#AAJWgoodreads: The long and ugly tradition of treating #Africa as a dirty, diseased place: 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.)...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. Read it here: wapo.st/1pXTRCt
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 04:52:32 +0000
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