But we will still write off the “Africa patient” who infected a hospital in Spain and not bother with silly things like geographic specificity. We will breathe a sigh of relief when we remember that the Spanish priest infected in Liberia was afforded access to an experimental drug though West Africans were not; after he died, we wondered aloud whether Africans even deserve Christianity.
We will tweet about how much more terrifying Ebola is than black-eyed ghost children. We will make sure to specify that alcohol, not Ebola, killed a British man in Macedonia. We will suggest that Ebola is so common among West Africans – even the ones who make it to New York City – that it might as well be part of the weather forecast. We will not mention that Nigeria hasn’t had a live case in six weeks.

We will try to hide our fear behind jokes with dying black bodies as their punchlines. We will “self-quarantine”. We will dedicate Reddit threads and Twitter accounts to our Ebola “jokes”. We will giggle at our Ebola memes. We will suggest that perhaps Ebola is really just the Isis of biological agents.

And when this is all over, we will move on and find a new reason to weaponize black suffering to account for our unshakeable fear.