alondra

first-5:

Jessie Daniels, PhD is a Mellon Fellow (2012-2013) at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Professor of Urban Public Health and Sociology. She is the author of Cyber Racism (2009) and White Lies (1997), as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles in journals such as…

What are the first five websites you visit every day?

Alondra Nelson teaches sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary social scientist, she writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. She is author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical…

alienbodies:

Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora

The African-American Studies Collective

Logo by Corinne Stevie

Emory University, Atlanta, GA

February 8-9, 2013

Was it why I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now…

poczineproject:

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom…

On July 25, 1972, Associated Press reporter Jean Heller disclosed in the New York Times that the United States Public Health Service had been conducting a clinical experiment on black men in Macon County, Alabama. Beginning 1932, these close to 400 share-croppers were left untreated for the disease that can decimate the body in its late stages, despite the fact that antibiotic treatment had been available for decades. Heller wrote: “For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, not given proper treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects.”

The Tuskegee tragedy (recently described in a stellar book by Susan Reverby) has come to exemplify health inequality and racial discrimination in medicine. Numerous studies show that public awareness of the syphilis study has had a residual, negative impact on healthcare practices. Blacks, in particular, have developed a strong distrust of mainstream medicine and clinical research that is attributed to past abuses–and, especially this exploitative study.

Harriet Washington’s award-winning book Medical Apartheid was an urgent reminder that African Americans’ apprehensions about biomedicine were both abiding and perfectly warranted. In other words, if we take a longer historical view, the Tuskegee study is an important symbol, but it was not the first or even the most appalling instance of medical discrimination. As Washington notes, such practices have extended “from the colonial era to the present.”