Racism Rising Amid the Outbreak

Salma Ahmed 

Editor-In-Chief

In the midst of the coronavirus outbreak people have gone mad. Every hour a different news outlet reports new developments. Some countries are on lockdown, others have switched to online education and Egypt remains unfazed. 

This unfazed state comes as both shocking and surprising. Shocking because the entire world is going insane, so why aren’t we? And surprising because it sparks a hope that Egyptians are not as naive as most to believe all they stumble upon on social media. 

With the spread of the virus, there is also the spread of viral news – social media users are having a blast creating memes and making up information.. And because most people fail to check credible sources for the truth, they take whatever they see online for granted and hence the spread of so many misconceptions. 

One of those gone viral was that of an East Asian man kicked out of the Uber he was in by his driver because he was perceived to be ‘carrying the virus’ on account of his race and origin. The man was forced to walk around the busy Ring Road, full of speeding cars, desperately searching for a ride to his destination. 

The man stood in the middle of the road, surrounded by drivers mocking him and implying that he is infected of a virus they do not comprehend. A policeman quickly came to the scene, which is highly unlikely for most Egyptian road incidents, but he did. He walked around saying “Get an ambulance ambulance quickly”. Another voice can be heard saying “A Chinese man has been infected with the coronavirus”.

The video showed a side of Egypt that has been buried for an extended period of time. A racism that one had hoped Egyptians have been cured of. 

The driver’s claim lacked any evidence to support it. Yet people were quick to cave into the racism that seemed to have taken over Egyptians amid the news of the virus. Perhaps this racism was always present and all that was needed was this trigger to make Egyptians show their hypocrisy. 

The video went viral and was met with numerous reactions on all ends of the scale, those who laughed at the humor of the whole situation (which I fail to see) and those who cursed the actions of the apathetic citizens. A group of Egyptians contacted the tourist and apologized to him on video. The man appeared indifferent but he cannot really be blamed, he was humiliated and treated beyond poorly in a country that wasn’t his own. 

This racist hypocrisy is beyond fascinating and it resurfaced strongly with the spreading of the coronavirus. We hear stories of Egyptians and Arabs saying they condemn being called terrorists by the West yet proceed to treat an East Asian man worse than they would a stray animal. 

Their racist behaviour could be blamed on the lack of education, but when a country has a much lower illiteracy rate such actions can only be blamed on pure racism. Most countries are on high alert in fear of the virus taking over their land and infecting their citizens but one of the Arab Gulf countries took it to an extreme. A picture circulated around Twitter of an Indian worker at a company located in the Gulf, acting as a human hand sanitizer. 

The man was dressed in a box with a hand sanitizer attached for company employees to clean their hands as he walked by. Another word could be used to describe this action: slavery. The man, probably working a minimum wage job to supply for his family, most probably had no say in the manner and because jobs are scarce and life isn’t cheap, he couldn’t really object on his objectivation.  

Again, like the former case, upon it going viral an apology was issued and the problem was put to rest and will soon be forgotten. This outbreak has disrupted many plans and operations but the one thing that was most disturbed was the human empathy we all claim to possess. 

Speaking of disruption, if you look out your window, you will see lightning and rain, and you will hear thunder. Roads are already flooding and this is disrupting normal Cairo life. All schools and universities, banks and the stock exchange are closed by government decree due to Storm 2020. At The Caravan, we’ll be publishing our weekly work online for our fourth issue of the semester. The news does not stop, despite printing shops halting their operations.