Introduction: The long road ahead

Summary

On 31 December 2019, the world began to hear murmurs from the Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) of the novel coronavirus, a mysterious new virus strain that had never been identified in humans. By 30 January 2020, WHO labelled SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) as a public health emergency of international concern. It did not take long (11 March 2020) for the widespread and rapidly evolving virus to be declared, a global pandemic.

If a pandemic is defined as ‘a novel infection – new and previously unconfronted – that spreads globally and results in a high incidence of morbidity (sickness) and mortality (death)’, deriving ‘from pan – across, and demos, meaning people or population’ (Doherty, 2013: 42), the new virus in this instance became confronted with an old one that has historical roots and continual contemporary manifestations – and that is the virus of racism. The antagonism, discrimination and prejudice directed against an individual of another race based on one's perceived racial superiority is not novel by any means. However, the histories of racism in the global North and South have never been more visible than in these pandemic times. Indeed, the impact of the latter on existing inequalities is wide-reaching, with reverberations felt worldwide. Even after three years since the arrival of COVID-19, many of the outcomes from these inequalities have been shown to be more exacerbated and devastating, particularly along the lines of race and ethnicity.

Global media discourses and scholarly debates have revealed over the course of 2020 onwards the role structural racism has played in perpetuating racial inequalities, and its impacts on Black and global majority groups has been laid bare. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst of many existing and intersectional issues globally, and it was with this in mind that the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality (CRED) at Leeds Beckett University initially issued a call for rapid response papers on the racial impacts of the coronavirus. More widely, we identified an emerging racist rhetoric of blaming and shaming Black, Asian and Minority ethnic groups, for instance in the conversations on vaccine hesitancy, higher COVID-19 incidence in Black communities, the labelling of the virus as the ‘Chinese virus’ and the ‘Indian variant’, to enumerate just a few examples.