"racist and misinformed"
This week, a drawn chimp features as the sole image on the cover of Newsweek. The article and cover image now face two serious charges from academics, activists and diplomats. They say that the image of a monkey is racist and the article is factually incorrect. The depiction of Africans as ape-like and sub-human dates back centuries to colonialism. A racist justification for treating Africans as inferior, the image is one that rots in the dustbin of history. At least that was the thought until Newsweek’s cover.
The release of the image at the end of last week was met with an immediate backlash. Newsweek’s Editor in Chief Jim Impoco engaged with his critics to the extent that he dismissed their concerns.
He flippantly dismissed the concerns of the cover, made by academics and African experts. The feature article warns that bushmeat smuggled into the US from West Africa could export the outbreak to American shores. The illegal delicacy makes its way into the US and could be a vessel for deadly diseases “such as Monkeybox, Ebola Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and other communicable diseases,” according to a 2007 customs memo obtained by Newsweek.
The cover, coupled with a misinformed article, is extremely damaging, argue researchers Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne in the Washington Post, today. The two carefully looked through the information about the spread of disease through bushmeat, finding that it would be nearly impossible for Ebola to make it to the US through the illicit trade. The consequences for the way that people view Africa, and especially African migrants living in the US, can be devastating.
“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,” write Seay and Dionne.
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"Factually incorrect"? Maybe, there're still a lot of unknowns regarding the Ebola.
But "racist"?
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
