Posted on 05/02/2008 4:44:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
“Based on this Tuskegee experiment ... I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”
So said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright when asked if he stood by his claim that “the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”
The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33 percent of African-Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”
But it is crazy. And it’s dishonest.
Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely. In March, CNN commentator Roland Martin defended Wright, saying, “That actually did, indeed, happen.” On Fox News, the allegation has gone unchallenged on “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor.” Obery Hendricks, a prominent author and visiting scholar at Princeton University, told O’Reilly “I do know that the government injected syphilis into black men at the Tuskegee Institute. Now we know that the government is capable of doing those things.”
To which O’Reilly responded: “All right. All governments have done bad things in every country.”
True enough. And what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did.
So what did happen? In 1932, public health researchers set out to study syphilis, particularly among African-Americans, who had higher infection rates than whites. They recruited 399 black men who already had syphilis. The doctors infected no one. In fact, the patients were selected in the first place because they were tertiary-stage syphilitics who were no longer contagious.
The researchers studied the progress of the disease, without treating it, for 40 years.
Prior to the availability of penicillin in the 1940s and 1950s, the researchers couldn’t have treated the men even if they wanted to. Even after standardized penicillin treatments were available, it wasn’t clear that the patients could have been helped. Some of the doctors believed that treating the decades-long infections would kill the men.
Among scholars who’ve studied Tuskegee, there’s a lot of debate about how much — if any — racism was involved in the experiment. But no one disputes that Tuskegee had nothing whatsoever to do with genocide or even a desire to spread the disease among the black population.
What was bad about the Tuskegee experiment was a callous disregard for the humanity and integrity of the patients. They were told they were getting “treatments” when they were merely being studied. They were lied to, treated as objects rather than citizens. This is even more offensive today, now that we have modern legal and ethical rules about informed consent — rules that did not exist when the study was launched. But it was still wrong.
But the idea that the Tuskegee experiment somehow validates the deranged, paranoid view that the U.S. government created AIDS to murder African-Americans — in one of the most hideously painful, drawn-out and expensive manners imaginable — is a riot of ridiculousness and a maelstrom of mendacity. And yet, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard guilt-ridden white liberals say exactly that. “Considering what we did at Tuskegee,” they opine, “who can blame them for being distrustful of government?”
Well, as a conservative, I have no problem with distrusting government, nor can I fault the descendants of slaves or the victims of Jim Crow for distrusting government more than most.
But why blacks remain the most reliable voters for the party of ever-expanding government power is something of a mystery. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Tuskegee study, launched under the New Deal, was symptomatic of arrogant liberal government. The study “emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African-American population,” writes University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder. He adds: “The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”
Liberals like to invoke Tuskegee as if it’s solely an indictment of what other people did, proof that we need more progressive government. But Tuskegee was in fact the poisoned fruit of progressive government.
A sick irony is that Jeremiah Wright’s lies, and liberal apologies for them, make it more difficult for government to do the job these people want it to do, starting with helping people with AIDS. But that’s only one of many reasons they should be ashamed.
“But why blacks remain the most reliable voters for the party of ever-expanding government power is something of a mystery. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Tuskegee study, launched under the New Deal, was symptomatic of arrogant liberal government. The study “emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African-American population,” writes University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder. He adds: “The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”
Say no more...!
When it comes to callous disregard for people — and, disproportionately, black people — one need look no further than legalized abortion. That’s a travesty. But some folks approve of it whole heartedly, while believing myths about Tuskegee and calling it an abomination.
Thank you for this article. It is yet another example of what we could NEVER read in the ratmedia. They are more comfortable with lies. The truth hurts their eyes.
Hoover was a Progressive.
Wait, I thought that was crack.
AIDS was created to murder homosexuals.
If I believed that the *government*, or anyone with power, had targeted senior white rural females with a horrendous disease and a destructive drug, both only a risk if the targets indulged in certain behaviors, then I and everyone I know who fit the target description, would AVOID those behaviors in self defense.
So, those who believe this have a way to resist. Why haven’t they?
I agreed with Wright that Tuskegee was reprehensible, but aside from that, the man has worms in his brain.
Same goes for crack. I don't see anyone forcing people to sell or smoke it.
If I believed that someone had created something to destroy me if I used it, I darn sure wouldn't play into the plan.
Tuskegee was very bad, but it was not a plot against blacks, even against the particular blacks involved.
One of the rarely discussed dirty secrets of the medical establishment has been the tendency to use groups of poor people as guinea pigs. Treatments have been tested on patients in mental hospitals, prisons, and or simply poor communities of any color where people might not have the knowledge or ability to resist. One of the reasons that there are now so many safeguards connected with any test program or study is because of the gross abuses of the past.
Not, of course, that this necessarily prevents current abuses: I knew someone who was treated at the clinic of a major teaching hospital for a relatively minor thing that could have been dealt with in one office visit. Because the doctor was performing a study, however, the condition was not treated immediately; the patient was forced to come for visit after visit for unnecessary, painful “treatments” that accomplished nothing, all so that the doctor could perform his study. (Finally a nurse intervened and insisted that the patient receive the regular treatment.)
This was apparently a common practice, and the doctors simply regarded the poor and often non-English speaking patients of this clinic as a set of large guinea pigs provided for their use.
This has a lot more to do with the medical establishment than with the US government, but of course that will never be mentioned.
The proof of this statement is to simply observe the surroundings of most major research/teaching hospitals. In the case of Johns Hopkins, the surrounding neighborhood is so bad that women are actively discouraged from walking alone at night. The population is predominately black, and the trauma center (for treating gunshot victims for example) has a world-class rating. The only anti-thesis I can think of is Georgetown, which exists in a very nice neighborhood.
How so? No man was forced to enter, or remain, in this program. They had already been infected for quite some time ("they were tertiary-stage syphilitics ") so the clearly weren't deliberately infected by the researchers. This particular project* used black men exclusively b/c of the disproportion of the disease in this group.
*Was this type of study never feature on non-blacks? Was Tuskegee the only one ever to exclusively use black? If not, why have we not heard of the others? If so, why no cries of racism, why no outrage that more tests/studies weren't done?
Perhaps I’m wrong, but as I recall, they were not informed they had syphilis in the first place. If you don’t know you have an illness, if you don’t know you’re part of such a program, how can you know that you’d like to be “out” of it and properly treated?
Never mind, I just re-read it and I am wrong. Mea culpa.
LA-County Hospital is like that. They send medical people from all over the country to study there, because they deal with every trauma imaginable. On the other hand, people living in those infested places have medical care available.
Are researchers "negotiating" from a position of power? Sure.
Remember the HIV/AIDS types screaming to be put into trials for whatever treatment was proposed? It's not just the poor.
Back in the late 70’s early 80’s when this thing got its start we knew next to nothing about retrovirus and little about helper T cells; and to this day nobody could design ‘de novo’ a viral protein that would enable it to enter a particular cell type.
This thing came from Simian Immune Virus (S.I.V.) and mutated as it evolved to better infect its new host.
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