Ebola is the latest mysterious evil — ranking high among AIDS, tribal genocide, female genital mutilation — to have emerged from the place white explorers used to call the Dark Continent because of Africa’s alleged “unlearned,” “untamed” and “uncivilized” black peoples and their exotic ways.
And just as white explorers took generations to wrestle with African culture, it may take us equally as long to understand the Centers for Disease Control’s bumbling of the Ebola virus as it slowly yet frighteningly encroaches on these shores.
Just how ironic is it that the very first American Ebola fatality is a black African national?
With their baffling, slow-footed assists to West African nations slogging through outbreaks, the CDC and the rest of the American medical complex appear punitive toward Africa — on both soils — for the landing of Ebola.
Instead, we’re getting reports of frightened, woefully under-trained nursing and medical staffs, airports scrambling to institute screening policies and outright panic complete with quotes and tales of limited treatments and vaccinations.
Worse, our medical complex twiddled its giant thumbs while Thomas Eric Duncan was released to infect his own family before he died October 8.
It is a sad repeat of what happened with the outbreak of AIDS nearly 30 years ago: The Western world watched while poor, untreated black Africans died, usually alone and shamed by the social stigmas associated with the trifling nature of the disease.
It begs this question: What is a black African life worth to the rest of the world and who wields the price gun and sets that cost? With every scourge besieging the Great Continent — from hordes of kidnapped schoolgirls to starving, unvaccinated babies — it is as though it’s OK to watch with the din of lively debate as background soundtrack music so long as the missing the dead and the dying are black-skinned.
America is so quick with its international aid and intervention in other people’s wars, economic restructuring and disaster relief. But there’s just something about us (U.S.) and Africa. Could be the far-reaching stain of slavery, that old bitch; could be a toxic cocktail of race and class, those faulty towers.
If Thomas Eric Duncan had been a white doctor or aid worker doing the Lord’s work in West Africa, there would have been a special airplane manned with specially trained medical personnel sent for him to ferry him to the most progressive and best American treatment waiting and available to keep him alive.
That’s what some party — the CDC? the World Health Organization? — pulled off in July for Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, two white medical missionary workers working with Ebola patients in Liberia. They were ferried by plane from Liberia to Emory University in Atlanta, not Texas where Brantly is from and where Duncan died and apparently infected a nurse who treated him, where they received top-notch, secretive treatment.
Part of their treatment comprised ZMapp, an experimental blend of antibodies that miraculously worked, but one doctors are cautioning the public against; further, the WHO is backing the widespread use of untested drugs. However, on the other hand, the medical industry says there isn’t enough of anything to go around and they’re all trying to figure out who should get what drugs.
I guess Duncan didn’t somehow “qualify.”
I am anxious and angry to see who else won’t.
This black line is drawn and that line is as undeniable as Ebola’s very symptoms. What’s strange but not new is that medical racism has plagued communities of color since doctors first took the oath to “Do no harm.” Yet, seemingly as far as medicine and technology advance, we’re always the ones either left to languish and die or we’re used as secret back-room guinea pigs for the advancement of someone else’s treatment. Then we die. (Oh, say can you Google Henrietta Lacks or the Tuskegee Experiment by the dawn’s early light?)
I now see why haters and naysayers — i.e. Big Pharma and its lobbyists and doctors more accustomed to taking kickbacks than to giving holistic care — were so adamantly against the Affordable Health Care Act and did everything in their power to ensure its failure, including naming it after the president they despise as a backhanded blemish.
Our system of dispensing quality, healing care is nearly too far gone, too butchered to effectively handle and withstand the sweeping, overhauling changes required for all major health care complexes to train their people to detect and treat Ebola.
We should all brace ourselves for a long, messy, death-riddled haul fraught with mistakes, little oversight, panic, anxiety and finger-pointing as more Ebola cases pop up here in America. Also be prepared for the spotlight on Ebola to dim and peter out as ISIS, Syria, Amanda Bynes, The Real Housewives of Atlanta and whomever Jennifer Lopez is next trying to bag all vie for our shortened Attention Deficit Disordered attention spans.
Ebola will undoubtedly top the year’s biggest stories during the standard year-in-reviews that dot the news landscapes. But I wonder if anyone by that time will make the time or have the forthrightness to take note of the racial disparity that makes Ebola even sadder, more frightening, for some of us and a further testament to how little we can still matter to such an advanced society.
Or, by literally ignoring the fact that the first-ever Ebola death on our shores was a black African man erroneously mistreated and sent home to perhaps infect his entire household, are we whitewashing this scourge and saying, in effect, that race is a non-issue and that the most significant aspect of Thomas Eric Duncan’s death is that grave medical mistakes were made?
I’ve never called myself or considered myself African American. It’s always seemed an insult to the people of the continent.
But Ebola’s casting a long, dark shadow all the way from West Africa and if you’re an African in America, that shadow appears destined to be a custom-made pall.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2014.