Examining Tuskegee: Part 1 Response

From the first part, “Testimony,” of Susan Reverby’s Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy, the ideas of race, eugenics, and the body in the role of the Tuskegee syphilis study is what intrigued me the most. As Reverby highlights, throughout the introduction and the first part of the book, racist ideas and eugenics played a major role in how medical professionals viewed syphilis and the African American community, particularly in Macon County, Alabama. As she states, “[i]nfection was the focus; racial differences were the underlying assumption; obtaining knowledge about the disease was the central concern.”[1] From this quote, then, can it be argued that the syphilis experiments, performed over the course of about forty years, on African Americans was ethical and without racial bias?

After reading the first part of Examining Tuskegee and learning more about the experiments and the trial that followed, I would say no. It is important to note the way those residing over the experiments viewed the disease and the black body; Reverby highlights the discourse surrounding the idea of these African Americans being “patients” or “subjects.” This desensitizing of black bodies as mere medical experiments shows that those who presided over the experiments still believed in biological differences between the races, making African Americans inherently inferior. Furthermore, racist ideas circulated that syphilis ran rampant in “hypersexualized “African American communities because of poor morality. Reverby notes, “[w]hen needed, race would be ignored in order to generalize about the need for treatment. But in the end, the assumed biological difference based on race and the need to fully understand the disease proved even more intriguing.”[2] Overall, then, it is seen that the ideas of race, eugenics, and the body all played vital roles in how the Tuskegee syphilis study was conducted.

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[1] Susan Mokotoff Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 28.                   

[2] Ibid, 37.