Covid-19, Racialization and Postcoloniality

While most of the scholarship in the Global North has focused attention on the racialization of Covid-19 as a ‘Chinese’ virus, attention has also been paid to the proliferation of racialized discourses suggesting that the virus is the result of a Jewish or Muslim conspiracy. In this Special Issue, while Baumann and Denardi relocate an examination of the racialization of Covid as Chinese to the Global South by examining its impact in Argentina, the other contributions further expand our understandings of the ways in which Covid has been racialized in other ways. In both the papers by Vaughn, Kiconco, Quartey, Smith and Ziz and by Musariri, Covid is constructed across different African contexts – South Africa, Kenya and Ghana – as a ‘colonial virus’ brought into Africa by (neo)colonial powers and a rich, predominantly white migrant’s disease. Here, too, the Chinese are constructed as a racialized source of the virus and as posing a greater risk of spreading it. Unlike in the Global North, however, this does not take place through a process of inferiorization, but rather in response to both China’s position as a neocolonial power in African contexts, and racist practices towards Africans within its own national borders. While further analysis could have been provided comparing the specific ways in which Chinese as opposed to white racialization takes place in the chosen fieldsites of South Africa, Kenya and Ghana, the papers’ key concerns lie rather in the devastating impact of the racialization of Africans – as both Self and Other.

Leona Vaughn et al. take research on the Covid infodemic in new directions by examining the Black immunity myth. In doing so, they highlight the continuation of global racial ideologies and the legacies of colonialism in the infrastructure, institutions and logics of decision-making across South Africa, Kenya and Ghana and in the racialization of the risk narratives regarding Covid-19. Yet, they argue that the most colonial aspect of all this lies in the ‘monument of biological or scientific “race”’, perhaps because, as their article demonstrates, it not only delimits contemporary forms of resistance, but also actively endangers the lives of those who are racialized as Black. For Vaughan et al., the myth of African people being innately immune to Covid-19 is based on ‘the eugenicist, racist belief in “biological race” ’. Accordingly they frame the impact of racialization and notions of racialized risk explicitly as a ‘colonial project’. Despite the differences in the ways in which the myth unfolds across the three states, Vaughan et al. nonetheless argue for an acknowledgement of the ways in which colonialism and coloniality continue to scar human relations in these different contexts.

While Musariri also acknowledges the Black immunity myth, her analysis examines the shift in South Africa from a racial to a national discourse of othering as specific nationalities among migrant Africans become scapegoats for the ills of the pandemic and are constructed as economic parasites who should be excluded from the nation’s borders. Despite this, her paper confirms the centrality of European colonial racial ideology in devastating the lives of these migrant Black Africans, especially those perceived to be in poverty or from poorer nations. In South Africa, she argues, their categorization ‘as non-citizens and less than human cannot be divorced from western racial ideology, which is premised on white supremacy’. Here, as in the Global North too, as acknowledged in the wider bodies of literature, while particularly poor, racialized migrants are to be expelled from the nation-state as interlopers, white migrants from rich nations are rarely viewed as foreigners but instead enjoy the privileged position of being constructed as ‘tourists’, ‘expatriates’ or ‘travellers’ who pose no threat to the nation state. In the case of South Africa, however, it was during colonial rule that white settlers identified themselves as ‘true’ South Africans and racialized Black South Africans as ‘foreign natives’. In the contemporary context, this colonial racial discourse is reproduced to racialize black African migrants from poorer countries such as Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Somalia and Ethiopia as ‘foreigners’. Thus, although Musariri posits xenophobia as a new form of racialization that is not based on phenotypical difference, but located at the intersection of class, nationality and immigration status, she nonetheless highlights that this occurs in a particular context of power defined by former colonial rule. Unable to target whites, Black South Africans instead target poor Black migrants. In this scenario, as she summarizes, ‘white South Africans and white migrants remain unscathed and their foreignness unquestioned, making it a battle against the black minorities: native minority and migrant minority.’ New processes of racialization, then, leave the power of whiteness intact: Musariri’s paper confirms previous research that the racism directed at Black South Africans during apartheid has given way to racism towards migrant Africans in the post-apartheid era (Matsinhe 2011).

In their article, Siddiqi and Ashraf further expose the ways in which colonial modes of othering and exclusion are reconfigured in the Covid era by examining the ways in which migrant garment workers in Bangladesh are racialized as dispensable labour as part of wider racialized geographies of supply chain capitalism. In doing so, they make a significant contribution to work on the troubled category of the ‘essential worker’ and the politics of expendability that has been reinvigorated by Covid-19 but remains largely focused on the Global North. By locating their study within a framework of racialized capitalism, they also contribute to wider research on globalization, gender and development, which has by and large erased questions of ‘race’. While the question of gender remains relatively invisible across the other papers, Siddiqi and Ashraf adopt a transnational feminist lens. Through a multi-scalar analysis, they demonstrate that government techniques and practices draw on colonial constructions of submissive, oppressed Muslim women, which intersect with local indigenous concepts of class/caste, gendered nationalist ideologies and global racial hierarchies in apparel supply chains to make garment workers expendable. Here, they point to the significance of the category of bhadralok in reinforcing middle-class boundary-making during Covid. This self-ascribed identity among a largely English-educated middle class, a mainly Hindu upper caste, emerged in colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century and was deployed as a form of distinction from the labouring chotolok, who were further constructed through racialized colonial ‘myths’ of the lazy native. In contemporary Bangladesh, such tropes are reconfigured to construct working-class bodies as ‘non-agentic’ and ‘animal-like’ with no rights as workers or subjectivities as human beings. The article thus speaks to the ‘robust afterlife’ of colonial racialized and gendered distinctions. However, while positing that racialization has always been a deeply gendered process, and while highlighting the dual construction of female garment workers as saviours of the nation and as sexually lax lower-class others, what they find to be distinctive under Covid is that, in the logic and discourses of disposability, both male and female labouring bodies are affected in ways that are only minimally inflected by gender or sexualization.

While the three articles discussed so far emphasize the ways in which colonial modes of thinking survive in present-day forms of racialization, the article by Baumann and Denardi makes relatively scant mention of the enduring significance of European colonialism beyond its initial shaping of racialized dynamics in Argentina. Here the colonial myth that ‘Argentines “descend from the boats”’ constructed indigenous people, and racially minoritized immigrants and their descendants, as ‘others’ and continues to shape state racism. Nonetheless, the article provides a contribution to the study of racism in Latin America and the Caribbean, which they argue is defined by its disavowal, the scarce research focusing on indigenous people and mestizos rather than immigrants from abroad.

However, unlike the other articles, Baumann and Denardi focus specifically on how new forms of racialization generate new forms of anti-racist mobilization, in this case, the ways in which the racialization of Covid has led to the digital empowerment of a new anti-racist movement among the Chinese in Argentina. Their work thus also contributes to encouraging analysis of the interconnectedness of racialization in the Global North and Global South in terms of the experiences of Chinese diasporas under Covid. While the histories of the Chinese in Argentina and in Britain cannot be compared, given the Chinese presence in the latter dating back to at least the seventeenth century, there are similarities in the catalyst Covid has provided for anti-racist mobilization among Chinese groups across these Global North and Global South contexts. In my own work, I identify a historically significant moment for anti-racist mobilization among Chinese and wider East and Southeast Asian communities in the UK, especially among university-educated younger generations. As in Argentina, this activism occurs in response to an absence of state intervention to protect communities from the rise in racial violence that is not limited to ‘spectacular’ physical attacks but also to the loss of jobs, forms of discrimination and the widespread racisms that circulate in the media and political discourse. Like those studied by Baumann and Denardi, Covid-19 has sparked an emergence of racial consciousness among many of the individuals and groups I work with, who also find inspiration in transnational influences, particularly in the US. In Britain, however, what is also notable is that Covid-19 has contributed to the growth of wider pan-ethnic anti-racist mobilizations, leading to a new significance of the ‘ESEA’ (East and Southeast Asian) category (Yeh 2021 and 2018). I therefore argue that scholars must acknowledge the ways in which our perspectives can no longer be contained within the colonial borders of an area studies that is defined by “Chineseness” (Yeh 2020). The extent to which this claim might pertain to Argentina depends in part on forms of anti-racist mobilization on the ground. However, a reading of Baumann and Denardi’s work in the context of my own, and the wider issues raised by the Special Issue, also raises questions with regard to relationality in theorizing racialization and racisms, as well as to how we might decentre our studies and in doing so contribute to the decolonization of knowledge production. These I discuss in turn in the next two sections.