Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool

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White Supremacy and the #ChineseVirus

May 30, 2020

A disease has spread to all human populations for the first time in human history.

President Trump’s continual attacks on China have a racial component encoded in his use of the phrase, “the Chinese Virus.” In fact, the hashtag #ChineseVirus is still used twice a minute by his Twitter followers. I wrote this piece on Medium.com to focus on how racism works for the president within a global context.

Joel Dinerstein is a professor of English at Tulane University, where he also holds a Sizeler Professorship in Judaic Studies. He is the author of a forth-coming memoir of his immi-grant Jewish family, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (2026), and the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature (UNO Press). His work focuses on compara-tive racisms through cultural resistance, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism. His recent work emerged from two classes: (1) Jews & Race; (2) The History of Cool.

Dinerstein is a cultural historian and a renowned expert on the concept of cool, as featured in his TED Talk, “Why Cool Matters.” He published the first history of the concept in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), a work that shifted the paradigm of cool back to its origins in jazz, film noir, and existentialism, and away from its dismissal as a superficial tool of marketing. Dinerstein curated American Cool (2014), a popular culture and photography exhibit at the National Portrait Museum, and co-wrote its catalogue of 100 cool icons. His corporate study, Coach: A Story of New York Cool, is now a collector’s item.

Dinerstein is also a jazz scholar. His first book was an award-winning theory of jazz and industrialization — Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars (2003) — and his most recent book is a short narrative history of jazz’s emergence in five urban Black neighborhoods, Jazz: A Quick Immersion (2020). He was a jazz DJ for a decade on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans, and he is currently a consultant to the New Orleans Jazz Museum.