deeply rooted in France. A distressing side effect of this epidemic which left more than 100 people dead and affects fifteen countries, while only three contaminations have been identified in France.
"How do you call coronavirus patients?" The Chinese, right? "
"Monday, I was on a bus to go home and a group of girls laughed at me, thinking that I did not understand French", tells Parisian Huyen Trân, a Vietnamese student living in Aix-en -Provence. "I heard them say What are the names of coronavirus patients?" The Chinese, right? They also made jokes about the bat soup (wrongly suspected of having directly transmitted the virus to humans) and the dead of the epidemic, hinting that I was also going to die ”, laments the student who arrived in France last year.
Dumbfounded, Huyen Trân preferred silence to a scathing split, to avoid "putting himself in danger". "I'm not Chinese, but it really makes me sad," she says too.
It was also in a bus that she took to Paris on Sunday that Shana Cheng, a 17-year-old high school student, was the subject of mockery linked to this virus which can affect the lungs and is transmitted by the respiratory tract. "I was going to Orleans and when I got on the bus, I heard comments from teenage and adult passengers such as She is going to contaminate the Chinese woman or She just has to return to her country" , tells us she, disappointed. "They had a serious tone, contemptuous", also protests the young woman, who is saddened by a "trivialization of racism towards Asians". To take revenge, rather than respond to them, the high school student preferred to have fun "purposely coughing", triggering according to her "disgusted mines".
No wind, because "you never know"
"Do not approach them, they may have the virus", this is also what assures to have heard a Parisian journalist, during a Sunday stroll in the Luxembourg garden. On Twitter, he bitterly evokes "an extraordinary social and human experience".
"Stay away from them, they may have the virus"
It + the people who stare at you or who dodge you, all because we are Asian ': this Sunday stroll in the Jardin du Luxembourg was an extraordinary social and human experience.
(Band of mangy dogs!) Pic.twitter.com/g8Q1ZWIzVk
There are also colleagues from Sonia (assumed name) who, she relates, refuse to kiss a worker whose wife is Thai because "you never know". "It's a good paste so he laughed, but it really bothered me", denounces the young Parisian, who criticizes "uninhibited racism".
You don't have to look far to find an illustration of this ambient racism. Twitter provides a daily overview. "It's understandable that people watch Asians with what's going on!" […] It is not marked on your head that you never go to China or that you are French! ", For example, bluntly launched a user on Tuesday. Another goes just as far in discrimination. “It is not racism but prevention. […] I would not go sit next to an Asian for the moment, being unable to know if he is Chinese from Wuhan or Korean from Seoul. "
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The copy of the Courrier picard, which combines a headline titled "Yellow Alert" and an editorial titled "Yellow Peril", also contributes to this incessant stigmatization (despite the apologies made by the local newspaper), suggesting that every Asian person is potentially carrying the virus.
All is well pic.twitter.com/y72c8gpph2
- Gurvan Kristanadjaja (@GurvanKris) January 26, 2020"A virus has no nationality"
If it is in China that the virus is declared, the nauseating gestures and comments very often make an amalgam with the whole continent. “Do we have to remember that Asia is a continent and not a country? ", Denounces the young woman behind the #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus. She is outraged on social networks that "many people use Chinese for Asians indiscriminately, putting aside all nationalities and cultural and ethnic diversities that make up this continent". And even so: "We know very well that a virus has no nationality", rages also this surfer who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of being the subject of a wave of hateful comments.
Frédéric Le Marcis, professor of anthropology, explains to the Parisian, that as with other previous viruses, including H1N1, "this objective fear of coronavirus infection necessarily questions Western stereotypes about Asia". "This type of fear is not new and the way in which epidemics have been perceived in history always reveals the stereotypes of an era through the blacklisting of scapegoats," he also analyzes. .
Amalgams and stereotypes which sometimes go very far. "We received calls from people worried because they had met Asian tourists," said emergency doctor Patrick Pelloux on Saturday. "You have to keep and not fall into medical racism or psychosis!" ", Also reacted the doctor, who hammered him: the risk of catching this virus in France" remains very low ".
