"It's really interesting how when Ebola was common
in Africa nobody cared about it but now that it's common in white countries
there is a vaccine and a cure."
The student who said this to me is a good student. He is
intelligent, hard-working, courteous, and curious about the world. We were
conversing on an American university campus in mid-October, 2014, during the
worst Ebola outbreak in history.
I responded to this student, "Ebola has never been
common in Africa. The death toll is in the thousands, not the millions. Ebola
is not common in white countries. There is no vaccine. There is no cure. There
are lots of incurable diseases that strike lots of white people."
I despair at how American racism distorts discussion of a
health crisis, and cripples competent response to that crisis. The American
racism I'm talking about is exemplified by my student's fallacious beliefs. Here
are a few more examples.
The day before this conversation, on October 14, a
Facebook friend posted a photograph of an African boy, his face vivid with
emotion. Underneath a text read, "In this African tribe, when someone does
something harmful, they take the person to the center of the village where the
whole tribe comes. For two days, they say to the man all the good things that
he has done. The tribe believes that each human being comes into the world as good.
But sometimes people make mistakes. The community sees those mistakes as a cry
for help."
I pointed out that a very quick Google search immediately
exposed this text as a hoax. It contained words meant to be from an unnamed
African tribal language; in fact the words were the first and last names of the
author of a textbook on waste management; some "African" words were cribbed
from Spanish. The idea that an unnamed and distant African tribe deals with
evil in a way superior to Americans is a manifestation of the concept of the
Magical Negro. The Magical Negro is a stock character in American fiction and
film. He exists to help the white main character.
I mentioned to my Facebook friends that the post offended
me. It treated Africans as fundamentally different from Americans, and so
different and distant that it wasn't even necessary to name the very tribe that
was meant to deal with evil in such a superior way. I mentioned that this
mattered to me because I had served in Africa with the Peace Corps. I had come
to realize that Africans are human beings just like Americans. Africans are not
worse than Americans, nor are they better.
On October 9, 2014, the Sacramento Bee published a cartoon
of an obese, bald, stupid-looking white male. He wears a t-shirt with the
letters "USA" written across the chest in red, white, and blue. The
man is smoking, eating a burger and fries, and drinking beer. Statistics
surround his head; the numbers indicate how many Americans die of obesity,
smoking, and alcohol consumption each year. Above the man's head, a balloon
contains the caption, "Ebola!!!" The implication is, of course, that
white Americans are panicking about Ebola, but are unconcerned about their own
rampant self-destructive behavior. Further, Americans are stupid and
dangerously unstable. They panic and become hysterical without cause.
On October 14, The Independent (UK) ran an article
entitled "What's Wrong with How the West Talks about Ebola in One
Illustration." The illustration depicts black bodies in sickbeds. In one bed,
there is a white body. That body is surrounded by reporters. The black bodies
are ignored. The caption reads, "A death in Africa, or Asia for that
matter, should be as tragic as a death in Europe or the USA." In fact the
three US Ebola victims that are receiving so much media attention are not
white: Thomas Eric Duncan was Liberian, Nina Pham is Vietnamese-American, and Amber
Vinson is African American.
On October 16, Marlow Stern, in the Daily Beast, wrote that
Ebola news coverage "strikes me as reinforcing the xenophobic, Old World
line of thinking that Africa is the 'Dark Continent' where diseases emanate
from."
In his October 18 Weekly Address, with the Orwellian
title, "What You Need To Know About Ebola," President Barack Obama
scolded Americans. "We can't give in to hysteria or fear because that only
makes it harder to get people the accurate information they need. We have to be
guided by the science. We have to remember the basic facts," nagged Obama.
The implication here is, of course, that Americans are hysterical, panic-prone
ninnies who need their president's wagging index finger to remind them that
science is superior to hysteria and fear.
It doesn't take long in any given google search of the
word to discover that Ebola was invented by Americans to murder or exploit
Africans. A Liberian newspaper, The Daily Observer, published an article
alleging that Americans invented Ebola in order to harvest organs from Africans.
We are talking about Ebola through the distorting filters
of white guilt and Magical Negroes. White guilt, as Shelby Steele illustrates
in his book of that title, is not about black people at all. Like the white
man's burden narrative, white guilt makes the white man active and the black
man passive, if not absolutely immobile. White guilt shines the spotlight on
white liberal heroism, and reduces blacks to supporting players in the white
man's drama. Blacks exist only to be pathetic, to be helpless, and to supply
the white ego with a black object to save. Any problems that significantly
involve black people are not to be talked about with the same clarity we devote
to other problems. How do we talk about other problems?
On October 6, 2014, TIME magazine published a fascinating
article about a medical crisis: parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
TIME fearlessly and unhesitatingly demolished the idiotic excuses parents give
for not vaccinating. TIME boldly stated the danger such parents pose to wider
society.
TIME went even further than that. TIME related the screwy
decision not to vaccinate children with the mentality, values, and worldview of
the anti-vaccers. Anti-vaccers, TIME pointed out, tend to be leftist, affluent,
well-educated, and living in trendy, desirable locations, like university towns.
Their "master of the universe" worldview prompts them to "think
they know better than doctors…it's a community of 'Hey, I know better.'" But,
TIME stated, "What they think they know just ain't so."
TIME goes so far as to psychoanalyze anti-vaccers
"When people achieve a certain status, they think they're invincible. They
think it will never happen to them, and if it does, they have resources to deal
with it…People are trying to be the ultimate parents. Every piece of clothing
and food is thought out, and vaccines fall into that category." TIME ends
with prescriptions for how to reach anti-vaccers, prescriptions tailored to the
demographic's income, education, and attitude.
That's how we should be talking about Ebola. In exactly
the same fearless, fact-based, forthright way that TIME talked about the
affluent, trendy whites who don't vaccinate their children.
When we do talk about Ebola that way, there are a handful
of key facts that will receive great emphasis, emphasis they are not getting
now.
First, a quarantine is not racist; it's rational. Ebola
needs humans to travel. It can't travel on its own. The purpose of a quarantine
is to deprive a virus of human hosts. A temporary quarantine on Liberia, Sierra
Leone, and Guinea is to everyone's benefit.
As it happens, I myself came close to death in the Third
World, while serving with the Peace Corps. I developed an acute streptococcal
infection in a remote village several-days walk from any road with vehicular
traffic. No one rescued me. I did not expect anyone to do so. I have always
regarded my survival as a miracle; an atheist might chalk it up to chance. One
of my fellow volunteers did die, and another came close to death. We regarded
these events as the price we paid for our own choices. Because of my specific Peace
Corps history, I cannot donate blood. Those rejecting my blood are not being
racist; they are being rational and responding to microbes, not my skin color.
The sooner Ebola is deprived of new human hosts, the
fewer people will sicken and die.
The second thing we need to talk about is one possible
route for Ebola into the human population: through consumption of bushmeat. The
third thing we need to talk about is traditional burial customs, including
traditional Islamic burial, which requires extensive handling of highly contagious
corpses. Finally, we need to talk about the mindset of Africans in Ebola zones.
President Obama did not shrink from wagging his finger at Americans and nagging
us that science is superior to superstition. That sermon was delivered to the
wrong congregation.
Westerners cringe when talking about bushmeat. How dare
we lecture Africans, who are famously victims of famines, to limit their
consumption of any food? This attitude is nonsense. It's obvious that an
ecosystem that can support enough gorillas and chimpanzees for human consumption
can feed far less finicky omnivores like domestic chickens, goats, and
pond-raised tilapia. Legumes like peanuts supply a great deal of the protein in
many African diets. Africans don't have to eat bushmeat, especially not
primates, and they risk their own health – and ours, in our age of rapid travel
– by doing so.
Consumption of bushmeat and suspension, during Ebola
outbreaks, of traditional burial practices could be achieved through radio. Radio
is very powerful in Africa. Radio played such a key role in 1994 Rwandan that radio
broadcasters were convicted of genocide by the United Nations International
Criminal Tribunal.
To maximize radio's impact, we need to speak plainly
about a touchy reality. Many Africans do not believe what they hear from
official sources. They cling to traditional beliefs and conspiracy theories. If
a government spokesperson tells an African villager that he should abstain from
bushmeat and not bury his deceased loved one with a traditional burial, and
that he risks Ebola by doing so, that African will likely reject this
information, and believe something else that he has heard through the
grapevine, or from a traditional healer.
I think, again, of that illustration in The Independent article,
the illustration of black people dying and no one caring, and one white person
dying and the press attending. The illustration, as has been mentioned, is
factually wrong, but it is haunting. Yes, we care about the Africans dying from
Ebola, but our distance from them makes it hard for us to act on that care in
any effective way. That distance isn't just one of geography; it is also one of
belief. All the advanced medicine in the world is for naught if traditional
burial practices are adhered to. When I served in Africa, I saw aid workers
begging mothers to filter water through cloth, and to let it sit before
consumption, so as to limit their children's exposure to schistosomes and other
pathogens. The Africans I knew largely rejected the premise that invisible
pathogens cause illness. They did not accept the authority of science. It was
more attractive to adhere to traditional beliefs that associated illness with
curses and magic. These attitudes can be changed, just as the attitudes of
"master of the universe" anti-vaccers can be changed, but those who
want to change them have to first acknowledge that they exist.
Let's get over our racism. Let's get over our white guilt
and Magical Negroes. Let's do what we have to do to defeat Ebola. That starts
with talking about Africans as if they are people just like us.
This essay appeared in the American Thinker
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