The stigmatization of Asian people and their culture as “inferior” or “exotic” isn’t a new phenomenon. What is considered acceptable or “strange” meat is often the result of arbitrary cultural norms, and Chinese food has often suffered from hypocritical cultural appropriation once it became popular, before being stigmatized again by racist and propagandistic news coverage following the Covid-19 outbreak (FAIR.org, 3/6/20, 3/24/20). Alongside a spike in hate crimes against Asian people are reports of Asian restaurants and other businesses—especially those owned and run by Chinese people—struggling to survive because of resurging racist stereotypes about “dirty” Chinese eating habits.
As James Palmer noted in Foreign Policy (1/27/20), debunking a widely circulated video of a supposed ordinary Chinese woman in Wuhan biting into a whole bat (the featured woman was the host of an online travel show, eating in the Micronesian nation of Palau), Americans have long branded Chinese people as carriers of disease. For example, in 1854, the New York Tribune wrote that Chinese people were “uncivilized, unclean, filthy beyond all conception.”
And if there’s a reason why it’s widely believed that the novel coronavirus emerged in a Chinese “wet market” in Wuhan, it’s because many of the earliest reports treated this
— source fair.org | Joshua Cho | May 7, 2020