(Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
By Werner Lange
Long before the practice of social distancing became the new normal, there was the concept of social distance. Named after its founder, the Bogardus Social Distance Scale was developed within the Chicago School of Sociology during the turbulent 1920s to empirically measure the degree of affinity (or lack thereof) Americans felt for members of various racial and ethnic groups in our highly diverse society. Seven categories of “social distance” were established ranging from willingness to marry a member of specified groups to outright exclusion of all such group members from the USA; the higher the number on a scale of 1 to 7, the lower the affinity and greater the felt social distance. Not surprising for a white-supremacist society, European-Americans consistently ranked as having the lowest social distance standing in several nationwide surveys over a 40 year period, while Americans of color had the highest.
Particularly instructive for our troubling times is the comparatively high social distance score consistently expressed toward the Chinese, an ethnic group that has never fully escaped the racist stigmatization of the “Yellow Peril”. In fact, precisely that virulent castigation gained new life with repeated recent presidential denunciations of the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”. Not satisfied with raising the specter of a new deadly Yellow Peril, Trump used his press conference of March 19 to even evoke the ugly spirit of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by congratulating himself for having “called for a ban for people coming in from China”. Such Sinophobia is viciously echoed at increasingly alarming rates in the streets of America and in the halls of Congress, where a US Senator recently blamed the “culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs” for the coronavirus pandemic.
These utterly racist mindsets are not far from genocidal ones, patterns of barbaric thought and behavior hardly alien to the American experience as evidenced by the smallpox infestation of blankets given to Mandan Native Americans in 1837. In the midst of this pandemic, depraved visions of genocide once again rear their ugly heads. What else could have motivated the Trump regime to attempt, by a billion dollar bribe, to acquire exclusive rights and use of a developing coronavirus vaccine from German scientists? The prospect of witnessing others succumb by the millions to the pandemic while chosen Americans are safely vaccinated evidently fits the racist, even genocidal, game plan of this criminal regime.
That barbaric game plan is all too evident in regard to Iran. As of mid-March, Iran has suffered over 1,280 fatalities and 17,300 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections, the third highest of any nation in the world. Especially vulnerable are some hundred thousand Iranians who have survived the chemical weapons attacks by Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war but suffer from various lung ailments from that brutal conflict. Rather than lift the onerous sanctions imposed on Iran which deprive the beleaguered Iranian people of urgently needed medications and supplies, the Trump regime resorted to a new round of draconian sanctions on March 17 to intensify its “maximum pressure campaign” illegally implemented in 2018. The sanctions, a clear form of collective punishment, have already imposed enormous suffering upon countless Iranians. With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, these immoral sanctions are guaranteed to dramatically increase the Iranian body count, something that only a genocidal mindset could wish and seek. Yet with remarkably few exceptions, a roaring silence emanates from our national leaders regarding the calamity caused by these criminal sanctions. And the criminals themselves, ones responsible for the recent assassination of a beloved Iranian leader, likely greet the growing calamity in Iran with glee. There is no room for such barbarism in the greater moral universe to emerge from this crisis.
The social distance scale did not envision genocide as an option, and social distancing in our times is designed to keep people six feet apart to help prevent putting them six feet under. Hopefully we, as a more enlightened human family, will come out of this pandemic with an operative mindset much different than before. Once this crisis is over we need to practice just the opposite of social distancing physically and massively implement social proximity mentally by finally overcoming the racist legacy manifested and measured by the social distance scale, let alone forever cleanse the world of genocidal thoughts and practices. We must recognize, like never before, that we are one human family united by a common origin and common destiny. Whether that destiny is to be peaceful co-existence or no existence largely depends of the extent to which, we, as one wounded but healed global family, make a paradigm shift from hate to love.
