The bigoted history of the term “social distancing”

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In March, when the world was stocking up on supplies as stay-at-home orders went into place, doctoral student Lily Scherlis started to take stock of the new vocabulary of the pandemic. One phrase in particular caught her eye: “social distancing.”

So, as the world has been trying to figure out how to live life in a “socially distant” way, Scherlis has become an expert on the origins of the term. And, while it may seem to be a particular product of the COVID-19 moment, she found that in fact the term has a long history.

For Cabinet magazine, Scherlis traced the evolution of the term in a “social history of social distancing,” from the earliest reference she could find in English—in the 1831 translation of Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne’s memoirs of his friendship with Napoleon—to the Social Distance Scale that sociologist Emory Bogardus created in the aftermath of the Red Summer of 1919. TIME talked to Scherlis, who is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Chicago, about the highlights of her research.

What was it like to do this research even as you were living through this moment?
Getting to write this article the moment I wrote it — early March, right around time we went into shelter-in-place in Chicago — was really just a gift because it was [during] the first week I was sheltered in place, and it was a project to throw myself into that was a safe and healthy way to deal with the news. I felt I like I didn’t have to just refresh the New York Times homepage constantly, and feel fear for the world, but instead could feel like I was engaging with what was happening. I had a sense already that [social distancing] would show up in 19th century literature as a way to condescendingly condemn marriage between classes; it was actually pretty stunning how many other uses there have been.

How would you describe the evolution of the term?
It started with a memoir by a friend of Napoleon, who talked about how he experienced space in his friendship with Napoleon as Napoleon began to conquer more places. Then it’s used a lot as a euphemism for class in 19th-century British newspapers and as a euphemism for race in 19th century U.S. newspapers. In the 1920s, the Social Distance Scale [which measures prejudice by asking participants to describe how comfortable they feel interacting with people of another race] becomes a social science tool, a reductive attempt to slice the world into ethnic groups, and it’s still in use. To take all of the complicated and ambivalent feelings an individual can have about members of another one of these categories and assign a number to those feelings and average that number out across the group, was the most shocking thing to me.

After that, the other notable moment is that it gets picked up during the AIDS crisis, when it’s used colloquially to describe misguided fears of contagion. It’s not until 2004 that the CDC picks it up to talk about airborne illness and SARS.