Of course, xenophobia in the news and online needn't translate into in-person acts of racism. But while it needn't, such acts were perpetuated in local communities. Multiple Asian Americans' stories made the news, exposing the ways in which these people were made victims of racist attacks after the COVID-19 outbreak. One woman described a stranger shouting, "Get out of here. Go back to China. I don't want none of your swine flu here," in one week, and then being threatened by a man wanting to shoot her the next (Escobar). A man on a bus in Boston muttered about "diseased Chinese people" when a woman nearby sneezed into her sleeve" (Escobar). Children have also been targeted, as Devin Cabanilla's children were while at Costco. A sample vendor told Cabanilla's "Korean wife and mixed-race son to 'get away' from the samples, questioning whether they had come from China" (Escobar). A thirteen-year-old described tensions at school when her middle-school classmates started calling her "corona" and asked if she and her Asian American peers ate dogs (Escobar). And such incidents weren't confined to the United States. In Australia, some parents refused to let Asian doctors treat their kids (Escobar). In Canada, 10,000 people signed a petition asking a local school district to track down and isolate Chinese-Canadian kids after the Lunar New Year (Escobar). In London, a man was attacked by a mob of four people who punched and kicked him to the point that he was told he may need facial reconstructive surgery (Haynes). In the U.S. and elsewhere, at school, at work, and in public, the COVID-19 outbreak was followed by acts of racism that harmed members of already marginalized communities.
None of this should be particularly surprising, as this is hardly the first time that some Americans have responded in these sorts of ways. In 1853, during the yellow fever epidemic, European immigrants were stigmatized since they were said to be more vulnerable to disease, to the point that the epidemic was nicknamed "The Strangers' Disease" (Carrigan).16 In the plague of 1899, health officials in Hawaii quarantined "Chinatown" first:a home to Chinese, Japanese, and Native Hawaiian residents:responding to the belief that Asians "were more susceptible to the bubonic plague than Europeans" (Mohr). A common public perception was that white people were protected from infection, with at least one local newspaper giving credence to this belief when it reported that the plague "was not dangerous to whites 'who were honest and cleanly" (Mohr).17 In an attempt to sanitize communal spaces with controlled fires, Chinatown was accidentally burned down in January of the following year. In 1924, the bubonic plague prompted Los Angeles officials to quarantine and guard Mexican-American neighborhoods, including those where there was not disease outbreak (Deverell). Officials expressed their hope that "all of that area where Mexicans live [be put] in sanitary condition" and urged that "a great deal of that area ... ought to be condemned and destroyed" (Deverell). This destruction ensued, in the name of sanitation, and the government refused to pay any compensation since the destroyed properties:houses, business, infrastructure, and the like:were construed as public health nuisances (Deverell).
During more recent outbreaks, too, like those of SARS and Ebola, xenophobia was part of the public chaos. The SARS outbreak saw similar repercussions to those we enumerated earlier. A cartoon illustrated during that time features an open Chinese food takeout container with "SARS" written on it, and bearing the caption, "Bad Chinese Take-Out" (Shoichet). Claire Jean Kim discusses this phenomenon in her work, identifying the way in which "tropes of Chinese cruelty, transgressiveness, backwardness, and recklessness," took the media by storm during the SARS crisis. The public imagination turned against Chinese communities in 2003, just as it did in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What's more, Kim also highlights the way that animal activists in particular "mobilized ethnocentric and anti-Chinese feeling among some part of the public" in a string of anti-cruelty campaigns in San Francisco. Though those activists certainly weren't trying to depict Chinese people as backward, callous, or uncivilized, the activists nevertheless did that by singling out practices at Chinese markets instead of far more heinous problems at American factory farms.
We haven't told the full story of the economic and cultural importance of wet markets. We obviously haven't given a comprehensive account of pandemics and racist social responses. Still, even this brief sketch should be enough to make it plausible that abolishing wet markets would have significant consequences for many poor people; it also makes it clear that the United States is home to a long and complex history of majority groups linking disease outbreak to the presence of perceived foreigners at home. Importantly, this history includes a trend of blaming foreign food systems for pandemic outbreak, and our contemporary situation is one in which blame on food systems was cast in explicitly racist and xenophobic ways. What's more, while there are plenty of reasons to object to the wildlife trade and the forms of animal agriculture that support wet markets, humans generally cause animals less suffering in those systems than they do in conventional intensive systems. The conclusion of all this seems to be that activists' arguments against wet markets fit into a pattern of targeting and stereotyping institutions that support vulnerable populations. This pattern, we submit, was and is xenophobic, and on top of that, is unlikely to leave animals better off on net. Granted, there may be times and circumstances in which it is appropriate for animal activists to highlight links between COVID-19 and culturally important foodways. At a time of great fear and unrest, however, this involved participating in a xenophobic trend of blaming Chinese culture and citizens for a problem that is obviously caused by a complex set of factors, and which manifested itself in expressions of hatred for, and frustration with, Chinese people generally. So, if activists should avoid taking a non-trivial risk of leaving their beneficiaries seriously worse off due to their efforts when, in running that risk, they would be acting in ways that are morally objectionable for independent reasons, then activists shouldn't have run arguments against wet markets.18