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"White, Alexandre"
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Epidemic orientalism : race, capital, and the governance of infectious disease
\"For many residents of Western nations, COVID-19 was the first time they experienced the effects of an uncontrolled epidemic. This is in part due to a series of little-known regulations that have aimed to protect the global north from epidemic threats for the last two centuries, starting with International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 and culminating in the present with the International Health Regulations, who organize epidemic responses through the World Health Organization. Unlike other equity-focused global health initiatives, their mission -- to establish \"the maximum protections from infectious disease with the minimum effect on trade and traffic\" -- has remained the same since their founding. Using this as his starting point, Alexandre White reveals the Western capitalist interests, racism, and xenophobia, and political power plays underpinning the regulatory efforts that came out of the project to manage the international spread of infectious disease. He examines how these regulations are formatted; how their framers conceive of epidemic spread; and the types of bodies and spaces it is suggested that these regulations map onto. Proposing a modified reinterpretation of Edward Said's concept of orientalism, White invites us to consider \"epidemic orientalism\" as a framework within which to explore the imperial and colonial roots of modern epidemic disease control\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Historical linkages: epidemic threat, economic risk, and xenophobia
In the eyes of colonial health officials and the drafters of the first International Sanitary Conventions, the spread of cholera and plague was an economic, epidemic, and political risk to the long-term stability of the global economy. The particular anxieties over the threat of plague being spread by the free travel of colonised populations drove the colonial administrators in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to prophesise the potential collapse of the tea industry—and by extension their entire colony. Because trade with Europe was so crucial to the colony, in the late 19th century the colonial administrators endeavoured to sacrifice all trade with India rather than risk the threat of plague arriving with migrant workers from the subcontinent. In one letter between colonial administrators, it was suggested, in a derogatory way, that if even a single person from India or east Asia entered Ceylon without being exposed to sanitary surveillance “there would have been great peril to the Colony for these Coolies being free immediately on landing (in Ceylon) to spread over the island would scatter the seeds of disease as they went”. In a 1945 report accompanying the resolution that ultimately heralded US support for WHO, it stated that: “Particularly in our shrinking world, the spread of disease via airplane or other swift transport across national boundaries gives rise to ever present danger. [...]to protect ourselves that we must help wipe out disease everywhere…
Journal Article
Reckoning with histories of medical racism and violence in the USA
While much public health research has shown that racism is a fundamental determinant of health outcomes and disparities, racist policy and practice have also been integral to the historical formation of the medical academy in the USA. While no single concept can capture the complexity or full dynamics of racism, the brief historical examples we discuss here show that structural violence is helpful for understanding how the histories of violence, neglect, and oppression that crisscross law enforcement, politics, medical care, and public health are inextricably linked and manifested in the present. Like the history of US policing, the history of medicine and health care in the USA is marked by racial injustice and myriad forms of violence: unequal access to health care, the segregation of medical facilities, and the exclusion of African Americans from medical education are some of the most obvious examples. The health community needs to confront these painful histories of structural violence to develop more effective anti-racist and benevolent public health responses to entrenched health inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic, and future pandemics. Since 1619 when the first enslaved people were brought to the British Colony of Virginia until June 19, 1865, when the last enslaved Black person was emancipated in the USA, Black people, and especially Black women, endured violent medical treatment and experimentation against their will.
Journal Article
Racism, xenophobia, discrimination, and the determination of health
This Series shows how racism, xenophobia, discrimination, and the structures that support them are detrimental to health. In this first Series paper, we describe the conceptual model used throughout the Series and the underlying principles and definitions. We explore concepts of epistemic injustice, biological experimentation, and misconceptions about race using a historical lens. We focus on the core structural factors of separation and hierarchical power that permeate society and result in the negative health consequences we see. We are at a crucial moment in history, as populist leaders pushing the politics of hate have become more powerful in several countries. These leaders exploit racism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination to divide and control populations, with immediate and long-term consequences for both individual and population health. The COVID-19 pandemic and transnational racial justice movements have brought renewed attention to persisting structural racial injustice.
Journal Article
Who can lead the revolution?: Re-thinking anticolonial revolutionary consciousness through Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu
While several scholars have explored the connections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu through their shared relationship to French Colonial Algeria, comparatively less work has examined the shared perspectives on colonialism from which they both draw and where the discontinuities emerge. This paper explores the differences between these two thinkers, namely in their conceptualizing of the potential for a revolutionary consciousness to emerge from colonial populations during anticolonial actions. I argue in this article that where Bourdieu conceives of the horror of colonialism as a violent clash of cultures producing ‘hysteresis’ and a level of socio-political alienation from the most dispossessed sectors of society, Fanon conceives of a revolutionary consciousness emerging from the threat of racialized violence genocide and colonial subjection. Bourdieu however suggests that anticolonial revolutionary fervor cannot emerge from populations most dispossessed by the violence of colonization. While Bourdieu’s analysis drew solely from the Algerian case, Fanon recognized anticolonial struggle to be a fundamental type of revolution that could be theorized. In this, Fanon analyzed the Algerian revolution in the context of other anticolonial actions taking place across Africa and the world. Fanon thereby lays out a theory of the role of racism in structuring colonialism and fostering a revolutionary consciousness that is distinct. This cleavage of perspectives from two seemingly similarly inclined theorists emerges from a divergent view of the role of racism in dehumanizing and structuring colonial subjectivities and the effects of colonialism on those most aggrieved by it to spur political action.
Journal Article
Epidemic Orientalism
For many residents of Western nations, COVID-19 was the first time they experienced the effects of an uncontrolled epidemic. This is in part due to a series of little-known regulations that have aimed to protect the global north from epidemic threats for the last two centuries, starting with International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 and culminating in the present with the International Health Regulations, which organize epidemic responses through the World Health Organization. Unlike other equity-focused global health initiatives, their mission—to establish \"the maximum protections from infectious disease with the minimum effect on trade and traffic\"—has remained the same since their founding. Using this as his starting point, Alexandre White reveals the Western capitalist interests, racism and xenophobia, and political power plays underpinning the regulatory efforts that came out of the project to manage the international spread of infectious disease. He examines how these regulations are formatted; how their framers conceive of epidemic spread; and the types of bodies and spaces it is suggested that these regulations map onto. Proposing a modified reinterpretation of Edward Said's concept of orientalism, White invites us to consider \"epidemic orientalism\" as a framework within which to explore the imperial and colonial roots of modern epidemic disease control.
eBook
The public’s role in COVID-19 vaccination: Human-centered recommendations to enhance pandemic vaccine awareness, access, and acceptance in the United States
•A thoughtful vaccination campaign is critical to ensure COVID-19 vaccine uptake.•Social, behavioral, and communication science is essential to such a campaign.•Meaningful messages from trusted spokespersons can crowd out misinformation.•COVID-19 vaccines must be available at familiar, convenient locations that feel safe.•Transparent decisions and public oversight mechanisms strengthen vaccine confidence.
Given the social and economic upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders, health officials, and members of the public are eager for solutions. One of the most promising, if they can be successfully developed, is vaccines. While the technological development of such countermeasures is currently underway, a key social gap remains. Past experience in routine and crisis contexts demonstrates that uptake of vaccines is more complicated than simply making the technology available. Vaccine uptake, and especially the widespread acceptance of vaccines, is a social endeavor that requires consideration of human factors. To provide a starting place for this critical component of a future COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the United States, the 23-person Working Group on Readying Populations for COVID-19 Vaccines was formed. One outcome of this group is a synthesis of the major challenges and opportunities associated with a future COVID-19 vaccination campaign and empirically-informed recommendations to advance public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of vaccines that protect against SARS-CoV-2. While not inclusive of all possible steps than could or should be done to facilitate COVID-19 vaccination, the working group believes that the recommendations provided are essential for a successful vaccination program.
Journal Article
Global Risks, Divergent Pandemics: Contrasting Responses to Bubonic Plague and Smallpox in 1901 Cape Town
This article explores two simultaneous epidemics that, despite similar pathologies, prompted significantly varying responses from public health actors in 1901 Cape Town: the bubonic plague and smallpox. The Cape Colony responded to the plague with racialized quarantining, forcibly removing all black Africans from certain poor neighborhoods and transferring them to a camp on the outskirts of the city. It was the most significant segregationist act in Cape Town's history to date and foreshadowed the actions of governments in postunification and apartheid South Africa. Conversely, smallpox, though highly contagious and deadly, did not prompt similar aggression. Drawing from archival material, I argue that this differential treatment was the result of a global medical concern for the spread of plague to Europe that imposed external demands upon any region affected by plague that were nonexistent for smallpox. These demands aligned with local ideologies that equated state control with racial discipline to produce the first urban township in South Africa. This article addresses the global processes at work within seemingly localized epidemics and contributes to existing scholarship by exploring the role of medical experts and scientific knowledge in the framing of early pandemic threats.
Journal Article
Categorisation and Minoritisation
Minoritised can be a more useful term as it describes intersectional forms of discrimination, and acknowledges the active processes involved in differential allocations of power, resources and ultimately health. In health literature, ‘Asia(n)’ continues to be shorthand for the entire continent, or to specific parts (eg, East and Southeast Asia) based on the largely unchallenged assumption that, ‘due to the ethnic, genetic, environmental and cultural differences, clinical data of the Western populations may not be representative of Asian countries’.5 6 The implicit assumption is that the ‘West’ is the default ‘reference population’ with which ‘Asians’ are compared—notwithstanding the fact that even with the most restrictive definitions, ‘Asians’ make up three fifths of the world’s population. Adhikari,2 who makes a case for embracing the Coloured identity, stated ‘coloured identity is also very much the product of its bearers who, I would argue, were in the first instance primarily responsible for articulating the identity and subsequently determining its form and content’. [...]these terms do not cross borders with the term Coloured being pejorative in the USA and the UK, but embraced by some in South Africa. 4. Universality of minoritising power structures We recommend the term minoritised, which emphasises active processes,17 shifting beyond binary discussion of minority versus majority.17 18 We build on existing explanations19 to define minoritised, as ‘individuals and populations, including numerical majorities, whose collective cultural, economic, political and social power has been eroded through the targeting of identity in active processes that sustain structures of hegemony.’
Journal Article