Ebola and white response
As
the Ebola virus has now been confirmed in at least one – and possibly
two – people within the US, let's take a closer look at how this disease
has been responded to in the global North and West versus its
origination point – West Africa.
Over the last six months, Ebola has killed over 3,000 people and stricken thousands more, primarily in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Although this virus first appeared along the Ebola River in Uganda in 1976, all reputable medical professionals agree that it is spread only through contact with bodily fluids of not simply an infected but a symptomatic person. It cannot spread through the air or by simply touching objects. The symptoms are pronounced and obvious. Fever, fatigue and flu-like indicators are the three chief indicators of possible Ebola infection, and may take take up to three weeks before appearing. Thereafter, severe hemorrhaging from all body orifices begins. Indeed, it is the massive blood loss which actually kills from fifty to ninety percent of Ebola-infected individuals.
Until within the last few weeks, the response to Ebola in West Africa by the West and global North had been one of indifference – indifference to black life and suffering. President Obama has sent troops – not doctors – to the area to assist in the building of or shoring up of medical facilities.
From the moment of this virus' first appearance in West Africa, clear and consistent efforts to preserve white life, and indifference to black life by the West/North have been glaring, stark, obvious and blatant.
Indeed, it was only when two American white missionaries contracted the disease that most white folks in North America even became aware of the extent of the outbreak. That awareness was prompted because the missionaries were given an experimental drug and flown out of Liberia and back to the US. A third white American was flown to Nebraska for treatment. Latest reports indicate that yet a fourth white American – an NBC newsman – has been spirited out of Liberia and back to the US where he is reportedly doing well.
All the while, African doctors and aid workers were regularly dying from the disease. In mid-September, when the fourth African doctor, Dr. Olivet Buck, chief of the Lumley Health Center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, died of the disease, it was revealed that the World Health Organization had specifically refused to send her to Germany for treatment. Amazingly, however, and at the very same time, two Dutch doctors stricken with Ebola were flown home.
The first African doctor to die of the virus, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, the chief Sierra Leonean physician treating Ebola, was also denied the chance to receive the experimental drug by Doctors Without Borders. This is the same drug given to the two white missionaries, and which apparently saved their lives.
As to the US government's response (under its “first black president”), it initially announced that a $22-million, 25-bed Ebola hospital would be built, but only for foreign (read: white) healthcare workers and patients. Fortunately, outrage forced the the US to include African health workers. The point had been made, however: The purpose of the white aid workers and their governments was not to find a cure or even treat the increasing numbers of Africans coming down with Ebola. Their principal purpose was to contain and prevent the spread of this disease outside the continent of Africa.
What we are witnessing is an age-old story when it comes to black life and, indeed, this planet's second largest continent – Africa. Black life has historically been disparaged, demeaned and deemed disposable by the global North and West.
The image being fostered and nourished in the North/West is that this is a specifically “black” disease endemic to Africa, and which is if not caused by, it is at least exacerbated by “uncivilized” and black cultural practices. In fact, one white media maven, Fox News' Andrea Tantaros, has said it out loud: Black peoples' use of “witch doctors” has impeded the fight against this disease.
This picture of Africans and Africa as a disease-ridden people and place began when the first European colonizers – as far back as the 1400s – mysteriously died in droves almost as soon as they got off their ships in most African ports. Europeans soon learned not to venture into the African interior for fear of certain death – usually from the bite of the tste-tste fly and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
For white folks, therefore, Africa was, not only Jack London's “Dark Continent,” but a hopelessly diseased continent as well. This characterization of black people and their homeland (despite its untold wealth in both human and natural resources) has persisted right into the present century and informs white response to the current epidemiological crisis spreading throughout West Africa.
We are also being subjected to the age-old myth of the “brave” and “heroic” white saviors who risk their lives for African people. This construction harkens back to Rudyard Kipling's “white man's burden” view of the continent and feeds into what has lately been labeled as the “white savior industrial complex.”
Within this meme of black dependency upon white benevolence, however, no mention is ever made of the many past and continuing evils perpetrated by white explorers discoverers, conquerors, colonizers and neo-colonizers across the whole continent of Africa.
As Teju Cole points out in describing the white savior industrial complex, “It supports brutal policies…[where] the banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality.”
And, in a recent interview, Dr. Joia Mukherjee, of Partners in Health, pointed directly to the white racism behind the West’s Ebola response by saying, “I think it’s easy for the world — the powerful world, who are largely non-African, non-people of color — to ignore the suffering of poor, black people.”
But even as we watch the in many cases hysterical response of growing numbers of white people to this epidemic, we must understand that this response runs deeper than merely than a conscious indifference to black suffering.
Writing in the BlackAgendaReport.com, Drs. Hudson and Pierre of the Department of African American Studies at the UCLA, assert that “[This] is about white supremacy’s desire for Black death and Black suffering. It is about coming to terms with the fact that there is something systematic – and sinister – about Black killing globally. It is about the reality that in a universal context of anti-Blackness, Black lives don’t matter – anywhere.”
Here's a list of other European (and white American) responses to date:
Thus, Europeans' fears of Ebola spreading among them has intensified exponentially. However, rational health officials are attempting to head-off an out-and-out panic: “We need to be prudent without being paranoid,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, last month. Her statement followed an Internet rumor that there were three cases of Ebola on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where many refugees and illegal migrants arrive from North Africa. “It is not fair to assume all black people are potential Ebola carriers. That is blatant racism,” she said.
References
http://time.com/3452341/dallas-ebola-texas-ground-zero/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/health/airline-passenger-with-ebola-is-under-treatment-in-dallas.html?_r=0
http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/health/2014/09/29/dallas-presbyterian-hospital-ebola-patient-isolation/16460629/
http://www.blackagendareport.com/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/20/ebola-fueled-racism-is-on-the-rise-in-europe.html
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-15/american-doctor-says-racism-blame-slow-response-ebola-outbreak
http://www.humanosphere.org/human-rights/2014/08/newsweeks-racist-misinformed-ebola-cover-story/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/08/25/othering-ebola-and-the-history-and-politics-of-pointing-at-immigrants-as-potential-disease-vectors/
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3565
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3565
Over the last six months, Ebola has killed over 3,000 people and stricken thousands more, primarily in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Although this virus first appeared along the Ebola River in Uganda in 1976, all reputable medical professionals agree that it is spread only through contact with bodily fluids of not simply an infected but a symptomatic person. It cannot spread through the air or by simply touching objects. The symptoms are pronounced and obvious. Fever, fatigue and flu-like indicators are the three chief indicators of possible Ebola infection, and may take take up to three weeks before appearing. Thereafter, severe hemorrhaging from all body orifices begins. Indeed, it is the massive blood loss which actually kills from fifty to ninety percent of Ebola-infected individuals.
Until within the last few weeks, the response to Ebola in West Africa by the West and global North had been one of indifference – indifference to black life and suffering. President Obama has sent troops – not doctors – to the area to assist in the building of or shoring up of medical facilities.
From the moment of this virus' first appearance in West Africa, clear and consistent efforts to preserve white life, and indifference to black life by the West/North have been glaring, stark, obvious and blatant.
Indeed, it was only when two American white missionaries contracted the disease that most white folks in North America even became aware of the extent of the outbreak. That awareness was prompted because the missionaries were given an experimental drug and flown out of Liberia and back to the US. A third white American was flown to Nebraska for treatment. Latest reports indicate that yet a fourth white American – an NBC newsman – has been spirited out of Liberia and back to the US where he is reportedly doing well.
All the while, African doctors and aid workers were regularly dying from the disease. In mid-September, when the fourth African doctor, Dr. Olivet Buck, chief of the Lumley Health Center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, died of the disease, it was revealed that the World Health Organization had specifically refused to send her to Germany for treatment. Amazingly, however, and at the very same time, two Dutch doctors stricken with Ebola were flown home.
The first African doctor to die of the virus, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, the chief Sierra Leonean physician treating Ebola, was also denied the chance to receive the experimental drug by Doctors Without Borders. This is the same drug given to the two white missionaries, and which apparently saved their lives.
As to the US government's response (under its “first black president”), it initially announced that a $22-million, 25-bed Ebola hospital would be built, but only for foreign (read: white) healthcare workers and patients. Fortunately, outrage forced the the US to include African health workers. The point had been made, however: The purpose of the white aid workers and their governments was not to find a cure or even treat the increasing numbers of Africans coming down with Ebola. Their principal purpose was to contain and prevent the spread of this disease outside the continent of Africa.
What we are witnessing is an age-old story when it comes to black life and, indeed, this planet's second largest continent – Africa. Black life has historically been disparaged, demeaned and deemed disposable by the global North and West.
The image being fostered and nourished in the North/West is that this is a specifically “black” disease endemic to Africa, and which is if not caused by, it is at least exacerbated by “uncivilized” and black cultural practices. In fact, one white media maven, Fox News' Andrea Tantaros, has said it out loud: Black peoples' use of “witch doctors” has impeded the fight against this disease.
This picture of Africans and Africa as a disease-ridden people and place began when the first European colonizers – as far back as the 1400s – mysteriously died in droves almost as soon as they got off their ships in most African ports. Europeans soon learned not to venture into the African interior for fear of certain death – usually from the bite of the tste-tste fly and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
For white folks, therefore, Africa was, not only Jack London's “Dark Continent,” but a hopelessly diseased continent as well. This characterization of black people and their homeland (despite its untold wealth in both human and natural resources) has persisted right into the present century and informs white response to the current epidemiological crisis spreading throughout West Africa.
We are also being subjected to the age-old myth of the “brave” and “heroic” white saviors who risk their lives for African people. This construction harkens back to Rudyard Kipling's “white man's burden” view of the continent and feeds into what has lately been labeled as the “white savior industrial complex.”
Within this meme of black dependency upon white benevolence, however, no mention is ever made of the many past and continuing evils perpetrated by white explorers discoverers, conquerors, colonizers and neo-colonizers across the whole continent of Africa.
As Teju Cole points out in describing the white savior industrial complex, “It supports brutal policies…[where] the banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality.”
And, in a recent interview, Dr. Joia Mukherjee, of Partners in Health, pointed directly to the white racism behind the West’s Ebola response by saying, “I think it’s easy for the world — the powerful world, who are largely non-African, non-people of color — to ignore the suffering of poor, black people.”
But even as we watch the in many cases hysterical response of growing numbers of white people to this epidemic, we must understand that this response runs deeper than merely than a conscious indifference to black suffering.
Writing in the BlackAgendaReport.com, Drs. Hudson and Pierre of the Department of African American Studies at the UCLA, assert that “[This] is about white supremacy’s desire for Black death and Black suffering. It is about coming to terms with the fact that there is something systematic – and sinister – about Black killing globally. It is about the reality that in a universal context of anti-Blackness, Black lives don’t matter – anywhere.”
Here's a list of other European (and white American) responses to date:
- Brussels. An African man with a nosebleed was reportedly rushed
from a shopping mall in July. The store he was in was thoroughly
sterilized before he tested negative for the virus.
- The United Kingdom, the body of a woman from the Gambia
who died after getting sick following a flight from the Gambia to
London, was sequestered until she was tested for Ebola. This despite the
fact that she had no symptoms or known contact with anyone with the
virus.
- Italy, some schools have sent out warnings to all students of
African origin that they must now submit additional health certificates
prior to starting school. No such requests were made of white children, a
significant number of whom, had been to Africa on summer vacations.
- In Voecklabruck, Austria two asymptomatic Nigerian men who had
just traveled from Nigeria last month, were suspected of carrying Ebola.
They isolated before being released after testing negative for the
virus.
- A black woman from Africa collapsed at a business meeting in
Berlin recently. German police dispatched more than 60 police officers
and firefighters to lock down the building, isolating some 600 people
who worked there. The woman, who lives in Berlin and who was rumored to
have just returned from Africa a week earlier, along with two others who
had come to her aid when she collapsed, were rushed to an isolation
ward at Berlin’s Charité Hospital. No one was allowed in or out of the
building as armed police stood guard. In the end, she only had a stomach
virus. She had not set foot in any of the West African nations affected
by the Ebola outbreak. She had, in fact, been in Kenya, a distance of
over 3,200 miles from Liberia, “ground zero” of the epidemic. No, it was
her African-ness, her blackness, which sparked the frenzy.
- And then there was Air France's head of the airline’s union
Patrick Henry-Haye. He wrote a petition to his employers begging them to
stop all airline travel to West African countries affected by the Ebola
virus outbreak. That petition set off a frenzy among air travelers.
More than 700 Air France crew members, including pilots, have signed the
petition. “They say we are trained to spot Ebola,” he told Le Figaro.
“That’s false. We’re not trained to do anything other than put on
rubber gloves and surgical masks and lock suspected patients in the
lavatories. That’s not enough.”
- As things stand now, Air France is the only major European
airline still flying directly to the Ebola-affected West African cities
of Conakry, Guinea, and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Thus, these continuing
flights have amped up concern that the epidemic will land in Europe through Air France's hub in Paris. (For its part, American carrier Delta suspended flights to Monrovia back on August 31.)
- And in the US, with significant help from mainly right-wing
media, Liberians in Texas (and Africans nationwide) are reporting
increased surveillance and harassment by both authorities and “ordinary”
white citizens.
Thus, Europeans' fears of Ebola spreading among them has intensified exponentially. However, rational health officials are attempting to head-off an out-and-out panic: “We need to be prudent without being paranoid,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, last month. Her statement followed an Internet rumor that there were three cases of Ebola on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where many refugees and illegal migrants arrive from North Africa. “It is not fair to assume all black people are potential Ebola carriers. That is blatant racism,” she said.
References
http://time.com/3452341/dallas-ebola-texas-ground-zero/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/health/airline-passenger-with-ebola-is-under-treatment-in-dallas.html?_r=0
http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/health/2014/09/29/dallas-presbyterian-hospital-ebola-patient-isolation/16460629/
http://www.blackagendareport.com/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/20/ebola-fueled-racism-is-on-the-rise-in-europe.html
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-15/american-doctor-says-racism-blame-slow-response-ebola-outbreak
http://www.humanosphere.org/human-rights/2014/08/newsweeks-racist-misinformed-ebola-cover-story/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/08/25/othering-ebola-and-the-history-and-politics-of-pointing-at-immigrants-as-potential-disease-vectors/
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3565
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3565
