What's wrong with how the West talks about Ebola in one illustration

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

What's wrong with how the West talks about Ebola in one illustration

In West Africa, deaths from Ebola have now passed 4000, while in the US the death toll remains at one.

The coverage of the outbreak has been largely disproportionate however, and while one death is obviously still tragic and cause for concern when there is the risk of it precipitating more, it suggests a disregard for the bleak situation in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and other countries.

Cartoonist André Carrilho, whose work has been published in the New York Times, Vanity Fair and more, focused on this disparity in an illustration he created back in August, which has since gone viral thanks to its moving depiction of death being ignored.

"People in the African continent are more regarded as an abstract statistic than a patient in the US or Europe," he toldMic. "How many individual stories do we know about any African patients? None. They are treated as an indistinguishable crowd."

In spite of the stark colours used in the illustration, Carillho added that this is not so much an issue of race as "the West vs the rest".

Asked whether Dallas Ebola patient Thomas E. Duncan's being black contradicted the meaning of the image, he replied: "The fact that [Duncan] is black doesn't change the fact that because he's on US soil, he deserves more attention in the eyes of the Western media. It's not black vs white in the eyes of the media, but 'the West vs the rest.'

"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 doesn't seem to be."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/whats-wrong-with-how-the-west-talks-about-ebola-in-one-image-9792853.html

[Pooky 3,846]

Maybe because when it's in Africa, this seems to apply ...

SEP

"Somebody Else's Problem", an effectively-magical field that obscures things you think aren't relevant to you, such that even though you see them (or hear them or read them) you don't actually *notice*, and quickly forget.

More generally, the phenomenon that causes people to ignore issues that they know about but think of as either not something they can do anything about, or not personally relevant to them right now. This can result in something that's very important to a group of people being ignored by every individual member of that group.

Popularized by Douglas Adams in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, in which Ford Prefect describes it as:

"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

In that series, a strange object can be effectively hidden from view while out in plain sight, by an "SEP field", which "relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain."

[MyLittlePony 340]

Ebola Ebola.

[DavenRoxy 1,073]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/whats-wrong-with-how-the-west-talks-about-ebola-in-one-image-9792853.html

"The fact that [Duncan] is black doesn't change the fact that because he's on US soil, he deserves more attention in the eyes of the Western media."

Or maybe, just maybe, the US media knew a bit more about Duncan since he made a public spectacle of himself in the US. Perhaps American journalists don't know the personal history of any of the dead in Africa. Hard to report on them with no personal knowledge and say a smidgen of becoming infected during the interview process.

smh...

[Dan and Judy 614]

Why is Obama punishing the Africans?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Or maybe, just maybe, the US media knew a bit more about Duncan since he made a public spectacle of himself in the US. Perhaps American journalists don't know the personal history of any of the dead in Africa. Hard to report on them with no personal knowledge and say a smidgen of becoming infected during the interview process.

smh...

I doubt it. Its like anything that happens over there, we have to know how many Americans were killed in a terror attack while everyone else is reduced to a statistic.

[Dan and Judy 614]

I doubt it. Its like anything that happens over there, we have to know how many Americans were killed in a terror attack while everyone else is reduced to a statistic.

How many Americans were killed is a statistic.

[SMOKE 1,426]

I doubt it. Its like anything that happens over there, we have to know how many Americans were killed in a terror attack while everyone else is reduced to a statistic.

wouldn't that be a statistic?

[Dan and Judy 614]

wouldn't that be a statistic?

Hey stop copying me.

[SMOKE 1,426]

Hey stop copying me.

you've been sharpton'd

[Dan and Judy 614]

you've been sharpton'd

I've been sharpton'd

[DavenRoxy 1,073]

I was gonna reply about the definition of a statistic when I saw this in my email, but I see faster fingers beat me to the punch.