The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted us all immensely and caused irreversible damage to the country. The virus originated in China, so it is easy to understand why some individuals blame Asian and Asian-American people. However, this behavior is unacceptable and only promotes racial discrimination and hateful attitudes. No American should be blamed for a global pandemic that originated in an opposite part of the world, especially on a racial basis. It is evident that race is a completely irrelevant metric in this subject, and the described scenario only implies the arrogance of the co-worker. My response to this attitude would be to question the co-worker’s perspective and attempt to explain my position in a constructive dialogue. I believe that every person can learn to understand and accept others, even if the systematic racism mindset is deeply ingrained within them.
Concerning the terminology, I would classify such an attitude as ignorant behavior supported by racist beliefs. I believe this is an example of racism because neither microaggression nor implicit bias describes the situation well enough. The former is generally recognized as a very subtle attitude, which can be challenging to identify, but the person, in this case, is transparently aggressive (Hopper, 2019). On the other hand, implicit bias concerns unconscious associations of the race with negative attributes – such as Asian and pandemic, for instance (Berghoef, 2019). Nevertheless, the individual in the example is consciously and directly associating the co-worker with COVID-19 because of race. As a result, the demonstrated attitude is conscious and not subtle, eliminating the possibility of microaggression and implicit bias. Therefore, I believe that it is a highly ignorant behavior supported only by blatant racism and should be unacceptable.
References
Berghoef, K. (2019). Implicit bias: What it means and how it affects behavior. ThoughtCo. Web.
Hopper, E. (2019). What is a microaggression? Everyday insults with harmful effects. ThoughtCo. Web.