It didn’t have to be this way.

The coronavirus pandemic didn’t have to become politicized—or racialized. But last March, President Donald Trump “decided to call coronavirus, which has no ethnicity or zip code or nationality, the China virus,” says Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali on the 100th episode of The New Abnormal.

“There was no reason to make coronavirus a racist thing,” co-host Molly Jong-Fast adds.

Now, not only are people of Chinese descent coming under attack across the U.S., but other Asians—because “bigots aren’t nuanced,” adds Ali, who wrote about the wave of anti-Asian hate for The Daily Beast before the Atlanta massage parlor murders.

“As a Muslim, as a son of Pakistani immigrants, we’ve been through this for the past 20 years,” he tells Jong-Fast. “And I realized that that story in America is the original story that gets a remake, and sometimes the villain just gets changed, right? So right now it’s Chinese or the Chinese, whoever looks Chinese. It’s been Muslims. It’s always African Americans, it’s Latinos. We’re all the invaders.”

“It’s a society-wide problem,” he says, “that requires a society-wide solution.”

After Ali […]