“Black Death”: Race and Representations of the Ebola epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic
Over 3,000 deaths in Italy, yet no graphic photos of the dying or dead. Dear White Journalists, can you photograph Africa with the same level of respect and empathy? Dignity is a fundamental human right, not the privilege of a few. — @africanshowboy
Photographer Nana Kofi Acquah’s appeal is a global call for dignity in “Black death.” Since mid-February, COVID-19 cases have increased in African nations, as well as other parts of the Global South (the Caribbean, South and Central America, and Southeast Asia).
Acquah warns against recreating media representation of western Africa circulated during the Ebola epidemic.
From 2013 to 2016, mainstream outlets, such as the National Geographic, documented mass grave sites and grotesque images of human suffering.
@nowhitesaviors asked their followers to “imagine (if) a Ugandan photographer traveled to Italy right now and was being paid by @natgeo to photograph the suffering of white Italians due to #covid19.”
They inquire directly to award-winning National Geographic photographer Pete Muller (@pete_k_muller), “will you capture white people who are in delirium and near death due to infectious disease this time around? Or is that reserved only for Black folk?”
Coupled with Western media’s bafflement of why Africa had not yet experienced high Coronavirus cases and deaths, Acquah and @nowhitesaviors comparison of the Ebola epidemic and Coronavirus pandemic chronicles a propagated dominant narrative of Africa in crisis and Black death, whether in the United States or Sierra Leone, as normative.
In addition to early media narratives of Black death, proposed Black immunity to COVID-19, and a continental Africa in perpetual crisis, the Coronavirus became racially labeled as the “Chinese virus” by the President of the United States and prominent media outlets.
Similar to coded “Ebola” and “Zika” viruses, a “Chinese virus” narrative moved beyond underhanded racial codings. Asian American communities have experienced an exponential increase in racist and xenophobic attacks. What becomes interesting about the “Black death” and “Chinese virus” narratives is that although the United States, Canada, and Europe are epicenters for the Coronavirus and western tourists and plane hopping “ex-pats” are the most dangerous carriers of the virus — there is very little construction of narratives about racially white people spreading COVID-19 globally and locally.
Tourism is not relegated to white people from the “west”, but the freedom of world travel is dominated by white passport holders from the United States, Canada, and Europe.
In “The Unbearable Whiteness of Tourism”, Indi Samarajiva writes that “Sri Lankans… can access only 22% of the world without a visa. Canadians can access 95%. This isn’t fair.”
He asserts that “Some of us are tourists. The rest of us are the zoo.” White-majority western nations hold status as the most powerful passports in the world (visa-free or visa on arrival access).
In 2019, there were almost 150 million US passports in circulation. Although official data on race and ethnicity is not disclosed to the public, through qualitative documentation we can assume that the majority of US passport holders are white-identified.
Outside of tourism, many Black and Brown people from the Global South travel to western countries as a part of a temporary workforce providing essential agricultural, domestic, and technical labor.
Compounded with race, ethnicity, class, and gender within a nation, People of Color globally experience limited travel access and unbound global movement comparatively to white passport holders from western nations.
The global movement of People of Color will be further curtailed by prospective enactment of “immunity passports”.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has led this questionable agenda for technologically advanced “risk-free certificates” which is associated with efforts to move forward with vaccinations on the African continent and developing nations.
The freedom of white travelers to move globally is linked to 500 years of settler colonialism, empire building, ecological destruction, and, most critically, human death. The “Great Dying” historical narrative documents smallpox and other viral diseases, in addition to slavery and genocide, as having an impact on indigenous mortality rates from 1492 to the early 20th century.
European settler colonizers intensified the spread of viruses to indigenous nations and communities throughout the western hemisphere reducing some indigenous populations by 90%.
Oral and recorded narratives about biological warfare through “smallpox blankets” explains critical events surrounding the proliferation of viruses and diseases that have destabilized indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere for centuries. There are comparable narratives intersecting biological warfare and colonization of Black and Brown indigenous communities throughout the world.
Currently, neocolonial tourism has spread communicable and sexually transmitted viruses and diseases from the west throughout the Global South to Black and Brown communities. With the first known cases of Coronavirus in the Caribbean and Africa precipitated by western tourists from Switzerland, Italy, and England, parts of the Global South have temporarily closed its borders to and regulate travel from the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The seemingly unrestricted access to Mexico, Dominican Republic, and Jamaica have been met with community protest and government pushback.
The Trump administration has targeted nationals from the Global South with recent United States legislation on mass deportations and detention, propagandist threats to build a massive wall at the U.S./Mexico border, and laws banning travel from African and Muslim populated nations.
During the Ebola crisis, African nationals from affected regions — as temporary visa holders through work, school, or people already processed in the courts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — faced deportation to West Africa. Communities displaced by the Ebola epidemic are still fighting to extend Temporary Protective Status and Deferred Enforced Departure classifications to remain in the United States.
The COVID-19 crisis has not stopped the US federal government from deportation proceedings, raids on undocumented families, and mass detention in facilities unequipped to handle viral outbreaks.
In cultivating and maintaining historical records and narratives about the COVID-19 crisis, we must explore race through the “privilege of movement” and “privilege in death”. Although the virus is still affecting Europe at high rates, the new (and exponentially damaging) narrative now projects COVID-19 as a “black virus”.
This has been precipitated by the increase of COVID-19 related deaths among Black people in the U.S. and circulated media projections of COVID-19’s effect on the African continent.
In “The Black Plague,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor outlines the systemic inequities rooted in the high rates of death in U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. Black and Brown people fill societal roles as essential workers in grocery stores, health care facilities, delivery services, farms, prisons, etc…
They are also the most vulnerable in systems of incarceration and detention, which have demonstrated high rates of COVID-19 infections.
Although white people are openly pushing against the boundaries of stay-at-home orders through armed “protests” and unencumbered not-so-distant forms of social distancing, they remain invisible in media narratives formed about the spread of the virus.
Many instances of police brutality have gone viral, as violent enforcement of social distancing is administered based on race, class, and neighborhood location.
The global dimension of this “black virus” narrative is depicted by the maltreatment of African nationals in China and Chinese officials and authorities enacting anti-Black and xenophobic campaigns.
As well as recent documentation of healthcare abuses and refusal of treatment experienced by African nationals in Italy. This mirrors the Black experience in places like the United States and Brazil, where systemic medical apartheid causes COVID-19 testing to be inaccessible or refused, and ineffective healthcare to be rendered at the last minute.
In addition to understanding the types of images and narratives the public will receive about the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic must be placed within the context of border restrictions and the politicization of Black and Brown mobility alongside the free global movement of white passport holders from the west — and white people within western borders.
This global “freedom" has local dynamics and extends within the framework of gentrification and neighborhood borders as well.
Propaganda perpetuated about People of Color within western borders and Black and Brown nationals from the Global South as criminals, sexual predators, and diseased has dominated mainstream global media and xenophobic politics.
For media records — which will become historical records — we must extend a substantial interrogation of race, systemic inequity, and “freedom” of global and local physical movement with our understanding of the COVID-19 crisis. As we appeal for dignity in “Black death”, we must demand respect for Black and Brown lives.
