The American Medical Association recently apologized
to Black doctors for effectively keeping them out of the professional
association for most of its history. The AMA has much to apologize for to a
great many people, including its many decades of resistance to meaningful
national health care. But the white doctors' offenses against Black people go
way beyond political differences over how the U.S. medical system should be
organized. The AMA was guilty of failure to treat all human beings as equally
worthy of life.
This ghoulish attitude toward non-white human life was
routine among white practitioners of medicine in the 1800s, during which period
medical experimentation on Black slaves is well documented. Indeed, such
experiments by private physicians were deemed praiseworthy - good science - no
matter what happened to the Black human guinea pigs. A recent book by a Black
woman, Harriet Washington, provides a comprehensive history of the Dr. Mengeles
who thrived as respected men of science while their hands dripped with the
blood of innocents. Ms. Washington's volume is called Medical
Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from
Colonial Times to the Present. In a February, 2007 interview with Democracy Now!, Ms.
Washington explained how whites claimed that Blacks were especially suited to
experimentation, since they were said not to feel pain as white people did; it
was thought that they fight not be fully human, at all. However, one should not
dignify the supposed racial theories of the criminals and torturers with
medical degrees. The screams of real pain from their Black victims were
certainly unmistakable, and the utility of using Blacks for experiments was
precisely that they were human, that they would suffer horribly and die.
"White supremacy made it perfectly
alright for white physicians to not only support, but demand segregated public
medical facilities."
No, the American medical
profession has experimented on Black subjects since colonial days simply
because white men had the power to do so. That, not medical ignorance, is the
bright red line that runs through generations of professional butchery: white
supremacy.
It is the same white supremacy
that made it perfectly alright for white physicians to not only support, but demand
segregated public medical facilities, and to zealously defend their "right" to
withhold medical treatment from Blacks, as they saw fit. Compared to this
hellacious history, the refusal of American Medical Association chapters to
admit Black physicians seems almost a minor complaint. Blacks formed their own,
National Medical Association, in 1895.
So now the AMA has apologized, and
some Black doctors are saying, Better late than never. But the same attitudes
that led to ghastly medical experimentation on Blacks, generations ago,
continue to influence patterns of medical outcomes, today. Study after study
shows that many doctors treat Black illness, and Black pain, as somehow
different from white illness, and white pain. As a real doctor might say, we
are looking at the same underlying pathology: white supremacy. For Black Agenda
Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
In this week’s segment, we discuss the status of talks between Iran and the U.S.
Ajamu Baraka is a Black Agenda Report contributing editor and Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Right
Navid Zarrinnal is an Iranian journalist. He joins us from Iran to discuss the fragile "cease fire," Trump's threats, the Strait of Hormuz, how Iran's defense capabilities have frustrated the U.S.,…
Dimitri Lascaris speaks with Ajamu Baraka about Colombia's Presidential Election and Gustavo Petro's allegation that Israel tampered with the voting tabulation to bring about a razor-thin victory for…
The bipartisan consensus for regime change against Iran hit the wall of Iranian resistance. But Trump is forced into talks while democrats attack him from the right and expose themselves as partners…
