“The hardest thing I had to overcome in life? I think racism. That's so difficult because I don't think anyone can ever understand it. It's not that people don't want to understand it, but they don't want to touch it.”
—Herschel Walker
By Alex P. Vidal
WE Asians living in the United States have to deal with two frightening viruses nowadays: COVID-19 or the coronavirus and racism.
Because it is a common knowledge that coronavirus originated from Wuhan in China and Americans are now being bedeviled by the virus, some non-Asians think human beings with squinty eyes or even those afflicted with Microphthalmia (small eyes) are from Asia and could be carriers of coronavirus.
It’s not hard to notice some irate non-Asian characters planting dagger looks at our direction especially when we make a mistake of slightly sneezing or coughing while inside the bus and subway train.
And even if we aren’t sneezing and coughing, some paranoid non-Asian passengers sometimes refuse to sit beside us, in front of us, or stay and stand near us—or in a distance where they feel they can be easily blasted by an air of mucus expelled from the mouth and nose in case somebody will sneeze or cough.
But if they are the ones who happen to sneeze and cough, we don’t complain; we don’t make mountain out of a molehill; we don’t stare at them like they are descendants of Thanatos, the son of Nyx and the personification of death.
No coronavirus-tagging. No hateful glance. No malice. No problem.
-o0o-
We all sneezed and coughed—people of all races—occasionally even before coronavirus became a worldwide terror, but nobody gave a hoot inside the public transportations then.
It’s only when coronavirus started to kill in America that the level of enmity and prejudice toward Asians living in the U.S. developed an alarming uptick.
Not all sneezing actually can be associated with coronavirus.
It can have causes that aren’t due to underlying disease like cold exposure, bright lights, irritants such as pepper, or having an object stuck inside our nose.
We are thankful though that the New York Police Department (NYPD) Hate Crimes Task Force has started investigating a “racism” incident (that’s how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority described it) on N train in Brooklyn where an angry straphanger sprayed a male Asian passenger with air freshener after verbally attacking him recently.
A video on Twitter has detectives investigating a possible hate crime.
The video shows the altercation on the N train in Brooklyn, with the angry straphanger yelling at the man to move away from him—an apparent act of discrimination based on the man's ethnicity.
-o0o-
The Asian community has seen an increase in racist incidents against them since the outbreak of COVID-19, which began in China.
"I don't want him under me!" the man is heard exclaiming in the expletive-laced video. "Tell him to move!"
The subject of his tirade was an Asian man who appeared to be minding his own business on the train, and said nothing back to the man during the rant, and didn't move.
When the passenger doesn't do what the enraged man told him to, the man sprays the air freshener Febreze in his direction for about 15 seconds.
Those who are motivated by racism and hostility must be reminded and educated that not all Asians living in the United States are infected with coronavirus (COVID-19).
It’s not a sin to sneeze and cough in public as long as we take precautionary measures, or as long as we cover our mouths with handkerchief or mask.
That Asian man attacked in the N train didn’t even sneeze and cough.
We Asians are being judged by the shape of our eyes.
-o0o-
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. There is a certain amount of salt in all our food, and one of the properties of salt is to draw water from the tissues toward the kidneys where the waste liquids are filtered.
Also, the skin of our faces has a certain amount of color of its own, but the main part of the color of the face--at any rate, among people with light-colored skins--is the color of the blood shining through the skin. It is the heart that drives the blood through the skin of the face.
How hot is the sun? The temperature of the surface of the sun is estimated at about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun's interior may be 40,000,000 degrees. At these temperatures, molecules of matter can not "hang together."
(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)
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