This week’s Newsweek magazine cover
features an image of a chimpanzee behind the words, “A Back Door for
Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.”
This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America.
(The term is a catchall for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it that.)
While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.
Far
from presenting a legitimate public health concern, the authors of the
piece and the editorial decision to use chimpanzee imagery on the cover
have placed Newsweek squarely in the center of a long and ugly tradition
of treating Africans as savage animals and the African continent as a
dirty, diseased place to be feared. What can social science tell us
about why Newsweek’s cover story is so problematic?
Categorizing peoples in the colonial period
The Europeans who colonized Africa in the late 19th century were members of a culture obsessed with classifying and categorizing the natural world.
This quest built much of modern biology (think Darwin and his beetle collection), but it also led to some rather unscientific justifications for the colonial project.
One of these was an idea developed by Frederick Coombs, author of Coombs’s Popular Phrenology.
In the book, Coombs expounded a then-popular (and completely wrong) idea that the size, shape and other physical characteristics of a person’s skull determine that individual’s intelligence.
Coombs and his fellow phrenologists started with the assumption that non-northern and western Europeans namely, southern Europeans (who were not considered to be racially “white” at the time) and people of color were inherently less intelligent than northern Europeans with light-colored skin. CONTINUE READING
CREDITS: WASHINGTON POST
This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America.
(The term is a catchall for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it that.)
While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.
An American prepares a deer he killed. Photo by John Beagle, shared with Creative Commons license.
Categorizing peoples in the colonial period
The Europeans who colonized Africa in the late 19th century were members of a culture obsessed with classifying and categorizing the natural world.
This quest built much of modern biology (think Darwin and his beetle collection), but it also led to some rather unscientific justifications for the colonial project.
One of these was an idea developed by Frederick Coombs, author of Coombs’s Popular Phrenology.
In the book, Coombs expounded a then-popular (and completely wrong) idea that the size, shape and other physical characteristics of a person’s skull determine that individual’s intelligence.
Coombs and his fellow phrenologists started with the assumption that non-northern and western Europeans namely, southern Europeans (who were not considered to be racially “white” at the time) and people of color were inherently less intelligent than northern Europeans with light-colored skin. CONTINUE READING
CREDITS: WASHINGTON POST
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