One powerful illustration shows exactly whatâs wrong with the way the West talks about Ebola
October 12, 2014
The Ebola epidemic has killed 3,431 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; it has killed one in the United States. Liberiaâs Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told the U.N. Security Council in September that the disease poses a âserious threat" to the countryâs existence; the Obama administration recently reminded everybody that â[Americaâs] structure would preclude an outbreak.â Health care workers are threatening to strike over dissatisfaction with wages; the U.S. sent 3,000 military personnel directly into the area to help combat the epidemic.
The Ebola headlines in Western media outlets, however, donât tell that story. The Western media circus has lapped up the Ebola epidemic and paraded it around as its newest act. Itâs everywhere you look â stories about ânecessaryâ precautions, tales of children and even police cars under quarantine, fear that the disease has spread to other parts of the country. And it all has one singular focus: America and the West.Â
André Carrilho, an illustrator and cartoonist based in Lisbon whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and New York magazine, chose to play up this disparity in an August illustration, drawn shortly after two white missionaries stricken with Ebola were admitted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
"People tend to respond more to illustrations that have a point of view on issues that relate to their lives and their opinions," he told Mic in an email. Â
The Ebola epidemic hit a particular nerve with the artist. âPeople in the African continent are more regarded as an abstract statistic than a patient in the U.S. or Europe,â he said. âHow many individual stories do we know about any African patients? None. They are treated as an indistinguishable crowd.â Â
His point is well taken, given the recent arrival of Thomas E. Duncan, the Dallas patient who became Americaâs only travel-related case of Ebola. He came from Liberia, but the media paid scant attention to the countryâs experience with Ebola until his arrival in the United States. Carrilho says the color of Duncanâs skin doesnât contradict the meaning of the illustration. âThe fact that [Duncan] is black doesnât change the fact that because heâs on U.S. soil, he deserves more attention in the eyes of the Western media,â he toldMic. Itâs not black vs. white in the eyes of the media, but âthe West vs. the rest.â
"A death in Africa, or Asia for that matter, should be as tragic as a death in Europe or the U.S.A., and it doesnât seem to be," he said.
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