[jfengel]

I have watched a lot of people on Quora ask variants of "can white people get monkeypox?", usually from accounts with a lot of other dog-whistle racism and/or posted directly to explicitly racist sub-groups.

That doesn't make the name itself racist. It just presents a lot of opportunities for racists to be racist. As if they really needed one, but they're always seeking out new ones.

There's really nothing to be done about it. It just sucks. About the best one can hope for is that if you hear it being used that way, you can say, "Dude, don't be an asshole." Which is actually kind of a lot.

If you don't hear it used that way, awesome. But it is a thing that happens.