The History of Blaming Communities for Disease

As we have often seen throughout history, majority social groups find it politically prudent or personally convenient to blame certain communities for disasters and problems. As the Coronavirus pandemic began to take hold across the world, certain populations began casting looks to see whom they could attribute this to. It is almost unsurprising that racism against people from Asia, particularly East Asia, registered a significant rise.

It is most noticeable in the United States where even as early as February there were a few thousand incidences of CoViD-19 related xenophobia and racism against people of East Asian descent. While the victims of these have been mainly those of Chinese heritage, xenophobic groups of people have had little qualms about treating all East Asian people as ‘virus carriers’. Chinese businesses have been forced to declare bankruptcy as people have begun to associate those people with the virus. The fact of the virus originating in China has become the basis of many xenophobic incidents where Chinese people were attacked or humiliated in public. Such people appear to believe that East Asian citizens are responsible for spreading the virus because of their lifestyle or some conspiratorial motivations.

However, the absurdity of attributing blame for a natural phenomenon to a group of already marginalised people has a long history. As the Black Death in Europe began taking the lives of 50 million Europeans, the Jews became targets of violence and anti-Semitism. They had already been seen as the enemies of Christ since the First Crusade in 1096.

Rumours began to circle that the Jews were poisoning the wells and waterways and many began spreading the belief that the Plague was retribution from God for allowing the Jews to reside in Europe. 200 Jewish communities were said to have been exterminated by torture and burning. The wealth of those communities was summarily stolen, which also played a part in their persecution. Such was the fervour that when the Pope published a statement in 1348 stating that the Jews are not to blame for the pandemic for they are also its victims and it has spread to lands where there are no Jewish communities, it could hardly stem the flow of violence.

The outbreak of Syphilis in Europe in 1495 was also accompanied by nations accusing each other of carrying the disease, nations that they were often at political or military disputes with. The English blamed the French and the French blamed the Neapolitans (Italians from Naples). The Russians labelled it the Polish disease while the Ottoman Turks felt that all the predominantly Christian nations were to blame.

Despite Imperial China’s efficacy in dealing with smallpox in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, European travellers still wrote about China as the ‘cradle’ of smallpox and the ‘Sick Man of Asia’. For years, the Chinese community in the USA has faced discrimination and exclusion stemming from their presence being associated to outbreaks of cholera and smallpox. These communities were often poor and lived with squalid housing with weak sanitation. This poverty was pushed by discriminatory laws that limited their movement and economic opportunities. Studies in the late 1800s showed that any community living in those conditions was vulnerable to disease.

The desire to cast blame at an already vulnerable community is strong at a time of uncertainty and upheaval. Yet outbreaks and disease have always found their origin in natural phenomena, and have thrived on everyday actions or fatal missteps by communities at large. Whether it was the traders and merchants unknowingly transporting the Black Death between continents or CoViD-19 being transmitted because of the delayed responses of many nations, disease tells us more about our
existence as a species then it does about the nature of any specific social group.