4 ms·

To me racism has a pretty simple litmus test - would you treat an individual of another race, but in an otherwise identical background situation differently? If

To me racism has a pretty simple litmus test - would you treat an individual of another race, but in an otherwise identical background situation differently? If yes, then it's probably racist. If not, then it's probably not. So Tuskegee has some interesting backstory. It was inspired by a similar experiment that was carried out in Norway that followed the progression of untreated syphilis in thousands of people over decades. [1] That study provided extensive data and information on the progression of syphilis, but at the time it was believed that syphilis affected different races in different ways. And black Americans had (and still have) infection rates dramatically higher than other major groups. So this meant that studying this exact group could not only be overall most impactful on a population basis, but was also the least well understood group (as the Norwegian study presumably lacked much of anybody of African ancestry) and so the most most likely to yield novel/informative science. So if these individuals had otherwise been just another subgroup of whites (but one still had reason to think syphilis might affect them differently than e.g. Norwegians), would we still have carried out this experiment? It's impossible to say for certain, but I think the answer is probably yes. Not only was such experimentation already happening across the globe, including in relatively homogeneous societies, but there have been all sorts of other US government driven experiments on the population where white groups were just as readily experimented on like MKUltra [2], Operation Sea Spray [3], and so on endlessly. [1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0021968155901399 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002196... (note the date on the paper) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray

mandmandam 2y ago
Did you ... Did you just try and. use MK Ultra and Operation Sea-Spray to claim the Tuskegee experiments weren't racist? :o Systemic racism in medical research cannot be justified by comparing it to other unethical experiments... Really would have thought that was obvious? Also, even the analogies are terribly flawed. The Oslo experiments involved retrospective examination of medical records and autopsies, not the withholding of treatment. And Tuskegee victims were not informed of the real nature of the study - a clear ethical violation which disproportionately targeted a vulnerable racial group.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  That is not what happened in Oslo. This is the lead paragraph of the abstract of the paper from it: ---- Nowhere in the world is there a more unique opportunity to learn what happens when early syphilis goes untreated than from the files of Boeck of Oslo, Norway. His scientific conviction as to the inadequacies of the specific treatment of the day led him to withhold treatment from approximately 2,000 patients with primary and secondary syphilis during the twenty-year period, 1891–1910. Community protection from infection was aided by the hospitalization of these patients until all traces of the disease had disappeared (from 1 to 12 months, average 3.6 months). In 1929, his successor, E. Bruusgaard, reported on a follow-up study of 473 of these patients and provided information on the outcome of untreated syphilis, which has formed the basis for prognostic statements on syphilis for more than twenty-five years. ---- In Oslo the patients were both hospitalized and then had treatment withheld. His successor then carried out a retrospective study on what happened. It's unclear what the patients were told, but I suspect it was not 'We're going to hospitalize you for months, but not treat you.'
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    This is a side-point, quite apart from the fact that you claimed Tuskegee wasn't racist because MK-ULTRA also affected white people. I really hope you think that one over, because it's a truly horrid and utterly indefensible take. And you're still very wrong on this side-point, because from 1891 to 1910, there was no known effective treatment for syphilis. Whereas during Tuskegee (1932-1972), penicillin was both widely available for most of that time and known to be effective. I don't know why you're making these awful comparisons, but I'm interested how you formed these views. Did you hear these arguments on a podcast somewhere, or are they your own? ... And why on Earth would you think Peter Buxtun's death was the appropriate time to bring them up??
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      When one looks at history, it's like we're on a loop. And I think a big part of that is because we fail to ever "really" learn from the past. And I think one part of that is demonizing the past with labels, instead of actually trying to understand what really happened and why. Because when we overly demonize things it makes it impossible to imagine any reasonable person, let alone ourselves, ever engaging in anything even remotely awful - 'it could never happen again.' But of course it will, and it won't just be "evil" people doing it. So to your post here - you're again factually mistaken. There were indeed numerous treatments for syphilis in the 19th century, as the paper specifically mentions treatment being withheld should have clued you into. These treatments had significant side effects, but such is often the nature of medicine. What would you think of a doctor that intentionally withheld chemo or other similarly dangerous treatments to thousands of cancer patients, to instead observe what happened to them absent treatment? That is what happened in Norway, and again I'm sure the doctor had the best of intentions, presumably he was working to develop a more effective treatment. If you have any factual or logical arguments I'm more than happy to hear them, and indeed perhaps there is something I am not considering. But I find the appeals to emotion and bias mixed with a healthy helping of ad hominem and straw man quite silly, and I will not engage with that.
bobthepanda 2y ago
That's not really why the study was conducted on African Americans. > The conception which lay behind the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee in 1932, in which 100% of its participants were poor, rural African-American men with very limited access to health information, reflects the racial attitudes in the U.S. at that time. The clinicians who led the study assumed that African-Americans were particularly susceptible to venereal diseases because of their race, and they assumed that the study's participants were not interested in receiving medical treatment.[4][45] > Taliaferro Clark said, "The rather low intelligence of the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference with regards to treatment."[45] In reality, the promise of medical treatment, usually reserved only for emergencies among the rural black population of Macon County, Alabama, was what secured subjects' cooperation in the study.[4] I mean the other racist part was the fact that penicillin, which is still a standard treatment of syphilis today, was developed while the study was ongoing and yet there were still three more decades that it ran.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  >> Taliaferro Clark said, "The rather low intelligence of the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference with regards to treatment."... This is a fairly sickening mindset. I hope I am never not sickened by it.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Strange. I have no problem reading it as a literal description with no bigotry or racism implied.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      If it were about J.R.R. Tolkien's orcs, then I might agree. When basic observation disproves ¾ of your "literal description" about a racially-defined population… those "facts" probably didn't originate from honest mistakes. It's possible to be racist while using objective language: there's an entire Wikipedia article on scientific racism.

mandmandam 2y ago

Did you ... Did you just try and. use MK Ultra and Operation Sea-Spray to claim the Tuskegee experiments weren't racist? :o Systemic racism in medical research cannot be justified by comparing it to other unethical experiments... Really would have thought that was obvious? Also, even the analogies are terribly flawed. The Oslo experiments involved retrospective examination of medical records and autopsies, not the withholding of treatment. And Tuskegee victims were not informed of the real nature of the study - a clear ethical violation which disproportionately targeted a vulnerable racial group.

somenameforme 2y ago
That is not what happened in Oslo. This is the lead paragraph of the abstract of the paper from it: ---- Nowhere in the world is there a more unique opportunity to learn what happens when early syphilis goes untreated than from the files of Boeck of Oslo, Norway. His scientific conviction as to the inadequacies of the specific treatment of the day led him to withhold treatment from approximately 2,000 patients with primary and secondary syphilis during the twenty-year period, 1891–1910. Community protection from infection was aided by the hospitalization of these patients until all traces of the disease had disappeared (from 1 to 12 months, average 3.6 months). In 1929, his successor, E. Bruusgaard, reported on a follow-up study of 473 of these patients and provided information on the outcome of untreated syphilis, which has formed the basis for prognostic statements on syphilis for more than twenty-five years. ---- In Oslo the patients were both hospitalized and then had treatment withheld. His successor then carried out a retrospective study on what happened. It's unclear what the patients were told, but I suspect it was not 'We're going to hospitalize you for months, but not treat you.'
- mandmandam 2y ago
  This is a side-point, quite apart from the fact that you claimed Tuskegee wasn't racist because MK-ULTRA also affected white people. I really hope you think that one over, because it's a truly horrid and utterly indefensible take. And you're still very wrong on this side-point, because from 1891 to 1910, there was no known effective treatment for syphilis. Whereas during Tuskegee (1932-1972), penicillin was both widely available for most of that time and known to be effective. I don't know why you're making these awful comparisons, but I'm interested how you formed these views. Did you hear these arguments on a podcast somewhere, or are they your own? ... And why on Earth would you think Peter Buxtun's death was the appropriate time to bring them up??
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    When one looks at history, it's like we're on a loop. And I think a big part of that is because we fail to ever "really" learn from the past. And I think one part of that is demonizing the past with labels, instead of actually trying to understand what really happened and why. Because when we overly demonize things it makes it impossible to imagine any reasonable person, let alone ourselves, ever engaging in anything even remotely awful - 'it could never happen again.' But of course it will, and it won't just be "evil" people doing it. So to your post here - you're again factually mistaken. There were indeed numerous treatments for syphilis in the 19th century, as the paper specifically mentions treatment being withheld should have clued you into. These treatments had significant side effects, but such is often the nature of medicine. What would you think of a doctor that intentionally withheld chemo or other similarly dangerous treatments to thousands of cancer patients, to instead observe what happened to them absent treatment? That is what happened in Norway, and again I'm sure the doctor had the best of intentions, presumably he was working to develop a more effective treatment. If you have any factual or logical arguments I'm more than happy to hear them, and indeed perhaps there is something I am not considering. But I find the appeals to emotion and bias mixed with a healthy helping of ad hominem and straw man quite silly, and I will not engage with that.

bobthepanda 2y ago

That's not really why the study was conducted on African Americans. > The conception which lay behind the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee in 1932, in which 100% of its participants were poor, rural African-American men with very limited access to health information, reflects the racial attitudes in the U.S. at that time. The clinicians who led the study assumed that African-Americans were particularly susceptible to venereal diseases because of their race, and they assumed that the study's participants were not interested in receiving medical treatment.[4][45] > Taliaferro Clark said, "The rather low intelligence of the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference with regards to treatment."[45] In reality, the promise of medical treatment, usually reserved only for emergencies among the rural black population of Macon County, Alabama, was what secured subjects' cooperation in the study.[4] I mean the other racist part was the fact that penicillin, which is still a standard treatment of syphilis today, was developed while the study was ongoing and yet there were still three more decades that it ran.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
>> Taliaferro Clark said, "The rather low intelligence of the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference with regards to treatment."... This is a fairly sickening mindset. I hope I am never not sickened by it.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Strange. I have no problem reading it as a literal description with no bigotry or racism implied.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    If it were about J.R.R. Tolkien's orcs, then I might agree. When basic observation disproves ¾ of your "literal description" about a racially-defined population… those "facts" probably didn't originate from honest mistakes. It's possible to be racist while using objective language: there's an entire Wikipedia article on scientific racism.