On Sept. 16, 2001, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright said from the pulpit: "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."
If this were true, then we live in a nightmare. If this were false, then Wright has reinforced an ignorant and destructive calumny. I see no evidence to believe that this accusation is true.
But he didn't say that at the National Press Club. He was asked if he honestly believed those words and he said:
Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola"? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"?
I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't -- based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.
In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the -- one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.
So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.
It must be said at the outset that this answer is incoherent, veering widely in search of a handhold on something to throw, some way to regain the offensive. But the two points, while unrelated to one another, are true.
Selling Biological Weapons to Iraq
Let's take the second one first, because that one is easy. We sold them chemical weapons. This is from GlobalSecurity.org:
US government documents showed that from 1985 to 1989 pathogenic, toxigenic, and other hazardous materials were legally exported from the United States to Iraq... [T]he list of biological items legally exported during that period includes botulinum toxin, anthrax, gas gangrene, and vials of West Nile fever virus and Dengue fever... [T]he information first surfaced in February 1994, when then-Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan held hearings on Gulf War syndrome.
The US sold biological weapons to Saddam Hussein. He used them, people died. Period.
- December 20, 1983-Iraqi television; courtesy CNN
Tuskeegee
The Tuskeegee experiment is also undeniably real. Its proper and full name is the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. It was run in Macon, Georgia by the United States Public Health Service.
400 black men with syphilis were left untreated, lied to and told they were receiving an experimental medicine. For 40 years, government doctors studied the course of the easily curable disease. When press exposure finally brought this "experiment" to a close, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.
So when was this? Jim Crow days? Just after reconstruction?
The denial of care for these men ended in mid-1972, the year my sister was born. Five survivors attended an apology ceremony at the White House in 1997. Mary Harper, the last surviving nurse who assisted in the experiment died a year and a half ago. To this day, 19 widows and children affected by this inhumanity are still receiving government benefits.
This isn't history yet; these people live on. And they live on in the memories of black kids alive today, some who will survive to see the 150 year anniversary of the experiment's launch in 2082. And they will make it real for another generation.
Tuskeegee is alive in the popular imagination because it is fresh and it because it distills America's degradation of black people: we watched them die to see what happened.
Reverend Wright is unimpeachable when he says, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything." The unsupportable claims about the origin of AIDS have resonance because of Tuskeegee. What won't a government do if it will countenance the needless suffering of its most vulnerable? What won't a government do if it will allow other people to be infected and die?
The outraged act as if Wright invented this history.
AIDS deniers were never the majority and have been isolated in a scientific backwater, but they were not all charlatans. UC Berkeley Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Peter H. Duesberg isolated the first cancer gene. He is an expert in retroviruses and on that basis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. His letters and commentaries challenging the theory that HIV causes AIDS have been published in the Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS and the New England Journal of Medicine.
From the condemnation of Reverend Wright, you'd think a bunch of ghetto black folk ginned up this whole AIDS conspiracy theory around a plate of crack when they should have been working or raising their kids. Bettering themselves.
Lets look at what he said again, (cleaned up for enhanced comprehensibility which was in short supply in the original answer):
[A] government [that] can [sell] biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when [they] use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.
Is it a pity that many African-Americans believe what is not justified by science? Yes. It is a pity because AIDS infection and mortality rates are significantly higher in the African American community than in any other.
But it is not a pity because they believe what dominant culture dismisses as paranoid fantasy. Tuskeegee is the most infamous, but it is not the only experimentation on black people.
In Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, author Harriet Washington tells the story of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century surgeon who was celebrated in his day as the founder of gynecology for advances he made repairing severe vaginal injuries that can occur in childbirth.
Sims honed his skills by performing scores of painful operations on the genitals of black slaves.
Question worth asking:
Does white America too easily dismiss the possibility that it is true?
Another question worth asking:
Does white America too easily dismiss the possibility there is something to learn from people who are sometimes wrong?Another question worth asking:
Who gets a second chance to be taken seriously?
Another question worth asking:
Is this too the legacy of Tuskeegee: black men are less likely to wear condoms because they don't believe what they're told about AIDS?
Rand did a study in 2005 that found:
* 59 percent [of African-Americans] agreed with the statement that “a lot of information about AIDS is being held back from the public.”
* 53 percent [of African-Americans] agreed that “there is a cure for AIDS, but it is being withheld from the poor.”
* Nearly 27 percent [of African-Americans]agreed that “AIDS was produced in a government laboratory.”
* About 16 percent [of African-Americans]agreed that AIDS was created by the government to control the black population.
* About 15 [of African-Americans]percent agreed that AIDS is a form of genocide against African Americans.
So black men use condoms less and black women are the fastest growing population of new HIV infections.
Writer Earl Ofari Hutchison was on to something when he wrote
If, as AIDS activists claim, and the RAND study at least inferentially seems to confirm, reckless conspiracy theories about the AIDS plague among blacks are a cause of needless deaths and suffering within black communities, black leaders must speak out loudly against them. It's not a matter of racial one-upmanship. It's a matter of saving lives.
Reverend Wright had the opportunity to set something right. To heal and reveal. He chose not to do so and that should be pointed out. He could have said, because of the truth of America's past, there are those who fall prey to falsehoods today.
Bigots with degrees gussied up their racist untruths in white labcoats. Now, many people, black and white, are wary of the fruits of science.
Another question worth asking:
What needs to change in America for both parts of that paragraph to be appalling?
Reverend Wright could have struck a blow against some of the many faces of ignorance. For all the failings of the scientific endeavor, it is open to correction. It is not the only path, but science has been a powerful tool for liberation. Ignorance and superstition leave us bound.
Was what he said outrageous? Sadly, not at all.
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