Elsewhere, Western publications engaged in selective reporting about the deceased. The Washington Post, for example, led its homepage coverage Sunday with a headline that informed readers only that “Eight Americans among 157 people killed in Ethiopian Airlines crash.” (The Washington metropolitan area has the largest population of Ethiopian descent outside the country itself.) In a tweet about the national background of the deceased, the Associated Press listed eight nations affected by the crash. Not one of the countries mentioned in the AP’s list is populated by black Africans. This, despite the fact that Kenya topped the list of the deceased, with 32, and nine Ethiopians were on board. On CNN and BBC News, the presence of American and British nationals respectively is what drew narrative prominence. (In a brutal irony, the Nigerian writer Pius Adesanmi, author of You’re Not a Country, Africa, was among those on the flight.)

For many African readers, and other black people across the diaspora, it is perhaps unsurprising that Western media outlets would fail to report on a tragedy as devastating as the Ethiopian Airlines crash as—first and foremost—an African tragedy. Both the impulse to question the largest African air carrier’s credibility and the hyper-focus on Western passengers are consistent with the pervasive, long-running Western disdain for—or simple inability to empathize with—people of African descent. Since the advent of the transatlantic slave trade, Africa has been treated largely as a repository for the Western world’s fears (and during the colonial era, as the site of Europe’s most dangerous and banal desires). Africa’s residents and descendants, then, are more often portrayed as threats than as people.

Read: Nia Wilson and the formula for covering black death

Consider the recent New York Times reporting on the January terrorist attack in Nairobi, during which 21 people were killed. The outlet’s first article about the assault on the luxury hotel and office complex in Kenya’s capital was tweeted with a photo of three dead Kenyan men, their bullet-riddled bodies slumped over chairs on the hotel’s veranda. The photo of the deceased men was also the lead image on the article page. This was a tone-deaf decision that magnified the damage of the initial tragedy by failing to account for the image’s psychological impact. The photo drew a swift backlash, particularly from Kenyan readers and others with ties to the continent, who noted that the Times frequently covers violent crime in the United States and Europe without posting gruesome images of slain victims.



But rather than remove the disturbing photo, the Times published a conversation with two editors about the decision to share it. One acknowledged that “there are people in the newsroom who felt in retrospect that we shouldn’t have run the Nairobi photo,” and said that the Times “can do a better job of having consistent standards that apply across the world.”