In the last three months, life as we know it has changed dramatically. The words on everyone’s mind: coronavirus, dry cough, fever, China, Italy, closed, unprecedented, indefinite.

  The coronavirus we are seeing currently is a strain called COVID-19. There are actually several coronaviruses, and they cause disease in animals. Seven of these viruses are known to infect humans, including the virus that is spreading all over the world currently. 

  In retrospect, with now almost 300,000 people dead (and I’m sure far more than that by the time this gets published), everyone wants to find someone to blame. 

  The World Health Organization’s office in China first heard of the virus on New Year’s Eve in Wuhan, China. The city was quarantined, but it was too late. People had already left the city, whether they knew they had the virus or not, and spread it. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been diagnosed. 

  It is suspected that the source of the new strain is from bats. A video of a Chinese influencer eating a fruit bat in a “Wuhan restaurant” has gone viral since the outbreak, which was enough evidence for people to chastise the “dirty Chinese” who “eat anything that moves.” The woman in the video, though she is Chinese, clarified that the video was filmed three years ago in Micronesia. 

  Still, people have used the virus as an opportunity to be openly racist. Everyday I log onto Instagram, Twitter, or Tik Tok and see a new meme about Asian people and their gross eating habits, their uncleanliness, their idiocy. I can usually take a joke, but it’s hard to laugh at something that seems so targeted, so unfair.

  Last week, my mom went to Trader Joe’s to stock up on food, toilet paper, and soap- like every other person in America right now. She said she felt like people were staring at her and moving away from her. She said she had to hold in a sneeze, which is a symptom of her spring allergies- not COVID-19. Maybe she was just being paranoid, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she, and many other Asian people, feel like they’re now targets because of the way the media has demonized Chinese people.

  It doesn’t help, either, that our own president- the man who is supposed to be a fearless leader- has referred to the virus as the “Chinese virus,” which only further bolstered his followers to target Chinese people. 

  If you are the president of the United States of America in the middle of a pandemic, you should only be referring to the virus by its medical name, which would be coronavirus or COVID-19- not attaching a minority of people to a virus that has killed thousands. 

  The harassment of Asians among this pandemic goes beyond internet hatred. The Anti-Defamation League has a running list of reported “Anti-Asian Assaults, Harassment, and Hate Crimes” that have some sort of connection to the coronavirus. There are 90 reports listed as of May 8, 2020.

  One of these hate crimes, which was reported on April 2, occurred in Cherry Hill, NJ. Vietnamese American photographer Ted Ngheim was walking his dog when a middle-aged man wearing a “MAGA” hat yelled at him that he “caused the coronavirus and needed to get the f*ck out of here.” Six days later, he was spat on outside of the Cherry Hill public library.

  Even if the virus did originate from a Chinese person eating a bat, even if it was made in a Wuhan lab, your racism is not excused. It is not rational. 

  Imagine the outrage if we blamed all white people for school shootings in America just because school shooters are almost always white. There’s even more to work with there because white American culture values firearms. Imagine being white and being spat on on your way to work and being told you were responsible for Columbine or Sandy Hook or Parkland when you don’t even own a gun. 

  Maybe then, when you have a moment to think about what it would be like if the tables were turned, you can sympathize with what Asians are going through right now.