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Paula is Currently Reading

Paula is currently reading

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

by Harriet A. Washington

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Paula said: " Written by a social worker of fundamentalist level Kantian ethics. So far, it’s a rehash of other books that have done it better, from slavery through exploitation and exhibition of living people of color as well as abusing their dead bodies, through Written by a social worker of fundamentalist level Kantian ethics. So far, it’s a rehash of other books that have done it better, from slavery through exploitation and exhibition of living people of color as well as abusing their dead bodies, through Tuskegee Experiment ( Which she refers to as the Macon PHS Study to create distance from Tuskegee university, which is a fabulous progressive school With a very high African American % of students, sometimes called the black Harvard...) through eugenics through the development of birth control in the 60s and debates over restricting publicly funding access and forcing it on young women of color as well as paternalism in medicine throughout.

If you’ve never read anything on the topic, this is a complete litany and a nice place to start to understand the complete history. If you have some knowledge of sociocultural America it becomes very tedious, and I often need a break before I could return to it. You must be a Kantian ethicist to not eventually roll your eyes as she belabors her arguments.
There are better books, such as Bad Blood and the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks for example that cover this material more completely and more personally, through the experience of the people who lived it and with more historical context that I personally found more relatable, complete and understandable in light of what we know about other genocides and ethno-racially based policies accepted world wide across the centuries.
Often in this genre, and any public discussion of race in America there is a continuum between ascribing deliberate malfeasance, people who want to torture,eradicate and subjugate for sadistic pleasure or subconscious prejudice vs an equally blind perspective of best intentions and benign paternalism. Both are gross oversimplifications of very complex situations with many participants... and if you’ve ever worked with more than one person, you know this level of consensus is not a thing.

The thing that turns me off about this book is the strictly Kantian ethics it adheres to (not in itself a problem) but the authors willingness to ascribe motivations to the participants. If you are not familiar, Emanuel Kant says the Only thing that makes an action or thought ethical is the motivation behind it, on the individual level, and the outcome is irrelevant. The opposite school is utilitarian ethics, which says the most good for the most people is most ethical.. so the outcome is most important. As human beings we understand that neither of these settle every question, and more importantly no human, forget a large group of humans that come together to create any type of social policy ever makes a decision based solely on strict adherence to one of these criteria. The author has very black and white (excuse the pun) viewpoint..
it is very true that black people are disproportionately the victim, of racism, of poverty, of violence, of lack of quality care, of social and legal injustice, of grossly underperforming community services ... but when you’re always “the victim” in the sense of a purposeful victimizer, or worse, a united coterie of purposeful victimizers across every aspect of white society that all agree (yeah, right) we are not coming to the heart of the argument... which is, or I think should be and one day can be- how do we pick out the bad seeds? how did things go wrong? By design, by context, by intention? and today it can not be as simple as white people hate black people- at least not if there is any hope, and not if we want to honor those who have come before us to make positive change in reducing the us vs them attitude that so many other cultures and communities have overcome to a much greater extent than we have.
This is very much an us vs them book. Exemplified by the passages on the advent of chemical and/or physical barrier reversible birth control The author takes the position it was applied, but ONLY in the sense it was either withheld or forced without consent. When new medication delivery methods hit the market, if new cutting edge meds were only available to rich white women who can pay exorbitant costs - it was withheld. When it was systemically made available to poor inner city young black girls, they are cast as unwitting lab animals, or worse, conscripted into a genocide against never conceived children of black adolescents. Those two things can only be true if you believe in a unified conspiracy by white people against black.. again, it describes issues in a way that ascribes internal motivations. We must look deeper into these events, because the devil is Always in the details.
This book details events that cause and continue to support iatrophobia, but takes it too far when rather than saying it’s understandable to be fearful that you might be victimized based on this history, she states it’s “reasonable to speculate” worse atrocities did happen, were covered up, and continue today. Sounds like semantics, but it’s not. Young black men are shot by police grossly disproportionately, that doesn’t mean its reasonable to suspect cops are shooting black men and burying the bodies. It’s it possible? Sure. Is it reasonable to suspect exponentially worse behavior that involves more people, larger conspiracies that’s more morally reprehensible somehow easier to keep quiet? No.
In short, it’s divisive, encourages iatrophobia, takes a strictly Kantian viewpoint allowing the author to both invent internal motivations in order to deride or canonize participants across strictly black and white lines... both in terms of their skin color and their actions.
It’s disheartening and tiring. If you want an objective accounting or a subjective lived-life experience, you will be dissatisfied. ...more "

Jan 23, 2021 03:24PM · see review