As
the monkeypox virus spreads—and the media hype up this outbreak
into the new COVID pandemic—news organizations are racializing
and colorizing this new virus du jour. A rare
and mild virus
with a low infection rate, monkeypox has a history in remote parts of
Central and West Africa. However, the cases these days are now coming
from Europe and predominantly white countries such as the U.S, Canada
and Australia. Although the
160 confirmed cases of monkeypox
are located not in Africa but in numerous Western nations,
news outlets
such as ABC News, BBC, Sky News and Reuters have published images of
pockmarked
Black skin
in their reporting.
As
Washington
Post columnist
Karen Attiah noted about a since-deleted tweet
from Reuters, “Y’all really couldn’t find photos
[of] monkeypox on white skin to illustrate outbreaks in
white-majority countries? This is what we talk about when mainstream
media paints Black/African people as disease vectors and threats to
white health.” Further, Black
doctors
and scientists
seem to agree, based on their social media posts on the latest
monkeypox racism.
The
issue is real, and the situation is so serious that a United Nations
agency has spoken out. A
statement
from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) called
out monkeypox reporting that relies on media imagery and portrayals
of African and LGBTQ people. According to UNAIDS, these images only
reinforce racist and homophobic stereotypes and stigmas and undercut
the public health response to diseases.
“Stigma
and blame undermine trust and capacity to respond effectively during
outbreaks like this one,” said Matthew Kavanagh, UNAIDS Deputy
Executive Director. “Experience shows that stigmatizing
rhetoric can quickly disable evidence-based response by stoking
cycles of fear, driving people away from health services, impeding
efforts to identify cases and encouraging ineffective, punitive
measures.”
And
African journalists have raised the issue as well. The Nairobi,
Kenya-based Foreign
Press Association, Africa (FPAA)
condemned media outlets for using Black images to report on the
monkeypox outbreak, noting that the virus can occur anywhere and
should not be associated with a particular race of skin complexion.
“It
is therefore disturbing for European and North American media outlets
to use stock images bearing persons with dark/black and African skin
complexion to depict an outbreak of the disease in the United Kingdom
and North America,” the FPAA said, urging news organizations
based outside of Africa to censure their staff and update their image
policies.
“If
you are talking about the outbreak of Monkeypox in Europe or the
Americas, you should use images from hospitals across Europe or the
Americas? Or in the absence of such use a collection of electron
micrographs with labelled subcellular structures,” the
association added, asking: “What is the convenience of using
such images to tell the world how Europe and America are reeling from
the outbreak of MonkeyPox? Is the media in the business of
‘preserving white purity’ through ‘Black
criminality or culpability?
“The
virus can occur in any region of the world, regardless of race or
ethnicity…No race or skin complexion should be the face of the
disease.”
Almost
as if to settle the score and set
the record straight,
African news sources
have featured a photo of a white
monkeypox patient
in their own coverage.
And
yet, history shows us this is nothing new. Remember the Ebola
virus?
In 2014, Ebola fear, hate and racism swept America, as the name of
the disease itself became a racial slur associated with West Africa
and Black people. Ebola became a stand-in from Black people, the
scary
“other,”
and was used to justify racial profiling, racist chants aimed at
Black high schools,
anti-immigrant discrimination
and other racist hysteria.
Similarly,
HIV/AIDS
became associated with Haiti
in the mind of white racists, which turned into policy based on the
perception of Haitian immigrants as a high-risk group and the theory
that AIDS
came from Haiti.
At the height of the AIDS crisis, the FDA banned
Haitians
from donating blood, and HIV-positive Haitian refugees were detained
at Guantanamo. When Trump
proclaimed that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS,” he
was scraping the bottom of the barrel and tapping into deep-seated
American racist attitudes towards Black people and disease, with the
underlying belief that all Black people are dirty anyway.
Moreover,
in the age of COVID-19—when Black people are fighting against
the virus and systemic racism at the same time—the pandemic has
been framed as a disease caused by, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan
Patrick claimed,
“African Americans who have not been vaccinated.”
That
is why Black people might be a little sensitive about the recent
media coverage of monkeypox.
This
commentary is also posted on The
Grio
