Buxton himself could be self-effacing about his actions, saying he did not anticipate the vitriolic reaction of some health officials when he started questioning the study’s ethics.
Humans relentlessly believe themselves to be just and righteous. To maintain that self-sense, they will gladly deceive themselves — and often much worse.
As non-American, it's a strange feeling to see all these discussions about racism. It took me a while to understand that the whole perception of the issue is just completely different.
I’ve lived here for ~10 years and I’m still learning. The base realization is that if you come from a mostly homogenous (or openly racist a la apartheid) background, you simply can’t understand how American style racism works.
In my home country we have so few black and asian people that exact numbers can’t be reported in the census because it would be considered personal information. Sure we have racism but it’s purely of the “fear of new/unknown” kind. Anything more than that we learned from american media.
A better analogy, if you come from such a background, might be to replace racism with ethnicism. We’re really good at ethnicism in Europe in a way that’s a lot more similar to how america does racism.
Its not quite that. The US is also different from other countries with large non-white minorities. I think you are right that race, ethnicity and other things (such as caste) are much the same thing: you are classified by some group you are born into, and you and your descendants cannot move out of. However it is also different in every culture.
It look me a long time to understand how the US is different from countries I know (which are definitely not homogenous, though some are fairly openly racist). I could see race was much more ingrained in the culture compared to the UK, but did not understand why. The insight for me (mostly thanks to Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste) is that race in American is a caste distinction: it is a hierarchy rather than just hostility to the outsider.
I wrote a blog post on this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
I would posit it’s not a caste system similar to India’s caste system or old school feudalism. Being an outsider definitely plays a part for instance the treatment of Italian immigrants. In my experience if you’re part of a certain group you might or will get mistreated but if you’re part of that group and also an outsider oof you’re in for one tortured existence. Which is kind of contradictory because the USA is one of the few places that openly welcomes outsiders (like you don’t see migrants trying to go to China or Russia) but at the same time if you’re deemed persona non grata like for whatever reason the land will mess with your life, health and so on unlike any other place
How is it not a caste system? A caste system can ALSO be hostile to outsiders on an ethnic or religious basis (plenty of examples of both in South Asia!) in addition to the caste system.
Feudalism is not a caste system. In a feudal system people can move up and down to some extent, and over generations people can move a lot. It was possible for people to marry to at least some extent. There is no notion of pure blood or pollution.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228717335_Was_there...
In a caste system, your "worth" is decided at birth based on what caste system you are born into, and your opportunities and relationships are determined by that.
The US has some of the highest rates of interracial marriages, relationships, etc. in the world. Mobility in America is driven by socioeconomic class, not race, and gender plays a heavy role in educational success in some races (more than race itself), but not others, for various historical reasons.
In order to cast U.S. racial relations into a type "caste" system, you'd have to stretch the definition of caste so thin that it wouldn't have any meaning.
It was historically a caste system though, especially in the South up to the sixties, and there are remnants of that. No doubt it is a weakened caste system, and hopefully dying one, but it still seems present.
Americans seem to still, at the least, attach a lot of importance to race, and to classifying people by race. It is seen as fundamental to who people are: a lot of Americans who seem fine with someone self-identifying their gender find it far harder to accept someone self-identifying their race. Why not? A lot of people report assumptions are made on the basis of race. In a lot of conversations I have with Americans about race seem to assume that people are likely to be overtly treated differently on the basis of their appearance.
I do not know the US so maybe I am out of date or have read the wrong things but I find it a lot harder to understand the importance Americans (not just racists, but people trying to be anti-racist too) attach to race if I am wrong.
If I were to wildly speculate, I might guess that many Americans think of gender as being about presentation and experience, while "race" is almost entirely about shared experience - which, yes, is often informed by reactions to one's appearance, or lack thereof, but that's not the identifying characteristic.
So it comes across as similarly distasteful to someone claiming to be "long lost Uncle Eddie", because they saw your family through the glass at a holiday and liked what they saw - since you weren't here for a billion shared little experiences, and there's no claim that you were from the same grandparents or similar, it rings hollow and like you want something from it.
Interesting idea. How much shared experience is there though - for example between poor and affluent people of the same race? What about immigrant groups who look similar but have very different culture and experiences? I cannot imagine an affluent black African immigrant will have much in common with a poor black American. I know that (in the UK, but it would be just as true in the US) that I do not have much shared experience with other people who look like me (South Asian to Western eyes) but come from different cultures types of area (urban vs rural is a big difference) and family backgrounds.
maybe I am out of date or have read the wrong things
No, I think you have a better grasp on it than most people outside the US. Americans really want to believe we don’t have a caste system, because it’s antithetical to our origin story and what we feel is true about ourselves, but we absolutely do. So if you listen to us talk, you’ll think we don’t have a caste system. If you watch our actions, you’ll see we still do.
The US has some of the highest rates of interracial marriages, relationships, etc. in the world
This is a fairly recent development. As recently as 1995 (1 generation ago), the majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages.
I think this is still the case opinions regarding stuff like this isn’t just voiced in public anymore so it gives the appearance of shifting stats
I think with things like this people lie to themselves as well. You might say "I am OK with it" but not be 100% comfortable but want to avoid thinking of yourself as racist.
Rich African Americans are still looked down on by some in comparison to rich whites. There is not as much mobility as you would think
For European racism, just bring up the Roma and wait for a European to say things that no one in any American city would say.
It's different.
Europeans are proud of hating gypsies, we just don't bring this up around Americans because of how poorly they react when we show them our point of view. Racism and pedophilia are two most sensitive topics for Americans, who feel like they're on the holy mission to free the world from these two evils.
Europeans are proud of hating gypsies
What are even talking about? Please don't extrapolate your own views on the population of a whole continent.
You know, PG said you can disagree with downvotes but if someone says something that they honestly believe and not just to make controversy I think I'd rather upvote them so I can see the post.
So up you go.
If you’re ever “proud” of hating someone, you should go see a therapist. (Or a priest.)
Oh we have quite a bit of racism in Europe too, just go to eastern part. People are not so vocal about it, unless in 'their' circles.
Sure, its all mixed together with fear of different religions, xenophobia which I would say is still dominant force, and its targeted way more on black people rather than east asians, but these days its there, even on places that had 0 of it due to literally 0 exposure to other races few decades ago. I personally saw first black person in person as a teenager for example.
Big parts of societies are quite radicalized if you care to look closely enough, which many don't and consider Europe some form of uniform hippie paradise. But then you can't escape the reality of ie string of victories of more or less extreme right winders all getting the vote 'to stop immigration'. Whole Brexit was fueled mainly by such xenophobia, it would be insignificant fart in the wind without this.
My personal opinion is that before countries like Germany decided to allow unregulated immigration en masse and try to push rest of EU in same direction without asking, serious discussions should have taken place for a long time and explained to common folks why, in what form, for how long, how will it affect them, how will state protect them etc. Instead, at least eastern part went through shock therapy and hence often seen kneejerk reaction of refusing everything.
Oh we have quite a bit of racism in Europe too,
Just mention Romanians and Europeans can pretty quickly get a sense of how racism works in the US
For some context on the Tuskegee "experiment" I'd recommend the two-part series from "You're Wrong About" [0] [1]. Buxtun shows up in the second episode. What I hadn't remembered is that it was 6 years from when he first raised his concerns until they were taken seriously.
[0] Part 1 https://open.spotify.com/episode/1CSuf2U9vM5sYru8RwsqFB [1] Part 2 https://open.spotify.com/episode/6GveYHXn6CdkHoGOZTYv0j
Apologies for the spotify links, I couldn't find their hosted version
I can second these episodes, and the podcast series in general. It's very informative about things that have been "misremembered". Other good series were the OJ Simpson trial, Monica Lewinsky, the Satanic Panic, and of course the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit.
Just recently on Hacker News I saw someone making jokes about this lawsuit being spurious.
Oh gosh, now I'm on a tangent.
Rather than defend "this was not spurious" I'll just say that's how our legal system is set up. The legislative branch is not interested in making reasonable laws, and/or creating capable regulating bodies like most other modern countries. Your recourse here is to sue, hopefully there is an appropriate decision, and it's taken as precedent. Of course we've gone further in that direction in recent history.
I don't know if it is fair to say people "misremembered" the details of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. As the news media and pop culture weirdly seemed to go out of their way to paint McDonald's as the victim and the woman as negligent, people never knew the correct details at the time to begin with.
The media also follow trends. I remember all through the '90s there was a trend of reporting frivolous cases as news, probably for sensationalist purposes. The ones I remembered were "prisoner sues because his ice cream melted", burglar sues after falling out of rafters". These type of stories were popular on morning radio programs.
What I want to know is if Ms Liebeck just got lumped into that fad, or if there was economic pressure from McD's to weaken her case. McDonald's advertising spend was HUGE back then, of course on the same media channels that reported about her.
I was a college student at the time and never saw it that way.
I remember in the media there were vigorous debates over this as being "frivolous" but I remember all my friends were on the victims side. Spending days in the hospital to get skin grafting because their coffee was too hot I think far exceeded what someone would classify as "frivolous". I also remember several news reports about how they found out through court documents McDonald's had over 700 reports of burns between 1982-1992 which to me was completely shocking and proved they knew their coffee was way too hot.
Now you see all the warnings on the labels, most of the bigger chains have cardboard sleeves so your hands don't get too hot holding it. McDonald's has since reduced the temperature of their coffee as well.
The only thing I didn't accurately remember was several people told me that the lady initially won her lawsuit, but lost on appeal and McDonald's didn't have to pay her anything. In actuality, she won a sizeable award from the jury, but it was greatly reduced by the judge and then before an appeal, McDonald's finally settled out of court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
I loved the first 20-30 episodes, but at a certain point I got the feeling they had a very significant axe to grind on their supposedly impartial revisiting of some of the events they were looking at.
When they started talking about health outcomes, especially, their tone of "we know what's obviously true, our outgroup is stupid" got too strong for me and I stopped listening.
I'd be interested to know if they've toned that down, at all.
I had some hesitation about recommending them because of this, but going from memory I think it was a good couple of episodes
he legislative branch is not interested in making reasonable laws, and/or creating capable regulating bodies like most other modern countries
That’s the point of a common-law system. Not that I’m defending Congress and how little they get done—I’m not, they’re terrible right now—but we don’t have case law because Congress is terrible. We have case law because that’s how our legal system is meant to work. The legislation lays out the theory, and the details get worked out by judges after theory meets practice. It’s not somehow inferior to civil law, just different.
Common law doesn’t require lawsuits to cover issues like this.
It’s hard to sue a company when they follow quantitative guidelines. However terms like ‘due caution’ punt issues to the courts who then come up with a meaningful standard.
Unfortunately 'creating capable regulating bodies' is no longer possible, in the binding opinion of the Supreme Court.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-court...
Apologies for the spotify links, I couldn't find their hosted version
They are right here:
https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/5330092-tuske...
https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/5418709-tuske...
Thankyou! I'm not sure how I missed them, I got to their website, clicked 'Episodes' expecting to see them, but missed the link to buzzsprout
Wonder why the US thought they needed to continue this experiment when they had access to the results and researchers of Unit 731[0], that did extensive research on syphilis. Kinda makes one think that the racial aspect was the point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#American_grant_of_imm...
> Kinda makes one think that the racial aspect was the point.
Interesting to note that the lowest C19 vaccine rates were in the African American communities. A lot of media outlets have speculated the primary reason for their vaccine hesitancy was this experiment and not trusting the government.
In Tuskegee, Painful History Shadows Efforts To Vaccinate African Americans https://www.npr.org/2021/02/16/967011614/in-tuskegee-painful...
> A lot of media outlets have speculated the primary reason for their vaccine hesitancy was this experiment and not trusting the government.
Combined with the much more recent incident in Pakistan where the CIA staged a fake hepatitis vaccine program to help locate Osama Bin Laden, leading to the resurgence of polio in the country.
The US government just can't help itself in abusing vaccine programs for shady purposes.
As discussed elsewhere, one reason is that at the time Syphilis response was significantly different in Africans. Trials like this had been previously run on Europeans, and 731 would presumably include east Asians and ran for a handful of years, not decades.
Unlike Unit 731, they didn't infect anyone and it was an observational study.
I had learned about this in the Pandemia podcast last year, unfortunately only available in German. But I thought for all the German-speaking HN readers I could share, it's worth listening to: https://superelektrik.de/pandemia/syphilis-geschichte-eines-...
Pandemia is a podcast started during the Covid pandemic, but regularly covering all kinds of diseases and health issues.
Yip, I think this is the main moral to be taken from this incident, and many like it. It's not like the people carrying out these experiments were just sadistic racists. They probably saw themselves as being able to, in the long run, save far more people and create a greater, safer, and healthier society for everybody, being able to eventually treat not only syphilis but any other disease which may manifest similarly.
About the time somebody starts arguing that the ends justifies the means, something has probably gone wrong. Because the "ends" people envision quite rarely come to pass, yet the means of trying to pursue those ends do, with 100% certainty, happen. So most often you end up with all the evils, and none of the utopian justifications at the end of the road.
I don't think a racist ever thought about themselves as racists.
Racism is usually a notion of people having an explanation for why they behave towards another race.
There are always explanations. I don't think there is any racist that doesn't have an explanation.
For American slavery it was that "African Americans" are just animals, not human. So it made sense to use/teat them like donkeys or vermin.
In Nazi Germany, the explanation was that Jews are veramin and so veramin needs to be exterminated.
In South Africa it was a "scientific" theory they had called Holism [0] which basically described that everything should be kept in its place hence apartheid policies.
In Gaza the explanation is religious i.e God have us land X, and this we need to cleanse the land of it's "invaders".
Also, look at caste systems in India. They have explanations of why they do that. They don't see themselves as racist.
The explanations still occur today using "statistics", "data", & "science" with stuff like IQ "research" & "race realism".
"Racist" is something we project on people.
But racists always think they actually have a Nobel or logical cause for thier activities.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism_and_Evolution
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/002196... (note the date on the paper)
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
That's not really why the study was conducted on African Americans.
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.
This is a fairly sickening mindset. I hope I am never not sickened by it.
Strange. I have no problem reading it as a literal description with no bigotry or racism implied.
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.
What was the basic observation that disproves it?
It was a statement about a specific group of people in a specific situation. I assume most of it was based in contemporary reality.
You could probably say the same thing about other places today and be correct.
I think the part that you're missing is that it wasn't a statement about blacks in general, but a particular community of incredibly poor people with zero education. syphilis was in fact rampant in that community, and I imagine that with zero access to healthcare or even detection, they were fairly fatalistic about it. People were more likely to have it than not have it by a huge margin.
You're asking me to provide a recorded observation, as evidence that the people recording "facts" didn't make observations. My theory (as stated) doesn't expect that evidence to exist! If this were debate club, that would be a foul.
Fortunately for my ELO rating, they did make observations that contradicted their bigotry. Per the great-grandparent:
(Racists always do this. Such comorbidities are part of why we have a special name for this special category of "being wrong".)
I Don't understand either if your statements. You said the characterization of Marcon County was obviously wrong, but say there's no possible evidence way they could have known this.
What are you trying to say here? Is this bad? They gave medical care to people who wouldn't have it otherwise.
Getting Medical Care is a reason people of all Races enroll in clinical trials and it's still true today
They had a positive belief. Conventionally, people come to positive beliefs after observing evidence*. I'm accusing them of not doing this. They absolutely could have known better; they simply chose not to look.
*: Exception: beliefs about Other Groups of People, which are conventionally formed by looking at Our Group of People, then inventing ways that Other Groups of People are different and/or worse.
Here is a study that gives a completely encyclopedic coverage of the context, data, and knowledge of the time. [1] If you're at all interested in this topic, I'd strongly encourage checking it out. It is the most extensively informative paper, on any topic, that I have ever seen, by far. I have no idea how many years the author spent collecting the data he presents there but it was clearly a labor of love.
For some relevant points: in Georgia, they carried out widescale syphilis testing, on the scale of hundreds of thousands in 1945. Counties adjacent to Tuskegee reached 89% test coverage, with the outcome being an infection rate of 30% in black individuals and 3% in white individuals. Of course people wouldn't have known the exact numbers back when the Tuskegee study started in 1932, but with such ridiculously high rates of infection, they'd have had a generally accurate idea. It's also accurate that the majority of those who were infected had not proactively sought out medical treatment. That knowledge is part of what led Georgia to mandate the blood tests and pair it alongside recommendations of treatment for those infected. How do you think you would have framed these data at the time with a wide open Overton Window, no notions of political correctness, and so on?
To be clear, as always, I am not defending the Tuskegee experiment, the people who did it, their views, or anything of the sort. They did awful things, obviously. But what I am trying to show is that if we were in their shoes, in the same situation, in the same context, it would have been all too easy to fall into the exact same trappings. It's only by really understanding the past that we might ever try to hope to avoid repeating it. When we simply demonize the past, the only lesson to be learned is don't be a demon. And certainly none of us think ourselves demons, so surely such things could never happen again. But with that mindset, they most assuredly will!
[1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
But it looks to me as though you are tirelessly excusing the researchers and spending many hours starting from the conclusion that there was nothing racist about what went on at Tuskegee and then reasoning backwards.
All humans are capable of racist actions, but some uphold the moral duty to fight against that tendency more conscientiously than others.
Having logical, or indeed even sympathetic, reasons for doing bad things does not excuse doing bad things. This is the entire point, and how history should be studied, because it emphasizes the underlying lessons to be learned. In this thread every attempt to paint the researchers as evil racists is relatively easy to factually rebuke. And it's because they weren't. They easily could have been you or I. And this is why it's so important to study history and actually try to genuinely understand the perspective of bad individuals.
Basically the entirety of evils in human history is people saying 'Okay, I know I'm doing bad things. But I'm a good person and I have very good, exceptional, reasons for doing these bad things. And once this is over we'll have a much better world for everybody, so it's okay in this instance.' And a lot of the times, the logic and rhetoric used is appealing. This is why it's so absolutely important to understand it, study it, and endeavor to never fall into such rationalization ever again. Because after all is said and done, this grand utopia we envision at the end will likely never come to pass, or anything even like it - whether or not we succeed, yet all of these evils done in the name of the pursuit of such absolutely do come to pass.
I think I see the confusion. We're saying that "racist" is a useful description of a type of human thought / behaviour. You seem to think it's a demonising invocation of Godwin's Law that's incompatible with empathy.
One level more meta, though: if, as a society, we treat racist behaviour as inexcusable, that makes it less likely to occur. Treating racists as "reasonable, but mistaken" is actually in the neo-Nazi playbook. (I understand the impulse, though: I used to do it myself, until I realised that I was making up historical "facts" in order to justify the attitudes of racists. I really don't want to believe that some people are bad people… but racism is a choice, a habit; not a mere mistake about the facts. Ignoring that legitimises it.)
The issue is you're not "making up" anything. One group had a syphilis rate of 30%, about an order of magnitude higher than everybody else. Race, to me, is simply another group, and should be treated as such. So imagine if it turned out that blondes had had a syphilis rate an order of magnitude higher than everybody else. Would it have fundamentally changed things? I don't think so. And indeed at such point we would likely have all sorts of colorful quotes about blondes. Is that hairism, or now somehow not a grave offense because it's a different group?
Reread what you're ardently defending, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974970
Your abstract point is (mostly) valid, but you keep trying to tie it back to "and therefore that isn't racist". I described it as ¾ disproved by basic observation. You're defending the other ¼, then acting like that justifies the original claims.
I'll assume good faith, and ask: are you aware that you're doing racist propaganda? (I have literally heard these exact arguments, third sentence onwards, from self-professed White Supremacists.)
Please elaborate and tell me what exactly you think I'm defending or not, as opposed to just linking to somebody quoting some Wiki editor. Because otherwise I have no idea what you're saying.
And I couldn't care less who agrees or disagrees with my views. When formulating a view I always engage in the same pattern - look to the falsifiable facts and data on any given issue and come to the conclusion that I think is the most logically and factually well supported. Wherever that leads is what I tend to believe. Others say they do the same of course, but I can't help but notice so few seem people comparably obsessed with reading (or providing) sources on information (and the scarce time it is provided, it often tends to be from the TellMeMyOpinionIsRight.com type sources), which makes me doubt the overall sincerity of most on this.
Done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40981302
Then you aren't introspective enough for this:
to be anything more than an aspiration. (Or, less charitably, an excuse to make racism apologetics seem socially-acceptable.)
I'm not sure that answers my question, but whatever - I'll play along. The statement you quoted was written by a Wiki posters, and is most likely false. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of people infected with syphilis did not pursue medical treatment (at least in Georgia). The clinicians for the Tuskegee study had an extremely difficult time even convincing the farmers to allow themselves to be examined when doctors were proactively approaching them. They ultimately required the assistance of an intermediary civilian (trusted by the farmers) to convince them. To suggest that the farmers were largely indifferent (if not averse) to medical treatment is fully justified, and absent some significant evidence to the contrary should be seen as true.
The thing you continue to conspicuously ignore is that it is the behaviors of the clinicians that were wrong, and behaviors are what I think everybody should focus on. Whatever the clinicians thought, said, felt, or whatever else is irrelevant. The race of them, the race of the subjects, and everything else - irrelevant. All that matters is their behavior, which are unjustifiable. And that's the entire point, trying to understand why they did what they did. And I think the exact same would have been done regardless of race, so long as the data were the same.
OK, I see what is going on. I believe they were likely correct and basing their opinion directly from observational data. Syphilis was rampant and education was extremely low.
You think they were wrong, and assume observational data would refute it.
Characterizing "rather low intelligence of the Negro population" (not educational attainment, but "intelligence") as "likely correct" is shocking. But it's also not an uncommon perspective on HN. Lots of "The Bell Curve" truthers here.
I think educational attainment and intelligence are correlated, and understand the quote to be in relation to a specific group, time, and place (and not race as a category).
Individuals arent statistics, but environmental circumstances have profound impact on cognitive development and intelligence measures.
In this case, observational data did refute it.
However, you're right: I was actually using the heuristic "racists are full of shit". This heuristic is pretty useful, because it means you can do useful things with your life instead of analysing and refuting bullshit racist argument #453054624.
Normally you need to confirm a stereotype with data, not verify it after the fact.
The treatment funding ran out during the study period, so this stopped being a benefit but the study continued anyways.
I’d go so far as to characterize HN as a hotbed for scientific racism. It’s an inevitable consequence of the guideline to “assume good faith”.
In looking up more information on this topic in general. I came upon this [1] paper on the Tuskegee Study. It's an absolutely encyclopedic work that covers the historical context, parallel programs, and much more with an absurd level of detail and sources galore. So for instance I also thought that no subjects in Tuskegee received penicillin. It turns out this is incorrect and by 1952 27.5% had! [2]
Another really interesting datum is that Georgia in 1945 started carrying out widespread syphilis testing, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of people, reaching 89% testing coverage in one local jurisdiction (which is where I assume Tuskegee was located). The interesting thing is that 30% of black individuals and 3% of white individuals tested positive for syphilis. People wouldn't have known the exact numbers back when this the Tuskegee study started (in 1932), but with such ridiculously high rates of infection, they'd have had a general idea.
How do you think that would shape your views of a people when the Overton Window was wide open? Do you honestly think you'd still have been standing on a moral pedestal? This is why I think it's important to try to do more than just demonize the people involved. Because demonizing them isn't hard. They deserve it, and worse. But at the same time when we demonize them, it's so easy to miss the lessons to be learned because, after all, we aren't demons so surely we couldn't go down the same path again. Yet we almost certainly will if the only lesson we take away is 'don't be evil', because what we see as evil after the fact is not what people, good normal and "moral" people, perceive to be evil in the present. That's history in a nutshell after all.
[1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art... (gotta love 70 year old papers being paywalled...)
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.
That is not what happened in Oslo. This is the lead paragraph of the abstract of the paper from it:
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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.
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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.'
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??
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.
The guy claiming the Tuskegee experiments weren't racist is also now claiming the moral high ground.
I'm out.
It's not clear to me if people in this thread are differentiating between "certain categories of humans have specific genetic vulnerabilities" and "we're going to be racist without logical or researched cause".
It actually hurts people to not take into account their genetic background, an example is sickle cell anemia, which originates primarily in black people, who have a family tree from Africa.
Why? Well, even though it causes severe issues, it also protects from malaria parasites! There was an evolutionary derived pressure to spread this in that population group. And, during covid this caused additional problems for those with sickle cell. It also highlighted how Italians, most specifically those in Sicily have a strong likelihood of having sickle cell, primarily due to the endless, centuries long Roman occupation of Africa.
Women and men are physically different, and have different issues to account for (osteoporosis a great example here). Men often have too much iron, where as women too little. Treating everyone the same would mean not treating anyone correctly.
So, yes.. there are racial and sexual differences to take into account during studies, and medical treatments. As with everything, the true way to behave is often neither extreme.
No one should be mistreated during treatment, and treatments should not be racist... while understanding that racism isn't "different genetic groups of humans are predispositioned for certain conditions".
No one is saying that all people are genetically the same. No one is arguing that sayig "different genetic groups of humans are predispositioned for certain conditions"is racist, or that medical treatment needs to ignore biological differences.
What is being claimed by OP is that since atrocities were also inflicted on white people during unethical medical experiments such as MK ULTRA, withholding known treatment from a specific racial group in Tuskegee without their consent can't be called racism (which is so absurd that maybe that's where you got confused?).
Hope that clears things up for you.
Probably like 2/3 of the people I know that I would consider to be racist or hold racist beliefs would call themselves racist, or at least say that they have some racist beliefs.
Probably half the other 3rd are predominantly those that are racist specifically toward white people.
When you create a space where people can be sincere, you would be surprised how self-aware they can be. At least I am.
I take that as part of the point they were making: white supremecists, for example, claim white people are superior. Their actions are logical in some sense if you accept their premises that a) race is a useful classification akin to species and b) there is some inherent difference between races.
To be clear personally I think the science has definitively debunked not only supremacy of any race but even race as a concept which is really all about skin tone and facial features... many people's DNA doesn't even match their supposed "race" because the categorization of race is akin to color of coat in dogs: a very superficial trait useful as a visual descriptor but not useful for segmenting individuals into groups.
Not to mention the whole story of homosapiens is freeing us from biological evolution. The idea that someone's biology inherently limits their worth or makes them not an equal member of humanity is in some sense the most perverse denial of our very nature.
I think when trying to debate something, the idea should be to try to convince the other person. That sounds stupidly obvious, but it's really not. Imagine you're debating somebody over something and resorted to an argument over the exact meaning of terms that, to people who might not share your worldview, would be completely obvious. It's unlikely you'd really be persuading them of anything.
I think the more salient point is that even if you assume clear racial distinctions, and even substantial racial differences, that still does not justify any sort of racial ideology. The movie Gattaca works as an oddly perfect metaphor for racial ideologies and its problems. Gattaca was about genetics, but it's not a coincidence that it fits perfectly with race, as it's literally the exact same problem.
Just because somebody is a part of a group with some sort of a negative correlation, does not mean that person will inherently let that trait dominate them. Incidentally the reverse is also true - just because somebody may e.g. have a high IQ does not mean they will inherently be knowledgeable or wise. It's okay to consider group tendencies, but at the end of the day individuals are able to rise far above or fall far below their "expectation", and so it's important to judge each person not by the makeup of their genetics, but by the content of their character.
Race as a cultural and social construct absolutely exist, and one can perform scientific analysis using this as a basis.
Segmenting individuals into groups on the basis of race shows a large number of very real differences with irrefutable statistical significance.
I don't personally think that these are due to Intrinsic genetic properties, but that doesn't mean that there are no real and scientifically verifiable differences that break along racial lines.
It's kind of like comparing Californians to Nevadans. You don't have to think that there is a non-conditional difference in the groups to explore the apparent or manifested differences in a scientifically rigorous way. Dividing the groups by the border on a map may be arbitrary from some perspectives, but completely relevant from other perspectives
Supremacy sure, but not its existence, more like the opposite: Ancestry DNA tests wouldn't work if there was no basis for it.
What’s your definition of racism? White supremacists are certainly racist and would probably tell you that they are racist, too. That’s their whole message. Nazi Germany Leaders would probably have been ok with having been called racist, too. They were talking about being superior than other races all the time.
I think a black man declaring all white people evil vampires is racist.
But we seldom call oppressed minorities racist.
My definition of racism is the application racial stereotypes to individuals & groups
For me, it depends upon how the 'groups' part is applied.
An example that seems sexist: women love shoes.
However, this isn't sexist... it's simply statistically true. Where *isms come into play, where sexism occurs, is seeing the individual and then thinking "Ah, a woman... clearly she must love shoes".
Applying group derived statistical fact to individuals is where racism, sexism occurs.
Another example, black people in America show lower outcomes on IQ tests. There is a lot of debate as to why, whether it is genetic (an example, do Black people have less incidents of autism? Autism is often correlated with mental issues, but also conversely with higher test scores in some areas.) But really, it doesn't matter why. Whether it is genetic, whether it is cultural, or what.
What matters is that we understand the group statistic exists, but that no matter what we do not simply apply such thought processes to the individual. After all, a few percentage in group testing has no basis for determining if the person in front of me is capable or not.
I've met (as an example) some very unintelligent white people, and some very intelligent black people, a few percentage difference as a group is not relevant here.
Yet if we pretend group differences don't exist, how can we possible try to fix it.. if it is cultural? Or worse, what if it is environmental, such as... poor nutrition which hurts brain development during youth? Such things can be fixed, yet if we pretend there is no difference, how can we try to fix it?
So again, the primary must be to treat individuals as just that, and treat groups as just that, otherwise.. how are we being fair?
It's easy to view this as bad in this article's case, but nobody views their version of getting to play god when it comes to politics so long as their side is in charge. And the funny thing about this statement is how volatile a reaction it will get from both sides who think assume I'm supporting one or the other.
This is just lazy rhetoric. Some political groups go murder crazy as soon as they gain power, while others don't. Obviously not everybody is equally bad as everybody else.
Yes, and the more you convince people that everyone is equally bad, the more you empower bad actors. If there is no profit in being good and there is profit in being bad, being good is for suckers.
If everyone's a thief, you'd better start stealing. Otherwise you're just a victim.
In fantasy arguments I have in my head about someone justifying their bad behaviour with “but everyone does it”, my reply would be, “most people I know don’t do it, so it’s definitely not everyone, just people like you”.
"Everyone does it" translates to "I don't think I will suffer consequences from doing it". It's a justification based on self-interest, not ethics.
It looks like they are applying a version of Kant's Categorical Imperative, which is roughly "what if everyone did it?" The justifier is saying everyone does do it and everything is fine. The proof is in the pudding. But as you say, if literally everyone did it, they wouldn't be having this conversation with you. So what they mean by "everyone" is "enough people that I'm safe".
This is just lazy rhetoric and ignores what I said.
Both sides of the aisle in the US right now want to be in charge. The right is popularly portrayed as crazy, but the left has a strong authoritarian streak as well -- and they justify the restriction of rights because they will get it right -- this time, of course. I'm not even going to start a discussion of which one is worse, they are both authoritarian and bad.
Both sides view their version of playing god as correct. Neither side seems to take a view of stepping back and letting people be on their own -- refusing to use force of government to impose their plans on the people.
You didn't say "both American parties", so I didn't ignore that.
Sounds like a lot of startups.
So what you basically say is that we should always follow the path of least evil at the current moment. It's strange to me to think that someone would say that this is indeed the optimal way to minimize evil.
In _Beyond the Curve_ a writer put it succinctly:
I think it is the human condition that our ego protects itself by denying truth in order to “protect” our psyche from acknowledging that we may have done something extremely morally compromising.
I wonder if Ursula von der Leyen thinks she is the Ursula of her story?
That might be too generous. What if the vitriolic reaction was due to the threat of external repercussions from that information being revealed, rather than threat to internal self-image?
We have known this for ages, hence the adage, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
It's a good thing we don't have labs that do these amoral experiments currently. It's always by sheer luck that such atrocities always happen in the past.