The Horrific Tale of Medical Apartheid

In today's democracy-infused society, it is virtually impossible to imagine that forms of inequality and bigotry still exist. It becomes thoroughly shocking therefore to learn that even in recent years, racism has been practiced to some extent through medical studies.

In 1991, a number of African American teenagers unknowingly became part of a medical research which required them to be implanted with Norplant, a tool intended for birth control. For more than a decade until 2001, a similar racist study was conducted in which HIV infected foster children became the test subjects for AIDS drugs with uncertain medical properties.

These two cases and many more have been documented by Harriet Washington, a former Harvard fellow in ethics and public health and presently a visiting scholar in DePaul Law School, in her book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present. It is the only book to encompass the whole history of how African Americans since the time of slavery until modern times, have fallen prey to horrific exploitation.

In the book, Washington goes on to specifically detail cases of experimentation on African Americans. One such study was the Tuskegee experiment, probably the most widely known case, in which African Americans with syphilis were denied treatment for the sake of medical research.

While the western world looked on in horror at the racist purging and experimentation in some places in Europe during the Second World War, similar cases were and have been unknowingly unfolding on American soil. Just like in the Holocaust, medical experimentations on Black Americans in effect highlighted the perverse notion that certain races are inferior to others, particularly the white race. From the time of slavery, the distinct outward appearance of African Americans was regarded as a sign of their inferiority. It was the twisted belief of some doctors that medical experimentation was the only way to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the black race is truly different and inferior to the white race.