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People who don’t know Black
history have probably heard more about the Tuskegee syphilis
“experiment” in the last month than they have in their
whole lives. The chattering class has used the debacle of allowing
hundreds of Black men live with untreated syphilis to monitor its
effects to explain the resistance that many Black Americans have to
accepting the COVID vaccination, thus imperiling the possibility of
“herd” immunity. It wasn’t just the men, enticed
into the study with the promise of lifetime health care, who
suffered. Dozens of wives were also infected because they didn’t
know their partners had syphilis. At least nineteen children were
born with syphilis because they were untreated. There was no known
treatment for syphilis when the study, which was supposed to last
just six months, began in 1934. Penicillin was the widely accepted
remedy in the late 1940s, but none of the men in the study were
offered it. The study is referred to as the “Tuskegee”
experiment, but it really needs to be called the United States Public
Health Service experiment. Our government initiated and funded this
abomination and used Tuskegee as its base for this putrid study.
This
was not the first time, though, and it is not likely to be the last
when Black bodies were experimented on for white comfort. During
enslavement, “doctor” often purchased enslaved people to
experiment on them. After Reconstruction, when Black folks died from
being overworked, often their relatives were not told of their
demise, but nearby medical schools used their bodies to teach medical
students about anatomy.
It
was legal in thirty-two states to sterilize Black women (and others
considered “marginal”) without their permission. In
Alabama, in 1973, the Reif sisters, aged 12 and 14, were
involuntarily sterilized in a federally funded clinic. An Essence
magazine writer broke the story with the help of a whistleblower. The
offending physician seemed to think the girls were mentally deficient
and incapable of caring for the children they had not yet conceived.
That was their decision to make, not his.
Between
1929 and 1976, at least 7000 people were sterilized in North Carolina
by judicial order. Thousands more were sterilized by order of local
judges. The state set aside $10 million in 2014 to pay some of the
oppressive state policy victims, but many don’t qualify because
they lack documentation. Those sterilized were treated as guinea
pigs.
J.
Marion Sims, known as the “father of gynecology,”
perpetuated some of the more chilling experiments on Black women’s
bodies. He performed sterilizations, unnecessary C-sections, and more
on Black women and worked on them until he could perfect the
technique to use on white women. Sims performed many of the painful
operations without anesthesia. In other cases, Black women were
given so much mind-numbing morphine that they became addicted. Sims
is credited with inventing the specula, a tool routinely used in most
gynecological exams. Actually, he used a spoon, then improved on it,
for the examinations. Sims had quite the career, serving for a time
as President of the American Medical Association. There was a statue
of him in New York’s Central Park and tributes to him all over
the country. Blessedly, the Central Park statue was taken down in
2018, after several protests. Why was it there in the first place?
In
her book, Medical
Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black
American from Colonial Times To The Present (Doubleday,
2006), Harriet Washington details the many ways Black bodies were
guinea pigs for white experiments. That’s not all. The
Institute of Medicine has documented that black folk with broken
bones are less likely to get pain medication than whites. And the
very recent COVID death of African American physician Dr. Susan
Moore, who was denied pain medication and was described as
“intimidating” by the medical staff, illustrates how the
medical establishment treats too many Black people.
Having
said all that, I’ll still be standing in lines soon as my
number is called for the COVID vaccination. I prefer the Pfizer
vaccination from the research I’ve done, but I’ll take
the Moderna if available. Why? I’m over 60, diabetic, and thus
at high risk for getting COVID. I want to travel again, get on a
plane, and see my mama and my friends. I don’t know about
eating out – my culinary skills have improved. But I know that
my limited exposure to the world has gotten on my last nerve.
We
were their guinea pigs, and the medical establishment has been
negligent toward Black people. By now, though, enough white people
have had the vaccination that by some wicked irony, they are my
guinea pigs. Get the vaccination if you can, medical racism
notwithstanding. Black folks are twice as likely to die from COVID as
white people. Protect yourself!
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