SHADES OF THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT

Last fall the story broke that the U.S. had experimented on many Guatemalans during the period of time U.S. scientists were trying to understand how to cure syphilis. You may recall that hundreds of black men being studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama were allowed to die of complications from untreated syphilis. Turns out it was not just black men they were killing but Guatemalans as well. Hilary Clinton made an official apology. But the story would not go away. Turns out U.S. efforts to infect Guatemalans, and the number of people allowed to die from lack of treatment was even greater than previously thought. Seems like frustrated researchers would intentionally infect people by scraping them with a nail or some other object coated with the germ, if they didn’t contract the disease fast enough for the researchers. You would hope these stories could be explained away because they happened in the 1930s and 1940s and racism and lack of concern for black people and other folks of color was normative.  But experimentation on people of color have continued into the 21st century and sometimes minority children are the subjects of unethical research. The Guatemalan and Tuskegee experiments remind us that government must be closely monitored when it alleges it is interested in the health of people of color.

… just something I was thinking about …