Thread by @DavidHundeyin

China's ongoing attempts to quell internal dissent over its woefully incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak by blaming it on Africans is the latest in a long series of instances where governments use the "African" bogeyman to deflect attention from their malfeasance.

In 2015, the Saudi government attempted to blame a deadly Hajj stampede outside Mecca on "African pilgrims." Actually the single largest group of people in the crowd, as well as most of the victims of the stampede were in fact Iranian.
ibtimes.co.uk/mecca-eid-al-a…

But it's more difficult to smear a neighbour with close historical and cultural links to you (and also looks like you) than it is to smear different-looking people from a continent nobody really knows anything about except that it is poor and powerless. i.e, they can't hit back.

Australia has been doing something similar by presenting a few incidents in Melbourne's Sudanese communities as a nationwide "African Gang Violence" epidemic.

It keeps people focused on hating an outside "enemy" instead of asking questions of their govt.
theconversation.com/why-the-media-…

You can even trace the origin story of AIDS to something similar. After dismissing it for years as a "Gay Disease" and even allowing it to spread among North American gay communities after it was acknowledged because of official homophobia, America needed a scapegoat.

A bogeyman to absorb public fury about this terrifying new disease and deflect attention away from a government that intentionally allowed an epidemic to incubate because it would supposedly kill only gay people.

Enter "Africa."

According to this ^^ nonsensical version of HIV's history, the virus traveled exclusively within the world's black populations from Africa to the Caribbean, to Haiti before conveniently infecting America last of all.

Ergo it's the Africans' fault.

Meanwhile the world's first known AIDS patient (Ken Horne) and the world's first recognised HIV superspreader (Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas) were both white North American males.

Who remembers that when talking about AIDS nowadays? AIDS is now synonymous with "Africa."

The point is that being the world's poorest, least accessible and least powerful continent will continue making it easy for us to be its convenient punching bag.

Nobody likes or even hates us. They just don't rate us, which is worse.

TLDR: We need stronger economies.