Skepticism Born of an Ugly Betrayal

It doesn’t take a genius to understand the distrust between a seemingly white driven government and communities of color across the United States. There’s a lot of history there. For African Americans, the post-Civil War tension rose from Jim Crow laws and continued voter suppression to the litany of blue on Black injuries, humiliations and killings that have lasted into the 21st century. The subject of the civil rights protests that began after Brown vs Board of Education in the 1950s and that have continued, as evidenced by the recent Black Lives Matter protests, into the present day. The issue has hardly gone away. Racial injustice is alive and well.

For many Native Americans, it seemed that the federal government, which broke promises to these dislocated people by the dozens, was practicing genocide as white America pressed to expand landholdings into territories that were the homelands for tribes of indigenous peoples. The wars between the federal government and Native American tribes, dislocated, slaughtered and relegated so many to small reservations, were aimed at marginalizing and removing indigenous peoples from coveted land. From the 1830s to the 1850s, for example, the federal government forcefully removed all the Cherokee people from their homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee on a prolonged forced march, where so many died on that journey, to live in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. It is known as the Trail of Tears. A shameful period of our history.

But there is more to the larger numbers of Native Americans and African Americans holding back or refusing to consider accepting a coronavirus inoculation, even as we all know that the disease is particularly deadly in crowded, lower income neighborhoods where we can find a disproportionate number of people of color in this country. Where familial and community interrelationships exacerbate the spread of truly infectious diseases. 

While the immigration discrimination against Latinx undocumented workers and their families, laced with harsh detention centers, separation of parents from young children and severe official local and federal repression, also represents a community of color that has suffered disproportionately from the pandemic (and the same eugenic sterilization noted below), with lots of vaccine skepticism there as well, today’s blog takes a snapshot of two very specific periods of American history where medical “cures” and “science” addressed purported problems in communities of color… lies with devastating consequences.

Further, while science-denying anti-vaxers, often trying to impose there misguided views on medical science on everybody – somehow and very wrongly believing that they are saving lives when then can prevent fully vetted vaccinations – there’s some historical to the skepticism in the minds of so many African Americans and indigenous peoples. Not that vaccination is always completely safe and risk free. From allergies to incompatible reactions with other prescription drugs to overreaction/fear (inducing heart attacks and strokes) to exceptionally medically vulnerable individuals on the edge. 

But in such communities, innate skepticism born of historical precedent, is very well embedded into the relevant communities’ culture. And it precisely in this environment that rumors and false narratives fester with deep credibility, even among their own medical professionals. Why? What are these embedded cultural realities? It not all 18th and 19th century historical precedent. The twentieth century, for example, continued abhorrent medical practices, effectively turning minority communities into unknowing guinea pigs for covert medical experimentation and eugenic sterilization.

“[In addition to federal genocidal efforts to take land from our indigenous peoples, little] publicity was given to another form of Native American civil rights violations – the abuse of women’s reproductive freedom. Thousands of poor women and women of color, including Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and Chicanos, were sterilized in the 1970s, often without full knowledge of the surgical procedure performed on them or its physical and psychological ramifications. Native American women represented a unique class of victims among the larger population that faced sterilization and abuses of reproductive rights. These women were especially accessible victims due to several unique cultural and societal realities setting them apart from other minorities. Tribal dependence on the federal government through the Indian Health Service (IHS), the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) robbed them of their children and jeopardized their future as sovereign nations. Native women’s struggle to obtain control over reproductive rights has provided them with a sense of empowerment consistent with larger Native American efforts to be free of institutional control. The following two situations are examples of the human rights violations committed against Native American women. Both reflect the socioeconomic climate of the 1970s that led to the overt and massive sterilization that irreversibly changed thousands of Native American families’ lives forever.” Sally J Torpy, a historian with the California Department of Parks and Recreation’s Indian Museum and the California Museum Services archives, Native American Woman and Coerced Sterilization: On the Trail of Tears in the 1970s Published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 24:2 (2000). This cruel and mendacious mistreatment of our indigenous and other minority women continued into the 1980s. 

Another aspect of such 20th century federal medical manipulation, under the guise of the federal government providing cost-free treatment/cure medications to African American men, was a 40-year federal “experiment” in a small town in the South (pictured above). It started in the 1930s and continued into the 1970s, as the U.S. Public Health Service solicited and then offered hundreds of African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama suffering from syphilis, free treatment in exchange for their cooperation in generating data about the disease. “Because the government researchers behind the Tuskegee syphilis study wanted to track the disease’s full progression, they treated the Black men in the study like lab rats, withholding for decades life-saving treatment under the guise of free healthcare.” Los Angeles Times, February 5th. Essentially, many of those in the “treatment” program were purposely left untreated, to compare with the results of treated victims over the years. “Before the full scope of the medical negligence was exposed in news reports in the 1970s, and later memorialized in congressional hearings, a stage play and films, more than two dozen men with untreated syphilis died and roughly 100 died of complications related to the disease.

“‘A trust in medicine, especially when the conversation is beginning with the federal government, is almost a nonstarter here,’ said Tony Haygood, mayor of Tuskegee, 40 miles east of Montgomery, the capital. ‘The trust in the government to do the right thing has long been broken.’” LA Times. As we face a coronavirus pandemic, as vaccinations against the disease become available, many of those in communities of color remember. It’s part of their cultural narrative. Even among their own medical professionals.

“Raw memories of the healthcare atrocity still echo through the thick woods that blanket this part of the Deep South, and they have only grown louder in recent months, as devastating coronavirus data confirm what many here have long known: Access to healthcare in America remains devastatingly unequal and shaped, in part, by structural racism.

“Throughout the pandemic, Black, Latino and Native American people have died at disproportionately high rates, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.

Yet at least partly as a result of the painful medical history, some Black people appear to be less inclined to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a measure most every reliable medical authority says will provide protection to individuals and the public at large.” LA Times. These aren’t misguided anti-vaxers or science skeptics. They just remember. For the rest of us, having such a large body of Americans turning down vaccination opportunities because of these historical injustices keeps that virus alive and able to continue mutating right in the middle of everywhere.

I’m Peter Dekom, and racial injustice and inequal treatment of minorities has always been bad for America, always providing a litany of horribles that hurts all of us… even at it hurt those who are the most vulnerable most of all.