Dying in the City of the Blues, Pt. 3

In the final chapters of Dying in the City of the Blues, Keith Wailoo explains that in the 1970s sickle cell anemia “became one of Washington’s three or four most important health care and research concerns, moving into the political spotlight alongside Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’ and the Tuskegee syphilis scandal” (Wailoo 22). Sickle cell anemia grew into a powerful political weapon, used both to strengthen Nixon’s administration and to gain funding for the city of Memphis. However, the “[c]elebrity status” that sickle cell gained “was a double-edged sword, for it meant both wider visibility for the disorder and also the danger of hype and distortion that often accompanied fame” (Wailoo 169).

While sickle cell started to receive more funding, it also became racialized—sparking questions about the inferiority of African-Americans. With greater converge of the disease, “false beliefs about the inability of sickle cell patients to ‘hold down jobs,’ as well as myths about their unreliability and their fragility” formed. These notions resulted in greater discrimination toward African-American communities. Mandatory screenings for the disease displayed that “genetic counseling had the capacity to deprive people of the basic right to make their own decisions about heath care and reproduction” (Wailoo 185). Many of these fears, rightfully so, coincided with anxieties regarding forced sterilization and black genocide.

Linus Pauling, an American scientist, “advocated extraordinary measures to prevent people with sickle cell trait…from having children.” Pauling went as far to suggest that “there should be tattooed on the forehead of every young person a symbol showing possession of the sickle-cell gene or whatever other similar gene…that he has been found to possess in a single dose” (Wailoo 186). Essentially, Pauling was willing to mark those who had sickle cell in an effort to outcast them from society—quite similar to how the scarlet letter in Nathanial Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter would expose and isolate adulterers. With outlandish opinions like this, “the disease now signified not pain and suffering per se, but the dangers of state-sponsored coercion and the loss of reproductive rights” (Wailoo 191). By bringing sickle cell into the national spotlight, stereotypical and discriminatory assumptions were pulled along.  

Evidently, “it proved difficult to translate [sickle cell] awareness directly into health policy without creating enormous new stigmatizing burdens for black Americans and without fostering growing cynicism about racial politics” (196). As sickle cell patients began to be treated with new drugs, the “fear of drug addiction had…intensified, providing a powerful backdrop for skepticism about the patient’s pain in sickle cell anemia” (201). Racial stereotypes caused physicians to undertreat African-American patients, believing that “too-liberal pain management might actually produce drug addicts” or otherwise result in pain being faked to obtain drugs. Regardless, a movement to provide assistance to the African-American community ended up revealing the politics that intertwine race and health.  

Works Cited

Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Heath. University of North Carolina Press, 2001.