Explaining racism through contamination fearsfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Unfelt six buzz when I was in grade nine because whenever I opened the comments, someone would always be saying some shit about Indian people. Amidst everything that's happening in The US, it's really important not to see their anti immigrant sentiment as something isolated from us. Specifically, I wanna talk about this rise of anti South Asian racism that's become so pervasive over these past years and why it's happening. Canadians are facing real issues like housing shortages and unemployment, but instead of turning to the structural roots of these problems, immigrants are increasingly scapegoated as a cause. And this is done, I argue, through the exploitation of tier, specifically a fear of contamination. A lot of racist rhetoric around South Asians focuses on ideas of dirtiness. There tier stereotypes about smell, bodily functions, and unsanitary behavior, but the natural body has always been a side of politics. Capitalist societies built the notion of respectability tier thus whiteness around the discipline and control of the body. So it follows that the uncivilized and uncontrolled is then projected onto racialized people. Anxieties about cleanliness become marking certain people as inferior Better not forget about when that lady claimed with literally no evidence that Indian people were shitting on Wasaga Beach and instead of dispelling the baseless rumors premier Doug Ford just said, Folks, don't be stupid on the beach. Simple as that hygiene was never about cleanliness The dirtiness comes from when it crosses a boundary and disrupts the order of a space. You might have no issue with brown people when they're in South Asia, but when they move to Toronto and become visible, suddenly there's a problem. Racially white people have always been framed as dirty, especially in contrast to the purity of the white body. We see this throughout history from fascist propaganda depicting Jewish people as rats contaminating the nation to xenophobic hysteria blaming Chinese communities for bat disease. Hygiene has always been used to give racism a logical excuse. Next, racialized men have long been framed as threats to women, especially white women. Historically, black and brown men have been framed as hypersexual, aggressive, and violent with deadly consequences. In the context of South Asian men, we see this through the stereotypes about creepy Indian men asking to send bobs in a machine. Researchers have found that out group men are consistently perceived as more sexually dangerous than in group men. Not only that, but a study done on sexual offenses in The UK found that offenders' ethnicity was way more often mentioned when they had bad ethnic or immigrant background than when they did not. This trains the public to associate racialized men with danger even though there's no solid evidence linking immigration and higher crime. Sexual fear becomes another way of framing immigrants as threats who must be controlled over their animalistic lust for the oh so helpless white woman. It's important to note that the white woman here plays not only the role of the victim of the racialized man, but also the reproducer of the white nation. Thus, the sexualized fear of the immigrant man is also connected to fears of racial contamination. There's this idea that immigrants are somehow contaminating the Canadian social fabric. This fear is tied closely to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the idea that white populations are deliberately being replaced by non white immigrants. As immigrants become increasingly visible, white Canadians fear being replaced in their jobs, houses, and nation. And when their lived reality consists of unaffordable housing and unemployment, it's easy to blame the most visible tier, especially when all narratives seem to be pointing in that direction already. Over and over again throughout history, racialized groups have been blamed for crises that they didn't create rank that scapegoating has always been justified for fear. The nation is often imagined like a body, something that must be kept pure. Hence, a fear of immigration speaks to a fear of contamination. In the context of everything that's happening in the world right now, I think it's really important to think about how these anti immigrant beliefs are becoming normalized in the Canadian public consciousness and I urge you to think critically about who ultimately benefits from this.