American Blindness to the Racism All Around Us
But the way the press has covered it has been frustrating, a good example of the way Americans see Africa monolithically and don’t understand or perhaps simply can’t be bothered to understand the differences between different countries. “And I don’t mean fringe reporting,” Adichie added. “I mean the ostensibly responsible press.”
Adichie was in Nigeria when the disease was there, though it has since been declared Ebola-free. But it feels to her as though Nigeria has been deprived of that victory. “It’s been attributed to everything but Nigerian action,” whether that’s CDC intervention or something else. “It feeds into the same old narrative of ‘Africa is a place with no agency.’ If anything good happens, it has to be about someone else.”
More: American Blindness to the Racism All Around Us - the Atlantic