“Newsweek’s use of a chimpanzee to represent a scientifically invalid story about an African disease is a classic case of othering. It suggests that African immigrants are to be feared, and that apes — and African immigrants who eat them — could bring a deadly disease to the pristine shores of the United States of America,” write Seay and Dionne. [MORE]

The depiction of Africans as ape-like and sub-human dates back centuries to colonialism. A racist justification for treating Africans as inferior.