I agreed with Wright that Tuskegee was reprehensible, but aside from that, the man has worms in his brain.
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.
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?