Examining Tuskegee: Part II

In part two of Susan Reverby’s novel The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy: Examining Tuskegee, different stakeholders within the Study are presented with their stories and their participation within the study. In my opinion, the patients, the African American men , within the Study were taken advantage of. Relating back to our class’s discussion on race inferiority within Molina’s book Fit To Be Citizens, races that were of lesser significance, Mexican and Japanese populations, were thought to have been “dirty” and incapable of taking care of their health which made them inferior to Whites in Los Angeles. These racially biased views of health can be seen throughout the south during the 18^th century as society proclaimed Syphilis as a prominent Black disease because African Americans were hypersexualized and were committing a sanitary sin (Reverby 27). Like the Japanese and Mexican populations in Los Angeles presented in Fit To Be Citizens, African Americans were denied citizenship because of their inferiority to the white population because of their poor health conditions. These denied rights and liberties hindered the African American population’s ability to obtain any health services because they were incapable of paying for treatment with the wages they were payed. With the syphilis outbreak and the PHS and its doctors’ drive for more medical knowledge, the Study presented free medical treatment to African Americans. African Americans who participated in the Study thought that by participating in it that “they thought they were doing the right thing” (Reverby 116). I took African Americans' decisions to do "the right thing" and seek treatment with in the Study as their way of not only becoming healthier but to their desire to be seen as sanitary and in return less inferior to the white population. This would allow them to move up in the “racial hierarchy” and obtain the civil rights and liberties that have been denied to them by Jim Crow Laws and discriminatory practices. Despite doing the “right thing”, the African American population was taken advantage of by PHS doctors who were driven by their quest for medical knowledge on a disease that they let kill innocent lives throughout the infamous Study.