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Ebola-Shaming
We need to talk about Ebola-shaming.
It is past time someone speaks up about our insidious and malignant cultural tendency to police, judge, and condemn people who projectile-vomit a virus that might melt your internal organs; a perfectly natural virus that occurs naturally in nature and is thus natural.
We need to talk about how we make people with Ebola — especially the ones who vomit on fully-laden 747s — feel guilty, inferior, and less-than only because they deviate from traditional and orthodox health expectations and transgress accepted codes of “contagiousness.”
It’s time for us all to gain the language and context necessary to parse outdated and bigoted ideas about hemorrhagic fevers. Some examples of Ebola-shaming include:
- Insensitively approaching those who are Ebola-abled in Hazmat suits;
- Expressing unease or distaste about having the Ebola-abled as neighbors;
- Focusing on the physical traits of the Ebola-abled, such as the way they bleed from their eyeballs, rather than their professional skills and accomplishments;
- Telling people they can avoid being labeled as an “Ebola victim” by not “touching the corpses of people who died from Ebola.” (The word “victim” is not empowering, nor is the association with corpses, nor is the suggestion that becoming one is an inherently bad thing); and
- Making jokes about fruit-bats.
Using the word “infected” subtly warns the Ebola-abled that there’s a line: they can be unhealthy, but not too unhealthy. Research has shown that many Ebola-abled become depressed, anxious, and even suicidal about this; well, that’s what research would show, if researchers overcame certain challenging problems in measuring suicidality among the Ebola-empowered.
I’ve written a play, Ebol-UP! to address the damaging impact of Ebola-shaming and our Ebola-negative culture. It’s “a call to action,” so to speak, a reminder than Ebola-shaming is happening every day, everywhere. It’s inspired by the real-life experiences of the many Ebola-powered people I interviewed. I’m filmed shaking hands with them, hugging them, kissing them, and then putting my hands right in their corpses — all in a really natural, comfortable way — to show that I’m totally at ease with vomiting blood and bleeding from my eyeballs. I’m arranging for it to be shown at the 2015 New York Fringe Festival.
Ebol-UP! vividly represents the irrational, harmful, terrible way we take voice and agency away from the Ebola-abled. It is a powerful and authentic representation of our “healthiness” double-standards. I am hoping to receive a grant from the NEA to support future creative work like this. (I might be around to receive it because it’s possible I’ll be an Ebola survivor, although the word “survivor” is stigmatizing around the concept of “non-survivor,” so I prefer just to be called “a playwright.” Why is it relevant what my disease is, or as I prefer to think of it, my ease?).
I hope Ricochet members will support me in this, as they always have, and give serious consideration to the way they’ve stigmatized and other-ized the Ebola-abled people in their lives. It is well past time.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user Carlos E. Santa Maria.
Published in General
ka-BOOM!
Thanks Claire. People take this little malady all too seriously. Follow Obama’s lead and downplay it.
The national emergency broadcast system just grabbed my cable connection and says stand by for an emergency message. I wonder if it has to do with ebola.
After my last exam, my doctor delivered a health-reinforcing check-up sermon that was shockingly anti-illness.
Now don’t get me wrong… I’m not unhealthy myself. But I really feel for the folks who have to sit there and listen to these troglodytes refer to their “problems” and suggest “prevention.” It’s literally insane.
I think I’ll sue.
I’m looking forward to Ebola-abled folks coming to my state so I can participate in a chapter of Ebol-UP (I think a new organization borrowing the name of the play is appropriate here, don’t you?) Since I live in ever-sensible California, I think I can count on the arrival and celebration of Ebola here.
Claire, not to trample on your artistry, but would you consider making your play a musical? Then it could spawn concerts where huge numbers of people populate the stage and sing about Ebola. I’m thinking the Up With People model here.
I sometimes wonder if AIDS would be the problem it is today if we treated it as an infectious disease instead of a social issue impacting gays and intravenous drug users.
But hey, what is 600,000 lives against the invasion of privacy of gays and intravenous drug users.
What color ribbon do I wear to raise Ebola awareness?
I think vomit colored ribbons are appropriate. Can we convince an enterprising entrepreneur to produce some ribbon that is mottled, kind of like real vomit?
I’ll bet Ebola-abled people can’t even choose which public rest room is gender-appropriate!
I was thinking brown.
There’s really only one good option. It should be “melena” colored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melena
Possibly puce? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puce
Red with spotting…..any background….
Transparent. Nothing to see here, folks.
Claire,
You are just scratching the surface of this society’s hideous treatment of microbial lifeforms. The Ebola Virus has been subjected to the horror of Ebolaphobia. Let us understand where this terrible prejudice comes from.
Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.
You can see that specieism is an adequate accusation to crush the evil that goes at your average Colonel Sanders when someone orders a big bucket and mercilessly chomps down on another species. Such monsters.
However, to adequately accuse someone of Ebolaphobia we can’t just go with the specieist thing. We must realize that the people of America are deeply prejudiced against beings from another Genus, Family, Order, Class, Phylum, and yes Kingdom! The thoughtless treatment of the Ebola Virus just because it is of another Kingdom entirely is horrible. The Ebola Virus has feelings too (well actually it has a thin protein coating that can mutate..never mind!). Perhaps this whole society needs sensitivity training.
Claire, I hope I have increased your social awareness level. We must always be sensitive to the other.
Regards,
Jim
Change the bird to a bat, and we have the Ebola flag!
Heh.
Once again, Claire manages to come up with a strangely onomatopoeic name for her production: “ebolaup” sounds like what I’d expect a victim—sorry, “ebola-enabled” person—to sound like.
Yes, I am having one of those “what am I, 8?” days. Why do you ask?
“Once again?” Beg pardon?
Too long ago: you wrote about Obama throwing the Uyghur people under the bus, and I said “‘Uyghur’ is exactly what I’d expect someone thrown under the bus to sound like.” Technically, it doesn’t work, unless you named the Uyghur people.
Would it be Ebolaphobic to use the word “quarantine”?
Plaid?
You could have ended that piece after the second paragraph and it would still be hilarious.
But, as any good liberal will tell you, “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!”
Some public radio program (The World?) ran a story yesterday about a Liberian woman who brought her kids to the US to escape ebola, only to have them suffer the shame and indignity of other kids in their school making ebola jokes on hearing they were Liberian.
So the quite lovely woman started the moral equivalent of a hashtag campaign, “I’m a Liberian, not a virus,” to counter the Ebola-shaming trend.
Proving once again that, even in the face of an inadequate and clumsy government response to a terrifying disease, there are people with too much time on their hands.
Oh, the horror. Certainly no other immigrant group has ever had to deal with this sort of guilt by association. Like the Japanese.
Perhaps it is time to introduce to the Doctors Without Borders, the concept of… borders.
Or the AIDS musical from Team America: World Police.
As part of Ebola-American history month, will one of the Ebola-abled be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch tonight? A spitball seems appropriate.
The omission in the first two games was clearly the legacy of Rush Limbaugh’s years in charge of ceremonial first pitches with the Royals.
I don’t know why, of all Ricochet members, only Gödel’s Ghost‘s posts don’t copy automatically when I try to comment on them. I don’t fully accept the “well, what do you expect from a ghost, and from G¨del’s in particular” argument–though I agree that it fits the evidence better than any other theory. (Nor do I understand why my umlauted o looks that way; it’s neither deliberate or metaphorical, it’s just happening.)
I am surprised, however, and perhaps pleased, by our ghost’s encyclopedic mastery of the Berlinski-on-Ricochet oeuvre. I certainly wouldn’t have remembered the Uyghur-bus swishisplatcident. Although yes, that happened, now that you remind me.
I guessed as much. I was pretty sure that the only reason I hadn’t seen someone saying this in dead seriousness was that I’d basically switched off the news flow.
Thanks, Claire. This made my day (or maybe it didn’t).