03/26/2008
Kathleen Parker, writing on NRO, thinks that evil that white people have done is responsible for black paranoia:
Black history, meanwhile, makes it possible for many to accept the theory advanced by Wright that white men invented the AIDS virus to destroy black populations. After all, the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis study, in which about 400 black men with syphilis were left untreated and uninformed as part of an experiment, was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service.Given that history, the AIDS theory doesn’t require much of a leap for many in the black community. The AIDS virus has hit African Americans harder than any other group. For blacks in the United States, HIV/AIDS is a leading cause of death, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).[PDF] Even though blacks account for about 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 49 percent of those who get HIV and AIDS. Whites account for 31 percent.
A white person might view these statistics on the CDC website and understand that blacks suffer more in part because of barriers such as poverty, sexually transmitted disease, and cultural stigmas that put blacks at higher risk. Blacks — especially those under the spell of Wrighteousness — might view the same information and at least wonder if something else is going on.[White America’s Blind Spot Racial harmony will require more than hope. By Kathleen Parker, March 26, 2008]
Of course, the problem with this is that the general belief about the Tuskegee Study is simply not true, and has been debunked here on VDARE.com by Jared Taylor, and by anthropologist Richard Shweder in the pages of Spiked Magazine.[Tuskegee Re-examined, January 8, 2004] It was conducted at least partly under the auspices of Booker T. Washington's famous Tuskegee Institute, hence the name. The study was run at least partly by Dr Eugene Dibble, right, and Nurse Eunice Rivers, left, who were black, and associated with the Tuskegee Institute’s John Andrew Hospital.
The reason for allowing some people, (who, if I have to say this, were not infected by the government, but had acquired the disease themselves in the ordinary way) to remain untreated was that was one of the normal options for dealing with a disease that, pre-antibiotics, had few good or safe treatments. Shweder writes that syphilis therapy in the 1930’s was "so weak, hazardous, lengthy, costly and difficult to administer that very few people with syphilis were willing to tolerate the drugs for the full course of the treatment."
In layman’s language, this included things that didn’t work, things that made you sick, and things that made you scream when the doctor did them to you. Arsenic was involved.
The problem with the Tuskegee Institute study and the black community isn’t the study itself, but the black community’s reaction to it, and that’s caused by men like Jeremiah Wright, preaching on it day after day, and year after year. And it’s wrong for Kathleen Parker to suggest that it’s somehow OK for Jeremiah Wright to be preaching that AIDS was deliberately invented by whites as an attack on black people.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.