Bad apples vs. bad genes: The way we talk about corruption is racist<\/a>,\u201d the author explains political corruption in America is merely a projection unto what they claim other countries are built on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cThis racist narrative argues that those who aren\u2019t from the West aren\u2019t capable of governing ethically and democratically. Take, for example, former president Donald Trump\u2019s continuous verbal attacks on Puerto Rico, which according to him is \u201cone of the most corrupt places on earth.\u201d Amid calls from people in Puerto Rico in 2019 for the governor to resign due to, among many things, corruption and mishandling of hurricane relief funding, Trump blamed Puerto Rican leaders for being \u201cgrossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Dr. Jose Atiles, a professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this narrative about corruption on the island has been \u201cinstrumentalized by the US federal government to deny access to disaster relief funds and impose additional oversights and legal limitations on the autonomy of PR\u2019s government.\u201d Such racism blames Puerto Ricans for their suffering. Rather than truly serving people in Puerto Rico and supporting their efforts to see reforms and justice, Trump only exacerbated the notion that even a U.S. territory could not function without Washington\u2019s guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Likewise, conversations about corruption across the African continent characterize \u201ccorruption\u201d as disease-like, using metaphors like \u201cepidemic\u201d and \u201cvirus,\u201d argues Dr. Gabriel O. Apata. He points to an article on corruption in Nigeria in which two academics write, \u201cCorruption is so common in Nigeria that there can hardly be any new perspective and approach to it. In fact, corruption is so pervasive in that country that it would be nearly correct to opine that it is a way of life.\u201d Dr. Aparta asks, \u201cBut why does corruption appear to be a particularly African problem in a way that it appears not to be, in other places?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These racist narratives about corruption in Puerto Rico and Nigeria imply that corruption is inherently linked to a certain race. They imply that people in these countries need to be disciplined by Western institutions, whether through democracy programs or punitive measures such as halting aid (as was the case when the U.S. recently stopped food assistance to Ethiopia in reaction to corruption, which only punished the country\u2019s most vulnerable).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hypocrisy is extraordinarily clear since Western leaders \u2013 particularly in the U.S. \u2013 are not immune to corruption scandals. Numerous American leaders including Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Ken Paxton, whose corrupt tendencies put profits (or rather, alleged bribes) over people impacted by U.S. policy. \u201cCorruption is about as American as apple pie,\u201d Bel\u00e9n Fernandez wrote in her recent piece on the legacies of bribery in U.S. leadership.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The biggest tell in the collapse of the US as a powerful western nation is their insistence on promoting and preserving as president of their country a man who makes fun of disabled people. Growing up in the hood, anyone who made fun of a mentally challenged person was either quickly checked and put in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,16,74],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-politics","9":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1829,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions\/1829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proliberation.com\/underthesun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}