Opinio Juris, (April 7, 2020).
The President of the United States has problematically utilized geographic references for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to play on anxieties of the racialized other, the foreigner and their diseases. This echoes the historical pathologizing of Black, Indigenous and other people of color as disease-ridden and unsanitary.The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced what was always latently there, the racialization of diseases. Despite significant efforts towards the de-legitimation of scientific racism, the racialization of diseases continues to percolate through processes of socialization that have persisted, morphed and diffused these norms globally. This post illuminates how racialized fears of contagion contributed to the development of the global public health regime. The emergence of this regime was in many ways coterminous with European imperial expansion.