In the midst of Jim Crow and segregation, white institutions experimented on young Black men to observe what effects syphilis and other STDs would have on human beings.
Please read that again: White institutions experimented on young Black men to observe what effects syphilis and other STDs would have on human beings.
What they did NOT do was, experiment on Black men exposed to syphilis to see what would happen to Black people.
Do you understand the implications here?
THEY KNEW THAT BLACK MEN WERE HUMAN BEINGS, JUST. LIKE. THEM.
White people knew this. They understood that if a disease affects a human being who happened to be Black, then it would likely have similar effects on white people. Racists have always understood that Black human beings were human, just like them.
This fact makes racism even more evil and insidious.
And yet, we still have things like medical racism, where “doctors” and “healthcare professionals” treat Black people—not “people of color” but specifically Black people—as if we are somehow different; as if we somehow do not experience pain in the same way as other human beings.
Here is the hypocrisy: Black people are human enough to experiment on, and we are human enough to use our very cells for cures to cancers that effect all humans, but somehow we still are not quite human enough to be treated humanely … we aren’t quite human enough to be treated equally. Not human enough to be seen as human.
You know how capitalism privatizes the wealth but socializes the poverty? It’s exactly the same with anti-Blackness. Institutions will monetize Blackness when it is profitable, and demonize Blackness at all other times.
This is not a mistake, nor is it coincidental that this paradigm - anti-Blackness, racism and profitizing pain & inequalities - aligns so neatly with capitalism.
And I’m adding this last statement because as obvious as it is to me and many others, apparently it still needs to be said: in America, the West and many Eastern countries, anti-Blackness is the racism on which all other racism & colorism is supported.
