{"id":104,"date":"2022-03-24T22:15:02","date_gmt":"2022-03-25T02:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/?p=104"},"modified":"2022-05-10T10:20:33","modified_gmt":"2022-05-10T14:20:33","slug":"yli12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/2022\/03\/24\/yli12\/","title":{"rendered":"Dynamics of Microaggression behind the COVID-19 Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><span style=\"color: #24243a;\">Yuchen (Nikki) Li<\/span><\/h3>\n<hr \/>\n<h4><\/h4>\n<h4>Instructor&#8217;s Introduction<\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nikki began working on this paper, in my WR 151 class, \u201cBoston Social Justice Now,\u201d in February 2020. The students were choosing timely topics related to issues of race, class, equity, or any combination of the above, and in those early days of the pandemic, Nikki felt called to investigate the different attitudes toward mask-wearing by students of different backgrounds. Drawing on her background in China, her experience on the receiving end of race-based microaggressions in Boston, and our class reading pool of theorists on race, microaggressions, and intersectionality, Nikki began building up a compelling argument about the racially-biased microaggressions against those wearing masks. As the public health messaging on masks changed, and changed again, she shifted her topic and expanded her project to look at university and city recommendations on the subject, even analyzing some of the official BU guidance and its language and diction. When the university switched to remote classes after the first week of March, she continued to work on her paper, remediating her research into an elegant podcast and returning once again to a focus on microaggressions. I cannot imagine any other topic one of my students could have chosen which would have progressed as rapidly as Nikki\u2019s did; despite feeling unmoored by the constant changes in American attitudes toward masks, she nevertheless managed to keep her research in focus and produce a final podcast that is both logically and emotionally compelling.<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><span style=\"color: #24243a;\">Christina Michaud<\/span><\/h6>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Dynamics of Microaggression behind the COVID 19 Pandemic<\/h3>\n<!--[if lt IE 9]><script>document.createElement('audio');<\/script><![endif]-->\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-104-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"\/wrjournal\/files\/2022\/03\/Li_podcast.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"\/wrjournal\/files\/2022\/03\/Li_podcast.mp3\">\/wrjournal\/files\/2022\/03\/Li_podcast.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>2020 was a critical year for the whole world, a nightmare for the Asian community. Chinese students in the US were the first to encounter microaggressions and will continue to be the central targets of microaggressions. I noticed many microaggressions stem from different notions of personal protection. The use of face masks stands out to be the most obvious one. In my article, I picked China and the US as the representatives of each side. From the guidelines given by health centers, hidden historical backstories, and cultural contexts, I tried to show how mask-wearing reveals completely different implicit and explicit meanings to both sides. And how the Chinese community in the US, which is caught between two cultures, struggles to stay healthy while being \u201cnormal.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Script<\/h3>\n<p>Hi, listeners, this is The Nikki Li Show, the last episode we talked about \u201cMicroaggression behind mask-wearing,\u201d in today\u2019s episode, we\u2019re going to dive into the dynamics of microaggression under the background of COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cIn Los Angeles, a child in San Fernando Valley was physically assaulted at his middle school and accused of having the coronavirus simply because he is AAPI. On a San Francisco street, a young AAPI woman was spat upon and blamed for bringing the coronavirus to the U.S. Young people as well as adults and seniors in California fear being perceived as the source or carrier of the disease.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is a section of \u201cCoronavirus Anti-AAPI Racism Incident Report.&#8221; This report center, which launched on March 19, is held by Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council along with Chinese for Affirmative Action and aim to track anti-Asian harassment.<\/p>\n<p>With nearly 3 million cases confirmed in a few months, the whole world is under the nightmare of COVID-19. And the fact that the origin of this virus can probably be traced back to China has pushed Asians into a hard time.<\/p>\n<p>As the hatred towards the Asian community continues to grow, we saw many Asian \u201cmodel minority\u201d reach out and speak for the life of the whole community. The one that caught my attention was an Op-Ed written by John Cho, who is one of the most famous Asian American actors in Hollywood movies. The article is titled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/opinion\/story\/2020-04-22\/asian-american-discrimination-john-cho-coronavirus\">Coronavirus reminds Asian Americans like me that our belonging is conditional<\/a>.\u201d Even though I\u2019m not an Asian American, but as a Chinese student, I do relate to this article when he mentioned that he grew up with his parents encouraging him \u201cto watch as much as television as possible\u201d in order to \u201cspeak and act like the natives,\u201d it is the same thing when I am encouraged to participate in events held by my university or even community, the purpose is to \u201cassimilate,\u201d it is the hope that \u201crace would not disadvantage us.\u201d However, just as he already mentioned in the title, \u201cThe pandemic is reminding us that our belonging is conditional. One moment we are Americans, the next we are all foreigners, who \u2018brought\u2019 the virus here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While John Cho is feeling a loss of belonging to his home country America, I, who still considered myself Chinese, has no problem with my belonging. However, still, this pandemic made me think about the dynamic of all the microaggression that happened to us.<\/p>\n<p>When I go back to Derald Wing Sue\u2019s book: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Microaggressions-Marginality-Manifestation-Dynamics-Impact\/dp\/0470491396\">Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact<\/a>, the book classifies the major psychological dilemmas or dynamics created by microaggressions into 1) the clash of realities between the dominant group and socially devalued group members; 2) the invisibility of unintentional bias and discrimination; 3) the perceived minimal harm of microaggressions.<\/p>\n<p>Now let\u2019s address these dynamics to this COVID-19 background. In my opinion, the model for \u201cdominant group\u201d and \u201csocially devalued group\u201d in COVID-19\u2019s case will be a little bit complicated. It is not simply white people as the dominant group and Asian communities as the socially devalued group. Here, I would argue that our \u201cdominant group\u201d would be individuals that are not Chinese, whose lives are affected by COVID-19, and the \u201csocially devalued group\u201d would be anyone who has a Chinese-looking appearance. You may wonder why I use \u201cChinese-looking\u201d people instead of just Asian communities, the reason for that is because there exist situations that Asian people discriminate against Asian people. For example, DW, a Germany news website, reported an article titled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dw.com\/en\/coronavirus-chinese-looking-indians-targeted-in-racist-attacks\/a-52956212\">Chinese-looking\u201d Indians targeted in racist attacks<\/a>.&#8221; The article mentioned Indians who were from northeastern states that border China were attacked by other Indians because of COVID-19.<\/p>\n<p>After defining our \u201cdominant group\u201d and \u201csocially devalued group,\u201d let\u2019s go back to the first point under the dynamics. In general, as the book also mentions, \u201cmainstream groups hold the ability to define reality through the tools of education, mass media, and social institutions.\u201d For example, let\u2019s listen to this typical message during COVID-19 pandemic:<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cThe United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/realDonaldTrump\/status\/1239685852093169664\">tweet<\/a> from US President Donald Trump. Even though soon after this tweet, the director of the CDC <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cdc-director-robert-redfield-condemns-trumps-china-virus-tweet\">condemned Trump\u2019s tweet<\/a> and agreed that it was absolutely wrong for President Trump to label the COVID-19 as the \u201cChinese Virus,\u201d the Trump administration still denied calling COVID-19 the \u201cChinese Virus\u201d as a mistake. \u201cIt\u2019s not racist at all. It comes from China, that\u2019s why.\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/03\/18\/us\/politics\/china-virus.html\">This is how Trump explained his use of \u201cChinese Virus<\/a>. The White House besides, even used other illnesses, like the Ebola virus, that had been named after places, to criticize \u201cthe media\u2019s fake outrage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Donald Trump and his administration are definitely one of the leaders for mainstream groups, their speech, response, action towards COVID-19 shapes and influences on the speech, response, and action within the whole dominant group. The problem here is not that the notion of \u201cnever call COVID-19 as Chinese Virus\u201d is a denial to the origin of the virus, but the word \u201cChinese Virus\u201d itself is fueling up the hatred and fear against the socially devalued group. Just like a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TheAltNative\/status\/1240324990031015936\">tweet<\/a> by a person named The Alternative African said: \u201cI\u2019d say this president &amp; his cohorts only EXPOSED the racism\/xenophobia that was already there. He just gave those people \u2018permission\u2019 to openly express it.\u201d And in fact, this person is absolutely right. After Trump claimed \u201cChinese Virus\u201d is not racist, the word upgrades into \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/OhSizzles\/status\/1239719693847592960\">Kung Flu<\/a>.\u201d The use of \u201cChinese Virus\u201d was no longer simply to define the origin of the virus, but as an excuse to accuse China for taking the full responsibility of this COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, when the leading groups permit all these microaggressive words, any actions from the socially devalued group that attempt to protest or point out the offensiveness of the terms will be marked as being \u201coversensitive\u201d or \u201cparanoid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cThe virus doesn\u2019t have a nationality<\/em><em>.\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Nuearth2000\/status\/1239691236065382400\">It started IN CHINA<\/a><\/em><em>!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrisJZullo\/status\/1239687429575114759\">Let\u2019s remember. Coronavirus is not an Asian virus. It\u2019s a human virus <\/a><\/em><em>.\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DSilvas1\/status\/1239711430787477505\">What about the Spanish Flu<\/a> <\/em><em>? Or the Russian Flu?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cIt\u2019s not the \u2018Chinese Virus.\u2019 It\u2019s a global pandemic<\/em><em>.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MajorDalaw__\/status\/1239693214661083136\"><em>\u201cWhat it is supposed to be called then dude&#8230; Didn\u2019t the Virus originate <\/em><em>from China?\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Such kind of conversations fills up the replies under Trump\u2019s tweet. Are we really acting \u201coversensitive\u201d or \u201cparanoid\u201d? Study shows people within the socially devalued group could often identify and define microaggressions well compares to the dominant group, but the scary thing here is that with the everyday influence from the leaders of the dominant group, we, or at least me, do start to question myself on my judgment towards microaggression.<\/p>\n<p>I bet you are tired of Trump\u2019s tweet, so instead, I\u2019m going to share one of my own stories on the unintentional bias I experienced. At the end of my spring break, the confirmed cases in Massachusetts area continued to grow, after receiving the email from BU that all in-person classes were moved online and hearing from my friend in Northeastern University that their school has already asked them to go home, I finally decided to fly to Seattle, the place where my uncle lives.<\/p>\n<p>One of the neighbors of my uncle is a lovely granny, who is always friendly to welcome us if we visit her. However, this time, I was told by my uncle that this granny implicitly asked us not to visit her by saying, \u201cI\u2019m hoping to see her on Facetime.\u201d Do I feel offended? Not quite, but I must admit I still feel a bit \u201cweird\u201d and \u201cuncomfortable\u201d hearing this. Even though I on purposely booked a business class ticket (which means no one sits next to me), never took off my mask during my flight and bathed myself as soon as I arrived home, I still know there\u2019s a chance that I might get the disease. I clearly understand she was keeping social distance, which is a right choice under this pandemic until I got to know from my uncle, the son of this granny recently was diagnosed with a gut problem, and she went to the hospital, without wearing masks, every time with her son and even my uncle hasn\u2019t kept in touch with this granny for a long time. So now is the story becomes tricky, am I \u201coversensitive\u201d or \u201cparanoid\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>I would love to think more simply that she is doing something right and proper in this particular time, but still, her action can be seen as what is called \u201caversive racism\u201d which refers to \u201can insidious and less conspicuous form of racism that hides in the assumptions\/beliefs\/values of well-intentioned people and is difficult to identify in its motivational manifestations.\u201d Honestly, I would rather she said it clear like \u201cI go to hospital regularly, and you just came off from a 6- hour flight, both of us are under the risk of getting COVID-19, so why don\u2019t we do what CDC suggests, let\u2019s keep social distancing, how about we use Facetimes instead of reaching to each others\u2019 home?\u201d But instead, what she really does made me feel she is being welcome on the surface level but implicitly showing no welcome to in-person conversations. However, the point of mentioning \u201caversive racism\u201d is not just reminding people about its existence but also to address the fact that \u201cpeople have unconsciously inherited the cultural biases of their forebears and that of society\u201d which is the cause of \u201caversive racism.\u201d The media should definitely take the most significant responsibility for building \u201ccultural biases.\u201d Especially for this COVID-19 pandemic, the controversy exists among China (a country with censorship) and the rest of the world (mostly without censorship), the information from both sides are never interlinked. As a Chinese student who studies in the US, I am lucky to have the ability to understand information from both sides, but I am also nearly desperate to see how the tension between China and the world (especially the US) gets tighter and tighter due to the misleading and one-sided, biased information from the media of both sides.<\/p>\n<p>I would like to recall your memory for John Cho\u2019s article I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast. It is an article posted on Los Angeles Times, but my first glimpse of this article was on <a href=\"https:\/\/m.weibo.cn\/3684280931\/4496786867524482\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Weibo<\/a> (Chinese version of Twitter), it was translated into Chinese, and I remembered one of the comments down below really got me related, she said (translated into English): \u201cnow people who are inside the wall (here \u201cwall\u201d refers to the censorship in China) are sick of people who are outside the wall, and people who are outside the wall are sick of people who are inside the wall. However, both sides know who stirs up fights in the media.\u201d Then why don\u2019t we stop even we see the media is messing up with the truth? Because \u201cthose in power do not need to understand disempowered groups to survive or do well, while those without much power must actively discern the mindset and motives of those with power in order to survive.\u201d Every time the dominant group minimizes the harm after microaggressive action. They claim you are acting too sensitive, and they encourage you to \u201clet it go\u201d and \u201cget over it.\u201d Gradually, the socially devalued group loses its voice, but the problem still exists and becomes even worse.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve seen people who are in socially devalued group revenge back with their hatred against the dominant group, the result will be people who used to experience microaggression become the ones who carry out microaggression towards another group. With no voice, no action taken, people are losing part of their humanity. They take pleasure in other\u2019s misfortune instead of feeling empathy for patients. Instead of getting together to fight back COVID-19, they are more persistent in finding the real origin of the virus to either get rid of microaggression or have a proper reason to carry out microaggression by blaming others for taking the full responsibility of the virus.<\/p>\n<p>So I would again bring out the main idea suggested in John Cho\u2019s article: stand up for your group, your community, never keep silent to minimize the harm or hatred. Do something. When you witness a hate crime, do something; when you hear some assaulted words, do something; when you sense anything in your family, do something.<\/p>\n<h5><\/h5>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Yuchen (Nikki) Li<\/strong> is a rising senior at Boston University, majoring in Film &amp; Television and minoring in Computer Science. She is an international student from Shanghai, China. Studying abroad in the US is her first time living as a minority in a foreign country. This led her to pursue Professor Michaud\u2019s WR 151 course. Nikki thanks Professor Michaud for her clear guidance and instructions on every project. She also appreciates Professor Michaud\u2019s patience in providing helpful resources and suggestions for her paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yuchen (Nikki) Li Instructor&#8217;s Introduction Nikki began working on this paper, in my WR 151 class, \u201cBoston Social Justice Now,\u201d in February 2020. The students were choosing timely topics related to issues of race, class, equity, or any combination of the above, and in those early days of the pandemic, Nikki felt called to investigate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16316,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16316"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":416,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}