A tweet came from the official FBI twitter account about wanted suspects for a business email crime. It had six photos of Nigerian nationals in its first six passport photographs for identification, and naturally, the tweet read:
Help the #FBI find six Nigerian nationals wanted for their involvement in Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes resulting in over $6 million in losses.
At apparent view, one would not immediately suspect that there is anything wrong with this tweet. On a closer look, the racism, bigotry, and gross unfair exaggeration of these black men’s involvement becomes obvious.
The tweet is about their involvement in a $6 million BEC fraud. The problem is, there were not the only people involved in this scam. The wanted list of individuals involved comprised of seventy-nine individuals in total:
37 were of Arabic descent
20 were of Chinese or Eastern Asian descent
16 Russians
6 Nigerians.
The gross bigotry of the tweet must be clear by now. In a crime committed by 79 individuals of diverse nationalities, the FBI’s official twitter account made the only six African descendants their primary focus enough to be the highlight of a tweet that reports the crimes and individuals involved to the public.
Going by the representation of diverse groups within the scam clique, one would wonder why the 37 Arabs were not the primary focus of the tweet. What about the 20 Chinese? 16 Russians? These were hugely represented groups in the crime-ring, but somehow, only 6 Nigerian nationals, that represented the lowest number of sub-groups within the clique got the spotlight.
This was a deliberate tweet meant to exaggerate the involvement of the black men in this crime, to perpetuate the narrative of Africans as corrupt, and justify the already extensive demeaning and condescending suspicion most Western individuals accord Africans or anyone with prevalent African ancestry.
A quick look at the “MOST WANTED” list on the FBI’s official website, has these men as the first six figures following a long line of seventy-three other culpable individuals. There was no attempt to hide the bigotry or unfair focus on black involvement.
Following that biased and bigoted tweet from the FBI’s official twitter account, they effectively twisted and made a crime committed by 79 individuals from varying racial, and national backgrounds, about the group with the least representation.
Such apparent bigotry in full view of everyone is worrying and greatly saddening. After going through the preceding and subsequent tweets about this crime, there were no tweets that specifically highlighted the other nationalities or individuals involved in it.
One could easily see how the narrative of black crime preponderance is created and perpetuated by systemic institutions that create these unfair and distorted trends based on grossly exaggerated data such as the above example. It is easy to see that there are still great efforts to undermine the African image than truthful reportage of abhorrence by Western institutions.
A couple of centuries after the Transatlantic enterprise, decades after the civil rights movement and independence of African colonies of Western imperialism, it is sad that Africans still has to call out Western institutions on their unfair treatments, bigotry, racism and the utter perpetuation of demeaning image of anything that has to do with African heritage.
