Examining Tuskegee Part III

In the third part of Examining Tuskegee, the one aspect that stood out to me the most was the idea of  "white betrayal of black trust" (Reverby, p. 187). The idea that white people had betrayed black people's trust was true. The white doctors had used their medical authority to do harm to the black men and their families. Later on in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was occurring, the presence of African Americans in clinical and drug trails was minimal, and the one reason to simply answer--- was because of the Tuskegee Study (Reverby, p. 198). Personally, I feel as though it was an easy answer as to why there was minimal African Americans in trials. The Study was released in 1972 and around ten years later AIDS was the big talk, and people were wondering "Why aren't there more African Americans in the clinical and drug trials?" is an ignorant question. The African American community had little to no trust in white people because they had fear of being betrayed once again. In 1990, two health educators wrote an article about the connection between the fear of AIDS and the Study and used a sample of black church members. Overall, the health educators argued that "public health professionals must recognize that Blacks' beliefs in AIDS as a form of genocide is a legitimate attitudinal barrier rooted in the history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Reverby, p. 200). Again this showed that African Americans had no confidence in white doctors. Obviously, the African Americans had a belief that they would be betrayed again. I dread that another study, like the Tuskegee Study, could possibly happen again, even with medical ethics in place, because some people with do anything to gain power and knowledge.