From ‘Chinky’ to ‘Coronavirus’: racism against Northeast Indians during the Covid-19 pandemic

By T. Haokip. 2020

ABSTRACT The outbreak of Covid-19 has been highly racialised and stigmatised around the world based on the origin of the virus and its highly infectious nature. Profiling of Asians or mongoloid looking individuals as a suspect carrier of the virus and the resultant taunts and discriminations occur worldwide. In India, the pandemic has reinforce racism against Northeast Indians, which the country has been grappling with this social problem in the last one decade or so. Such discriminations were overt acts of racial prejudice that primarily stems from the nonrecognition or misrecognition of Northeast Indians, who are mainly mongoloid race, as Indians. During the pandemic, the fight by Northeast Indians was with the mindset of the rest of Indians as much as the virus itself. It was a fight not only against the presumption of being ‘non-Indian’ with negative affiliation, or worse ‘unwanted Indians’, but also to get due recognition and acceptance as equal Indians. The absence of stringent anti-racism laws may have resulted in the pervasiveness of overt acts of racism during the pandemic. However, such actions are best understood on the structural elements that underpin Indian societies. The legal measures to address this social problem will reduce overt acts of racism but addressing covert racial acts, which are structural in nature, is a long way to go.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

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