Awkwafina is Speaking Out About the Recent Surge of Anti-Asian Racism

The coronavirus is scary and we don’t really know how to respond to it. When that happens, people start doing irrational things like panic-buying toilet paper because it essentially has an unlimited shelf life. There’s no shortage of toilet paper or food or basically anything you need to live your life; the only supply-chain disruptions I’ve heard of have been for consumer electronics because non-essential factories in China shut down or temporarily converted to making something more important. The reason grocery stories are empty is people are rushing and buying them out because they don’t know what else to do.

Some of the things people do when they’re scared and don’t know what to do are ugly, immoral and just plain disturbing, and that is the case with people who have turned their frustrations into just blatant racism against Asians.

If you stop and think for two seconds, you’ll realize that being Asian has nothing to do with contracting or spreading this disease, it just happened to evolve in the Wuhan area. And this racism is being stoked by *ahem* politicians who insist on calling the 2019 novel coronavirus the “Chinese virus” or something along those lines. I have some bad news for you, if anything it’s the New York Virus, it looks to be worse there than anywhere.

Awkwafina made a thoughtful Instagram post calling for people to stay safe and hopefully not internalize this extremely toxic rhetoric.

I am saddened by the rhetoric that has come out of this, and the cruelty that came as a result. I hope that while we self isolate and socially distance to stay safe, we also stay sane and calm. Wishing everyone a sense of peace during this batshit crazy time – I will be locking myself up for the next 2 weeks rewatching the Tiger King. Love you all

Look, the people who want you to blame China and Chinese people for this pandemic are trying to push the blame because they themselves have failed in some way. The response from a lot of countries has been entirely inadequate and the fault lies at the leaders of those countries. In fact, South Korea was able to avoid the worst effects of the virus despite the Korean Peninsula being relatively close to Wuhan because their government took this seriously and immediately enacted the precautions and testing needed to keep the virus from spreading through the population the way it did in Italy and New York.

This virus is not being spread because of anything the Asian guy sitting next to you on the bus did, it’s spreading because of what Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump didn’t do.

Mulan actor Jimmy Wong wrote and performed a song on his social media account about this reaction to the virus, as well. We teased Jimmy for tweeting about how he wanted to take Brie Larson to the Mulan premier (seriously, brother, have your agent call her agent, don’t just @ her on Twitter) and this is a little cheesy but it’s so much better than that dumb Imagine video that I’m willing to let it slide.

I wrote a song about The Chinese Virus. pic.twitter.com/1cvj6D7Zsx

— Jimmy Wong (@jfwong) March 23, 2020

I’d like to say that we’re better than this sort of racism, but obviously we’re not. I still believe we can be, though. So be better.