"Xenophobia Is The Disease You Should Be Afraid Of, Not Ebola"

"It didn’t matter that he was traveling to Nigeria, a country so successful in its campaign to contain the virus that the US government sent a team of scientists to learn from its public health officials. I thought his decision careless because I didn’t think that he fully understood the politicisation of his black immigrant body. This was not a time to be traveling to West Africa; this was a time to lay low...

Simply, by allowing racist fearmongers to use public health as a shield to promote their xenophobic agenda, we give way to policies that allows for dehumanisation of immigrant communities and offer consent for those who wish to violently express their hate. We see this play out in many countries around the world."
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2014/10/13/xenophobia-is-the-disease-you-should-be-afraid-of-not-ebola/

I read this and wrote a response back in October, before America totally forgot about Ebola because there weren't any more (black) patients to be disturbingly scared of.

We need some kind of intervention before this gets out of hand/more out of hand. Every day, regular people are feeling totally justified in being obscenely racist and xenophobic "for their own safety", and that's because there is a strong xenophobic narrative and no one feels responsible for producing the opposite narrative.

What could work, maybe, is an ad with lots of sweeping vistas and epic-type music and a voice-over from someone super famous (and white) and talking about how America is composed of people from all over the world, how people have often come here from countries with diseases, how we need to come together against stigma and collectively support public health, and then we need some American citizens from Guinea and Liberia and Sierra-Léone to be filmed at their wholesome American jobs and with wholesome American families saying "I am a Liberian-American, not a virus".
It would be all of the respectability politics but that's where we are right now.