Racialization and Counter-Actions in COVID-19 Times Experiences Among Asians in the Netherlands

As the Coronavirus makes its way across the globe, stigmatisation, prejudice and discrimination have also made their marks in many parts of the world. Reports on physical or verbal assault on people of Chinese/East and Southeast Asian appearance, among others, are abundant, also in the multicultural cities of Europe. In the Netherlands, large cities have been found to witness more discrimination incidents than their surrounding urban and rural areas. Racialised aggression does not only take place in physical places, but also in digital spaces. Stigmatised communities and their alliance have stood up to raise awareness of and protested against racism, both in urban public spaces and through online campaigns. As such, the Covid-19 pandemic has given a stage for racialised discourses and aggressions, contestations of in/exclusion, as well as counter-racism activism. Drawing on news and social media content analyses, observations as well as qualitative interviews conducted with people of Chinese/East and Southeast Asian appearance in multicultural cities in the Netherlands, we document the experiences connected to Corona-racism with the strategies in dealing with it. Our findings draw attention to the intersectional and transnationalised experiences of our interviewees, highlighting the need to go beyond native-migrant, majority-minority, here- there dichotomies. Our findings also underline the conflating nature of on- and offline racialisation and counter-actions. Through mapping out the traces of two protests in Amsterdam, we also show how Covid-related counter-actions have taken and created urban and digital spaces, which constitute the broader anti-injustice landscape in the Netherlands and beyond.