Harriet A. Washington

An excellent, thorough, and sickening recounting of how Black people have been abused and used by the medical community for centuries. It is so far beyond the Tuskegee syphilis trials or the Henrietta Lacks genes, this has been systemic failure or purposeful abuse for as long as medicine has existed. And though it is no longer going on in our country (as far as we know), it has moved to the African continent where research is taking place outside the restrictions of our laws. A very show more important read, especially if you ever questioned why a Black person might be medical treatment hesitant. show less

This book by Harriet J. Washington is very well researched. It is also a text that has taken be a long time to get through as I could only read 1 chapter at a time - then I needed to internalized and come to grips with the information and truths each chapter contained. I was truly and deeply affected by the unethical behaviors, lack of both truth and informed consent , coercion to care. As I read this, I also thought of the "Radium Girls" as both contained multiplicities of coverups. I show more salute Harriet Washington for her work as an ethicist and for opening my eyes to realities of medical apartheid that was present then and unfortunately is still with us today. That must be changed and this book is the perfect catalyst to action. While a difficult read, this is a MUST READ! show less

this book doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: a comprehensive scholarly treatise or a nightstand book for anti-racists? and trying to be both, does not succeed.

very good in many ways, very important of course, but as a read, the latter 200 pages lagged terribly: lack of focus, repetitive structure, segments that seemed out of order, and more of the facetious reasoning seen elsewhere -- ie. Washington argued that blacks were over-represented in prison experiments at, we'll say, 40% of show more the total, because the local unincarcerated black population was only 8%. she admits that blacks made up 60% of the total prisoners, but says it's incorrect to count only within the prison population because incarceration is such a racist system.

that's nonsense. the structural racism of incarceration is one problem; the structural racism of using primarily POC for medical experiments is another problem; the lack of better options for income among prisoners (of any race) that leads them to volunteer for prison experiments is another problem; the racism that leads POC, particularly blacks, to have generational poverty, is yet another. all of these problems intertwine, and feed one another, but they are not the same.

what i found most interesting (and Washington seemed to be uncomfortable with) was how the black people/patients navigated their experience: I mean their own sense of agency within the maws of racism. she mentions, for example, that prisoners often volunteered for the medical experiments because the payments were substantially higher than other job opportunities, and they were told the side effects would be minimal; it was seen as a good gig. Washington brushes that aside, just like she brushed aside the claims of Saartje Baartman, the young African woman exhibited as "Hottentot Venus," who claimed in court that she was there voluntarily; Washington says that you cannot make a true choice under those constrictions.

she's right of course, to an extent, that there aren't any true choices within structural racism (or capitalism, or disability, or arguably for any humans at any time); but at the same time it's demeaning to the victims to say that they had no agency whatsoever, or that their choices don't matter, when we have their own voices saying that this is what they wanted. it is, i believe, much more accurate -- and better honors the memory -- to see blacks as full humans who were intelligent and capable and brave enough to make their own work against the tide of racism, even within the context of slavery or prison. finding the strength to make a situation turn for your own benefit when exposed to cruelty is an incredibly legacy, and stripping these people of that past is another way to silence them. i'm sure it was inadvertent -- Washington was simply more interested in focusing on the inhumanity of their situation. that's not a crime, but it's an unbalanced story.

... this last bit reads like i'm advocating inspiration-porn, and that's not true at all; i just want to see the book include a discussion of why a slave might say aloud in court that she preferred to be displayed as a literal animal in a zoo, and why we should take her at her word that she's the aribtrator of her experience. there's a paternalism in saying "Baartman doesn't know what she's talking about" that reminds me of pro-slavery arguments, is what i'm saying; those anti-abolitionists were great ones for saying that slaves didn't know what they wanted, that they were treated much better as they were, that freed or escaped slaves were simply lying that their lives were better now. we have to center the stated, recorded experience of the actual people involved, no matter how uncomfortable it makes our twenty-first century selves. show less

4.25