“The Social Effects of Medicalizing an Entire Race,” Elisa Reverman Writes on the Georgetown Humanities Initiative

Elisa Revernman, Philosophy PhD student and one of our 2020-2021 Fellowships recipients, writes about her research project for the Georgetown Humanities Initiative. In her piece, Elisa Reverman describes how she started examining the the rhetoric and storytelling in the reporting on the COVID-19 that “categorized Asians as inherently diseased,” for which “Asian people started experiencing a very specific COVID-related discrimination.” She identified that “a lot of the accusations were similar to the rhetoric against Asian immigrants in the late 19th century. It seems like medicalizing an entire race is a powerful political tool for discrimination, and one that hasn’t been discussed enough, especially in regards to Asian Americans”.