A doença como metáfora racial: a pandemia de coronavírus à luz da Teoria Racial Crítica

Abstract

Our paper will focus on a specific problem: the way in which, in the legal and political imaginary of our civilization, subalternized racial groups (blacks, indigenous peoples, Asians, etc.) are associated with certain diseases. The work will be developed in three stages: at first, we will discuss, in a broad way, the reverberations of structural racism on the COVID-19 pandemic; then, we will make a brief presentation of the Critical Racial Theory (an exercise that proves to be necessary, considering that it is a philosophical current that is still little debated in Brazil); finally, we will turn to CRT to reflect on how, in a racist social imaginary, non-white populations tend to be represented as disease vectors. Considering the attempts, by governments such as the British, the US and the Brazilian, to impute the dissemination of COVID-19 to China, we will use the Asian Critical Racial Theory – AsianCrit –, one of the numerous aspects of CRT, as a starting point to debate the racialization of the disease.