Thought Exercise #2: Due 9/17/13

"...the distinction between Chinese people and animals becomes blurred, sustaining and elaborating in new ways the racialization of Chinese as inferior to fully human whites in U.S. racial paradigms."
--"Chinese Chickens, Ducks, Pigs, and Humans, and the Technoscientific Discourses of Global U.S. Empire," by Gwen D'Arcangelis

Apparently, when diseases and epidemics spread within the U.S. or Western countries in general, the first suspect to have fingers pointed at are animals. However, if not animals, then the other suspect would be a population of a foreign culture, such as the Chinese. This is to suggest that humans like to label the unfamiliar as something savage and dangerous out of sheer ignorance.

On a tangent, that reminds me of the song "Savages" from Disney's Pocahontas. Here, the English settlers are singing about killing the Native Americans

These two Powhatan warriors have their face painted in preparation to fight the settlers, the Caucasian foreigners, and sing aloud, "I wonder if they even bleed!"

So, my thoughts have gone from Westerners finger-pointing animals and another culture as culprits for diseases, to the logical conclusion that it is natural for humans to slap blame on what they fear and don't understand, to the realization that Caucasians have an over-inflated superiority complex. Is this some sort of power play for them? I recall my history professor (who was a white man in his forties, just so you know) in high school informing my class that while ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and the Chinese were flourishing, Europeans were shivering and scrounging in mud huts. Centuries later, when Europeans began exploring and conquering the "New World" (new for them, because they were the foreigners, the aliens!), not only did they kill off massive numbers of indigenous people via weapons of mass destruction, they also brought with them diseases that infected and killed off the native people.

That's right, the Europeans were the ones who infected the non-Caucasian people who were behind them in technological advances, not the other way around.

To make matters worse, the European settlers wouldn't stop killing, and proclaimed the land as theirs and saw themselves as the rightful citizens of the land and would shoot glares and pejoratives to immigrants of non-European descent, even though the Caucasians of European descent do not even originate from America. So Caucasians can discriminate others because they feel that they are superior? Because they are in power and are big bullies on the playground?

Scapegoats are always needed. Seeing that diseases such as SARS came from outside the U.S., the blame can be shoved upon infected animals and the unhygienic "traditional" practices of Chinese vermin. However, if the disease were to hypothetically originate in the U.S., no certain racial groups would be to blame because that would be politically incorrect. Instead, some B.S. story of gene mutations may be spoon-fed to the public by the media to appease the public's demands for knowing the origins of the disease.

Throwing blame is pretty much like playing the game of throwing around a hot potato.