Dying in the City of the Blues (Part 1)

The invisibility of sickle cell anemia to the white population is what astounded me the most. According to Wailoo, “local health care systems allowed for the visibility of some disorders and not of others, giving selective meaning to African American pain, distress, and disease,” and “the landscape of prevailing diseases, the local diagnostic preoccupations, and the attitudes about race and disease that pressed upon Memphis’s collective mind-set” were all factors that shaped the visibility of sickle cell anemia in Memphis (55). Because malaria was visible and sickle cell anemia was invisible to the health officials, any set of symptoms that looked like malaria were deemed malaria. By not considering malarial-like symptoms to be anything but malaria represents how ignorant the health system was to a disorder that only affected the African American community.

                Most of the white community was influenced by stories and images of the African American community as inherently dirty. Even in Atlanta, “public health officials and editorial cartoonists… graphically depicted black women domestic workers mingling with flies and insects” which reflects that the stereotype was dispersed from top officials who were trusted to deliver accurate information (61). If the white community already perceives the African American community as dirty and disease-ridden, not much money would be allocated to medically help the African American community because these officials believed something in the culture had to change for the African American community to not get sick as much, not that something in themselves had to change. Although Lemuel Diggs was interested in sickle cell anemia, he was only interested in the disease and not the patients because he could prosper from the scientific knowledge in the study of minute aspects of pathology. Again, the black body was viewed as a commodity, as something that could help the white community, and as a learning instrument.