Ebola, race and fear
Two students from Rwanda, 2,600 miles (4,148km) from West Africa, are sent home from a New Jersey elementary school for 21 days. A Maine high school teacher is given three weeks off because she attended a convention in Dallas, Texas.
A Texas college sends out letters to prospective students from disease-free Nigeria informing them that they are no longer accepting applications from countries with “confirmed Ebola cases”. A Pennsylvania high school football player is met by chants of “Ebola” from the opposing team. A middle school principal goes to a funeral in Zambia, also with no cases of Ebola, and is put on paid administrative leave for a week.
Some writers think they’ve found a theme that energises these fears, tying many of these incidents together: racism.
"In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the ‘Dark Continent’," writes Robin Wright, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, for CNN. “The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.”
And as the disease is associated with blacks, she says, it contributes to and feeds off already existing racism in Western society.
Of course.
