A New Lesson from the Old "Tuskegee" Study - Dr. Susan M. Reverby
White Man's Burden Redux: The Movie! - Mike Barber
CDC says African Americans are most affected by HIV in the US - Stephen Menendian
The continuing struggle for justice in Bhopal — By Rajeev Ravisankar
A New Lesson from the Old "Tuskegee" Study - Dr. Susan M. Reverby
"Don’t take the swine flu vaccine. Remember the Tuskegee Experiment Syphilis Vaccine," a recent post on Twitter warns. The message is simple: "Tuskegee," America’s notorious medical research study, is still considered as our own equivalent to Nazi experimentation that links state power to scientific fervor. Nearly forty years after the study ended, the name "Tuskegee" evokes fears of the dangers of government involvement in medical care. But as Congress debates how to provide health coverage for everyone and fear of the swine flu vaccine runs rampant, there is a different critical lesson to take from the infamous medical research project which targeted poor rural African American men and ran unabated for decades.
From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted a study on "untreated syphilis in the male Negro" in Macon County, Alabama in and around the city of Tuskegee. 439 African American men with late stage syphilis were selected as research subjects, and 185 without the disease became the study’s control group. A mostly sexually transmitted disease, syphilis left untreated can cause fatal heart and neurological problems. The men thought of themselves as patients obtaining needed medical care for what was known as "bad blood" from the government’s doctors. The PHS physicians never told these men they were actually research subjects being followed in a "no treatment" study.
Instead, the researchers explained that the aspirins, tonics, and diagnostic spinal taps given were "free treatment." In a county with only 16 doctors whose prices the men could rarely afford, a government program of free care enticed them. The study’s nurse kept visiting the men’s homes and helping them to get medical care for other ills. The study’s subjects and controls were also promised money for decent burials in exchange for the use of their bodies for autopsy after their deaths.
The study was not kept secret. Medical articles charting its progress appeared over the decades, while several health professionals questioned the study’s ethics. In 1972 the research experiment came to an end in a storm of media coverage that brought in federal investigators, a Senate hearing, and a subsequent lawsuit against the PHS, the state of Alabama, and many of the doctors involved.
In "Tuskegee’s" wake, major changes in federal rules governing medical research were established, including written informed consent and the creation of institutional review boards to oversee human subject research. The study also created another legacy—it became the metaphor for the distrust of scientific research, the risks of government provision of medical care, and the exploitation of poor patients.
Rumors and myths about what happened continue to circulate in whispers, blogs and media coverage. Most egregious in the face of the need for H1N1 vaccine is the erroneous claim that the government’s doctors intentionally infected the men with syphilis. But no "Tuskegee experiment syphilis vaccine" was ever created; no shots of the bacteria that cause syphilis were put into the men’s veins.
As the Obama administration takes on the huge task of reforming how we organize and pay for health care for all Americans and we line up for our shots, "Tuskegee" can offer another perhaps less obvious, if ironic, lesson. These men living in rural Alabama came forward for treatment not because they were uneducated and easily duped by their government, but because they needed health care for themselves and their families. They, as with increasing numbers of Americans, had no real access to the medical care they required, could not pay for what was available, and had to find it where possible.
Perhaps as the debate over health care reform winds its way through the Congress, a new post on Twitter should read: "Don’t forget the ‘Tuskegee’ syphilis study. Everyone deserves the right to affordable health care and this is what our government should and must provide."
Susan M. Reverby is the McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College and is the author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy.
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White Man's Burden Redux: The Movie! - Mike Barber
As I am typing this, I am five hours and 25 minutes into a 15+ hour trip on a slow train to Baltimore. I’m on en route to D.C. to interview sociologist and author Dr. James Loewen for my documentary film, A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada. This interview is two years in the making. In late 2007 when I originally conceived the idea to make a feature documentary on how Canada’s over 200 years of institutionalized slavery of indigenous and African people is constantly escaping mention in our history books, James Loewen was one of the very first names that entered my head for interview candidates. His book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (year?) was one of the biggest inspirations for me to start think about making documentaries in the first place; an inspiration possibly rivaled only by Errol Morris’ (year?) documentary film, The Fog of War).
Lies My Teacher Told Me is the result of Loewen’s research into the 12 most popular history textbooks used in American schools (circa 1996). He explores the common threads of what/who is given coverage, how much coverage is given, and in what light that coverage is made. He also looks into what is conspicuously absent, what is biased, and, finally, what is flat out false. More than myth-busting, Loewen examines the far-reaching social consequences of the history of teaching practices, a history that he finds has served more as jingoistic propaganda than scholarly discourse. At its heart, this book (and the follow-up Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sights Get Wrong¹) is about why the way in which history is disseminated matters, and how society could benefit from a curriculum that is unafraid to look deeply into the dark side of Canada's past as opposed to the feel-good bits.
Loewen demonstrates how the bland, celebratory versions of history found throughout the pages of various Canadian textbooks serve as a form of boosterism catering specifically to a white, middle- and upper-class audience. In essence, stories about white people written by and for white people. Page after page, Europeans are exalted for their great achievements while non-Europeans, if mentioned at all, are painted as people in need of European help. This feel-good bias doesn't feel right, however, and worse, it goes beyond the classroom, visible in pop culture and everyday discussions about historical events.
The film and television equivalent of this form of boosterism comes in the Hollywood archetype of the white saviour—a white, typically middle- or upper-class, usually male and almost exclusively heterosexual character through whom the life of a person of colour (or perons of colour) is dramatically improved. The basic formula goes like this: through the white protagonist’s selfless deeds the helpless, downtrodden victim of circumstance is rescued from the cycle of poverty and violence, changing both their lives forever. One gains new opportunities that would otherwise never be afforded to them, while the other gains redemption and a well-deserved personal sense of piety. Most importantly, the white audience gets to feel good about themselves.
One problem with white saviour films is that they perpetuate the archaic paradigm of the white man’s burden. They tell stories of white people going outside of their privilege to help people of colour who ultimately can’t or won’t help themselves. Whether it’s Uncle Sam bringing "civility, education and religion" to the Philippines or Clint Eastwood teaching his young Hmong neighbour how to be a "real man," it’s the same old story being played out again and again. It’s been colonialism’s best justification since Manifest Destiny in real life, as well as the template plot for movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, Finding Forrester, Gran Torino, Freedom Writers, The Blind Side...
(Why we never saw a remake of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady with Michael Cain as Henry Higgins and Rosie Perez as Eliza Doolittle, I’ll never know. Perhaps that would have been a little too on the nose.)2
Another problem with stories focusing on white heroes is that the reality of people of colour working hard to improve their communities goes largely ignored. Just like the selective telling of history in textbooks, the audiences of white saviour films walk away with the message that it is only white people that are doing anything to change things for the better. While there are films telling the stories of some of these individuals striving to improve the lives of the underprivileged, they are a disproportionate exception. For every Lean On Me there are at least three or four Dangerous Minds, a film which also exemplifies yet another issue.
"Destroyers and usurpers, curse them."3
The movie Dangerous Minds, which purports to be based on a true story, stars Michelle Pfieffer as a LouAnne Johnson, a white English teacher who tries to help her inner-city high school students learn an appreciation for poetry through the lyrics of Bob Dylan. The "based on a true story" isn’t entirely dishonest. There really was a woman named LouAnne Johnson who used musical lyricism to connect with her underfunded inner-city high school students; in fact, it was her book, My Posse Don't Do Homework (year?) was the inspiration for the film. The betrayal in the movie adaptation is that the real LouAnne Johnson was Latina and used rap music.
The filmmakers had a profound opportunity to tell the story of a non-white person inspiring a group of inner-city Black and Latino students, who had been otherwise written off, to become engaged with their own destiny. Instead, they chose to usurp LouAnne Johnson, while the movie tirelessly extolls the virtues of being white.
(And if that doesn’t churn your stomach just a little bit, wait until next summer’s release about the true story of the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for School Children Program, starring Tom Cruise.)4
What are students supposed to make of such history? What is an audience supposed to make of such movies? The constant message is that white people shape the world; non-white people are passive participants merely benefiting from those efforts. White people are the only ones with the faculty to improve anyone’s situation; non-whites are unorganized, hapless people, doomed until saved by the good will of their white saviours. Moreover, the white protagonist is usually the only character to have any depth or character development, while non-white supporting characters are foils to the white protagonist, and largely without history. The million-dollar film budget question is, why are white people the only ones deserving of inspiration?
The fact that none of these movies even mention, much less try to really address, the issue of systemic racism, is an appalling failure. The tragedy of over-crowded and under-funded inner city classrooms is never explained. It’s never explained why these under privileged people are under-privileged to begin with. The situation is presented without any nuance, save for the givenness of white privilege.
White saviour movies, like their history text counterparts, are designed to reinforce and perpetuate white privilege. White audiences get to walk away from these films feeling good about being white, and they are never prompted to empathize with supporting non-white characters. Furthermore, white audience members are never confronted with their own privilege or internalized racism. They are let completely off the hook for their own roles and responsibilities in the perpetuation of a racist power structure.
Since more whites than non-whites are shown throughout our pop culture as the people effecting change, the lesson inferred is that these individual cases we see in movies and on TV are the rule, when they are really the exception. This leads to a false sense of racial justice in the minds of all audience members. Just as the election of Barack Obama led some white Americans to actually believe that the West was entering a "post-racial" state [*insert bellowing gut laugh here*], white saviour films give white audience members the notion that they don’t have to do anything about racism themselves because look, there are plenty of examples of white people out there doing good!
Back to the history question, Loewen deftly points out that "the Eurocentric history in our textbooks amounts to psychotherapy for whites." To run with this simile, I would liken these white saviour films to psychotherapy for whites with a bonus happy ending. But like the history behind them, there is much therapy needed to right the normalization of whiteness, which is plainly wrong.
- Both Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America as well as Loewen’s Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism are required reading, especially for those in the US. Get your hands on them now or turn in your "progressive" card.
- FYI, Columbia and CBS Films are actually in development for a remake My Fair Lady with Keira Knightly being considered for the role of Eliza.
- Yes, that is Treebeard from JRR Tolken’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The nerd in me couldn’t resist.
- I’m kidding.
Mike Barber is an independent filmmaker with a particular interest in issues surrounding social justice. He is currently directing "A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada," a feature documentary exploring how a false sense of history—both taught in the classroom and repeated throughout the national historical narrative—impinges on the present. It examines how 200 years of institutional slavery during Canada’s formation has been kept out of Canadian classrooms, textbooks and social consciousness. He is currently based in Montreal, Quebec. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/... (@apastdenied)
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CDC says African Americans are most affected by HIV in the US - Stephen Menendian
AIDS is a disease that has now claimed the lives of over 25 million people. It would be a mistake to think that deaths from AIDS are no longer a common occurrence, or that the possibility of treatment has solved the epidemic. The rates of HIV infection are growing faster than expected. Even worse, according to the UN, 2 million people died from HIV related complications in 2008 alone.
African Americans are far and away the racial and ethnic group most affected by HIV in the United States. Of those living with the disease in the United States, almost half are African-American. According to the CDC, Black men and women are ten times more likely to contract the disease as white men and women. Although Black men and women only count for 12% of the US population, they counted for 45% of all new infections in 2006 and 49% in 2007. By comparison, the next most affected group, Hispanics, account for 17% of new infections in 2006.
Over one million Americans are HIV positive, many of whom are unaware of it. Although efforts to create a vaccine along with aggressive education and testing to prevent the spread of the disease are important and vital, we should not forget the struggles of those who live with the disease. In the film Precious, Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones discovers, after getting her life on track, that she is infected with HIV as a result of being repeatedly raped by her father. We should never forget the Precious’s out there.
We can and should do more to support those living with the disease, to develop better life-sustaining treatments, to make those treatments affordable and accessible, and to give proper care to those living with the disease.
December 1st was World AIDS Day.
Stephen Menendian works as a senior legal research associate for the Kirwan Institute. His work involves analysis and advocacy around civil rights, human rights, anti-discrimination law, and citizenship. In 2004, he worked as a law clerk for the Equal Justice Foundation. Stephen is a licensed attorney and a proud member of the Ohio Bar. He received his J.D. from the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University and a B. A. in Economics from Ohio University.
Research Interests: The Fourteenth Amendment, Civil Rights, Democratic Norms
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The continuing struggle for justice in Bhopal
— By Rajeev Ravisankar
A gas leak at a pesticide factory operated by Union Carbide Company (UCC) killed more than 20,000 people and exposed over 500,000 people to toxic gas and chemicals. On December 3, 1984 the people of Bhopal, India were subjected to one of the world’s worst industrial disasters.
As a result of this exposure, thousands of people were disabled. For years children have been born with birth defects. Currently, hundreds of tons of toxic waste remain at the site, and chemical processing not directly related to the disaster has contaminated the drinking water in the area. In the words of Indian writer and activist Praful Bidwai, "The past 25 years in Bhopal make a story of death, disease and devastation, of injustice piled upon injustice, humiliation compounded by callousness, monumental corruption eating into miserable compensation, and of denial of rehabilitation."
Survivors continue to fight for justice and are fighting to hold accountable those who bear responsibility. One of those responsible is the CEO of Union Carbide at that time Warren Anderson, and Dow Chemical which now owns the company. This summer, an Indian court issued a warrant to arrest Mr. Anderson, and called for his extradition. He is now living luxuriously in the Hamptons.
One of the many painful lessons of this tragedy that is still playing out today is how a corporation, through a concerted public relations campaign and with deft legal maneuvering, can effectively deny culpability regardless of its devastating impact on human lives, the environment, and society. Never mind that Union Carbide ignored warnings of major hazards, cut costs, provided only limited emergency equipment, employed a flawed safety system in the Bhopal plant, and also disposed toxic waste into evaporation ponds.
Union Carbide sold its stake in its Indian subsidiary before being purchased by Dow Chemical. Dow in turn argues that it did not inherit any of Union Carbide’s liabilities and points to the paltry compensation settlement with the Indian government. Explaining the company’s position, Dow’s public relations representative Kathy Hunt stated, "You can’t really do more than that, can you? $500 is plenty good for an Indian."
Such a statement is an articulation of a widespread ‘dominator mentality,’ which favors individuals of certain nationalities, upper classes and castes, and values their lives over all others. It isn’t shocking coming from a company that refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for supplying the incendiary weapon napalm and the poisonous defoliant Agent Orange to the US military during the war on Vietnam. Both of these have had horrifying human consequences, but these results are of little concern to Dow.
Despite this complete disregard for human life and the environment, Dow’s interest in expanding its investments and operations in India raises no alarm due to the increasing nexus between government and corporations. The Indian state is willing to bend over backwards for multinational corporations and is more concerned about attracting foreign investment than protecting the rights of its own citizens. The notion of citizenship within a democracy has been completely turned on its head.
US business leaders, and so-called captains of Indian Industry like Ratan Tata, the head of India’s largest conglomerate, have urged their respective governments to oppose efforts to extradite Warren Anderson or hold Dow accountable.
Top government officials listen, and some, shockingly, go the extra mile. For example, Minister of State for Environment Jairam Ramesh recently visited the disaster site and said "I held the toxic waste in my hand. I am still alive and not coughing. It’s 25 years after the gas tragedy. Let us move ahead." This coincides with plans to open the site to the public and promote some sort of disaster tourism.
According to Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh responded to a question on Bhopal similarly, simply saying the country needs to move forward.
While corporate bigwigs want to erase public memory of the tragedy, major politicians wish to be post-Bhopal, in an illusory situation beyond a deeply troubling past. However, for survivors there is no post-Bhopal moment, the past is very much a part of the present, a reality they live and confront daily. As they march forward for remediation and justice, we should stand in solidarity and insist on remembering what happened to ensure that there are no more Bhopals.
For more information:
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal
Greenpeace India: The Bhopal Legacy