black…MYstory

“The Tuskegee Experiment, indeed it was big
When they used the black man as a guinea pig.”

“Anger In The Nation” - Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth

It is almost unfathomable to know how low some people will go in their treatment of black folks. If you’re poor, very little regard is given to you. If you add being black to the mix, you life is easily expendable.

This is, basically, what was uncovered by Harriet Washington, a med-school graduate and former fellow in ethics at Harvard Medical School. Washington has written a new book titled “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.” As the title denotes, the infamous Tusekgee Experiment was not the only instance in which the lives of black folks were either unwillingly or unwittingly put at risk for the sake of medical research — research, mind you, that was illegal and/or unethical.

Washington was able to find incidents that ranged from well before the Tuskegee Experiment to the very recent future. Here are some examples:

• The 1855 case of escaped slave John Brown who recounted how his former master would cause deep blisters on his body “to see how deep black skin went.”
• The forced sterilization of black women, which began in slavery. However, this culminated in the Norplant trials in 1991 in which black Baltimore teenage girls were given birth control implants but weren’t adequately informed on the potential risks of the drug.
• The research of J. Marion Sims, a 19th century doctor and American Medical Association President, who developed his gynelogical treatments by experimenting on black slave women without anesthesia.
• The 1998-2001 study in which New York foster children with AIDS where given potentially dangerous drugs, often without parental permission. Some children were as young as 6 months of age. 80% of New York’s foster children are black.

Washington comes to a conclusion that many, including myself, deem true. The history of these experiments has bred a distrust among black people for the medical establishment and, thus, makes them, by far, less inclined to participate in clinical studies. In fact, black participation in biomedical studies is only at 1%.

Needless to say, I will be getting this book.

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