[colombiamigra] Fw: [NIEM] The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place
- From: "william mejia" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "wmejia8a@xxxxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: "colombiamigra@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <colombiamigra@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 17:32:12 -0700
On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 1:07 PM, "'niem.migr' NIEM.migr@xxxxxxxxx
[niem_rj]" <niem_rj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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/
The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place
By Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne August 25 at 7:22 AM
Vivian Koshefobamu, a 45-year-old vendor, speaks in front of dried meat, at the
Ajegunle-Ikorodu market in Lagos on August 13, 2014. AFP PHOTO/PIUS UTOMI
EKPEIPIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images
This week’s Newsweek magazine cover features an image of a chimpanzee behind
the words, “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S.
Epidemic.” This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting
with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could
bring Ebola to America. (The term is a catchall for non-domesticated animals
consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their
catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it
that.) While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast
majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the
current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.
An American prepares a deer he killed. Photo by John Beagle, shared with
Creative Commons license.
Far from presenting a legitimate public health concern, the authors of the
piece and the editorial decision to use chimpanzee imagery on the cover have
placed Newsweek squarely in the center of a long and ugly tradition of treating
Africans as savage animals and the African continent as a dirty, diseased place
to be feared. What can social science tell us about why Newsweek’s cover story
is so problematic?
Categorizing peoples in the colonial period
The Europeans who colonized Africa in the late 19th century were members of a
culture obsessed with classifying and categorizing the natural world. This
quest built much of modern biology (think Darwin and his beetle collection),
but it also led to some rather unscientific justifications for the colonial
project.
One of these was an idea developed by Frederick Coombs, author ofCoombs’s
Popular Phrenology. In the book, Coombs expounded a then-popular (and
completely wrong) idea that the size, shape and other physical characteristics
of a person’s skull determine that individual’s intelligence. Coombs and his
fellow phrenologists started with the assumption that non-northern and western
Europeans — namely, southern Europeans (who were not considered to be racially
“white” at the time) and people of color — were inherently less intelligent
than northern Europeans with light-colored skin.
Not surprisingly, this flawed premise led these Victorian gentlemen to reach a
flawed conclusion: that people with heads that were supposedly more “ape-like”
in shape were less intelligent than northern Europeans and therefore in need of
the “civilizing mission” that colonization was supposed to bring. The Victorian
phrenologists developed elaborate typologiessupposedly showing that Africans
had the most apelike — and therefore most “savage” — skull types, thus
justifying their subjugation under colonial rule.
While Coombs’s book may be the best-known of the works of Victorian phrenology,
the racism that his conjectures embodied was deeply embedded in the culture of
most colonizing states. Most Westerners of the time believed that people of
color were “savages,” desperately in need of the benefits of modernity,
Christianity and intelligence the colonists believed they were well-suited to
bring to Africa.
As societal norms tend to do, the racism embodied in the notion that African
people’s skulls are more similar to those of other primates than those of other
homo sapiens skulls made its way into popular culture. And it did so in a
particularly insidious way: by portraying Africans as apelike savages. Images
showing Africans as apelike were commonplace. In popular culture, Africans
were portrayed in postcards, film and literature as “savages” who were not as
“civilized” as their colonizers. These stereotypes even extended to children’s
books. A Belgian cartoon book, Tintin au Congo, is perhaps the most famous of
these representations; there, the Congolese people whom boy adventurer Tintin
encounters are at timesalmost indistinguishable from the great apes of central
Africa. Africans with exaggerated lips and other features who maintain
extended-limb, apelike postures are portrayed throughout the Babar series.
As historian Sarah Steinbock-Pratt notes, imagery of Africans as
hyper-sexualized savages — cannibals, even — persisted in cinematic
representations of Africa throughout the 20th century. This long history of
white people associating Africans with primates — both savage, running wild in
the jungle (never mind that most Africans live nowhere near a jungle or any of
the great apes) and threatening any white people who approach — has not evolved
as much as we might hope in the last century.
Othering
Coombs, the Victorians and the people who created appalling 20th century
popular culture relating to Africa were engaging in a practice scholars call
“othering.” Othering happens when an in-group (in this case, white northern
Europeans) treat other groups of people (the out-group, here, Africans and
other people of color) as though there is something wrong with them by
identifying perceived “flaws” in the out-group’s appearance, practice or norms.
Othering has real consequences; for example, international media othering of
Somalia in the early 1990s led to the misidentification and oversimplification
of the conflict’s dynamics by global policy actors. Rather than understanding
the complex nature of Somali society, the violence there was portrayed as clan
warfare involving savage peoples who had hated one another since time
immemorial. This misrepresentation led to two decades of misguided and
ineffective policy responses to the Somalia crisis.
Newsweek’s use of a chimpanzee to represent a scientifically invalid story
about an African disease is a classic case of othering. It suggests that
African immigrants are to be feared, and that apes — and African immigrants who
eat them — could bring a deadly disease to the pristine shores of the United
States of America.
Othering is particularly harmful in the context of a health epidemic, as one
scholar notes, because it “hampers the containment of contagion during an
infectious epidemic by compelling people to reject public health instructions.”
Newsweek’s piece is in the worst tradition of what journalist Howard French
calls “Ooga-Booga” journalism, the practice of writing in exoticizing and
dehumanizing ways about Africa. In case you haven’t read the Newsweek story,
here’s one summary, from a political scientist on Twitter:
Fact-finding and the #NewsweekFail
A most troubling aspect of the Newsweek story is this claim:
…there is an additional risk — all but ignored by the popular press and
public—lurking in the cargo hold [of trans-Atlantic flights] below: bushmeat
contaminated with the virus and smuggled into the U.S. in luggage.
The reason this “risk” is ignored is because it is infinitesimally close to
zero.
No scientist claims to have conclusive evidence substantiating the
pathwaythrough which Ebola crosses from animals to humans. The theory with the
most traction, however, involves fruit bats (not chimpanzees) as reservoirs of
Ebola virus. In-depth research studying the May-November 2007 Ebola outbreak in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo found:
By tracing back the initial human-human transmission events, we were able to
show that, in May, the putative first human victim bought freshly killed bats
from hunters to eat. We were able to reconstruct the likely initial human-human
transmission events that preceded the outbreak. This study provides the most
likely sequence of events linking a human Ebola outbreak to exposure to fruit
bats, a putative virus reservoir.
Likewise, the Guardian is reporting that a team of scientists studying the
source of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa point to “a toddler’s
chance contact with a single infected bat.”
Though non-human primates — like the one featured on the Newsweek cover — have
been found to have Ebola virus, “cane rats,” the delicacy described by the
single informant to the Newsweek story on the availability of bushmeat in the
Bronx, have not. [Sidenote: on the word bushmeat: why don’t we just call it
“wild game,” the same term we use for non-domesticated meat animals sometimes
hunted and consumed in the United States – some of which has also been known to
threaten human handlers with disease (e.g., deer, elk, armadillos, rabbit,
etc.)?]
How threatening is illegal fruit bat importation as a potential pathway for an
Ebola outbreak in the United States? The study cited in the Newsweek story on
illegally imported wildlife does not make any mention of fruit bats being
smuggled into the country. There were also no fruit bats among specimens
confiscated as part of a crackdown on (and study of) illegal importation of
meats from African countries via Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. The study’s
authors also characterize Paris as being at “the extreme end of a spectrum” —
meaning it would not be representative of other international cities to which
people from African countries may travel.
Ebola’s jump from its animal reservoir to humans is an incredibly rare event —
even in those locations where the likely animal reservoirs are much more
prevalent. Extrapolating the likelihood of an animal-to-human jump for Ebola in
the United States — a context where there are likely no fruit bats for sale —
is not only misleading, it’s irresponsible.
Newsweek is not alone in scare-mongering about the Ebola outbreak. Newsweek is
not even original in its approach — pointing the finger at African immigrants
smuggling bushmeat — as British and Swedishnewspapers have previously published
similar stories.
Some politics and history of associating immigrants and disease in America
There is a persistent association of immigrants and disease in American
society. The Immigration Act of 1891 explicitly excluded from entry to America
all “persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.”
Fast-forward one hundred years and we see Haitian refugees who tested positive
for HIV “confined like prisoners” at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay — despite
knowledge at least five years earlier that HIV was not casually communicated.
In the 2003 SARS epidemic, New York City’s Chinatown was identified as a site
of contagion and risk despite never having a single case of SARS.
Specific to Ebola, an earlier Monkey Cage post reported on the [completely
baseless] concerns raised by retired physician and current U.S. Rep. Phil
Gingrey (R-Ga.) that migrant children crossing into the United States from
Mexico were likely carrying Ebola — as well as other “deadly diseases” that are
“not indigenous to this country.”
The Newsweek story implies increased vulnerability to Ebola in the United
States, which psychology research shows will likely amplify negative reactions
to people heuristically associated with the disease — in this case, the many
African migrants living in the Bronx (and potentially elsewhere in the United
States) accused by Newsweek of liking bushmeat (never mind that Newsweek’s
investigative reporters were never able to locate any for sale). The negative
reactions to increased vulnerability include having more xenophobic attitudes.
Relatedly, a recent review of public attitudes toward immigration by political
scientists Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkinspoints out how prejudice and
ethnocentrism can engender support for more restrictive immigration attitudes.
The Newsweek story could generate additional prejudice against African
migrants, a population that already suffers from greater prejudice than other
immigrant groups. In the psychology study referenced above, researchers found
that simply manipulating the geographical origin of a hypothetical immigrant
group – from Eastern Africa to Eastern Asia to Eastern Europe — yielded
significant differences in attitudes in a study population toward the immigrant
group.
Fear-mongering narratives about Ebola circulating in the popular media can also
have a serious effect on knowledge and attitudes about Ebola. Though there are
no cases of person-to-person infection in the United States, a recent poll
conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health reports 39 percent of
Americans think there will be a large Ebola outbreak in the United States and
more than a quarter of Americans are concerned that they or someone in their
immediate family may get sick with Ebola in the next year. A similar poll
conducted for Reason-Rupe had four in 10 Americans saying an Ebola outbreak in
the United States was likely, and conservative Americans were more likely to
say an outbreak was likely. These two national surveys show Americans are
grossly overestimating their risk of infection.
The long history of associating immigrants and disease in America and the
problematic impact that has on attitudes toward immigrants should make us
sensitive to the impact of “othering” African immigrants to the United States
in the midst of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Scare-mongering
about infinitesimally small risks in one context serves no purpose to the
greater good of trying to curb disease transmission and relieve people’s
suffering in another context.
****
The irony of writing about the use of primate imagery as an “othering”
technique in a blog that takes its name from a reference to monkeys does not
escape us. We hope our readers will understand, however, that The Monkey Cage
is named for a quote about American politicians and politics, and that its
naming had nothing to do with Africa or an attempt to “other” anyone.
We thank Adia Benton, Melissa Browning, Michelle Carey, Mohammad Hamze,
Meredith Killough, Kennedy Opalo, Charles Thomas, and Ben Witt for their
suggestions for and assistance with this post.
Laura Seay is an Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. She
studies African politics, conflict, and development, with a focus on central
Africa. She has also written for Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Guernica, and Al
Jazeera English.
Kim Yi Dionne is Five College Assistant Professor of Government at Smith
College. She studies identity, public opinion, political behavior, and policy
aimed at improving the human condition, with a focus on African countries.
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