Letters to the Editor
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@Gary Kamiya: Well put, Gary, but on your AIDS position I read a rhetorical contradiction....
Well put! Listening to his entire sermons and even just the snippets I find it difficult not to come to a conclusion similar to yours. On the other hand, our reflexes are powerful: I wonder how many hear your column in the voice of an angry man?
Anyway, that isn't my question. I wanted to deal with your more-or-less aside about the AIDS claim:
His assertion that the U.S. government spread AIDS in the black population is a caricature of paranoid black demagoguery.
Without taking a position supporting the idea that this happened. I want to claim that your dismissal of the AIDS claim without context is along the same lines as the reflex that you decry in your article.
Let us remember he Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Taken from Wikipedia for ease of search:
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male [...] was a clinical study, conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which 399 (plus 201 control group without syphilis) poor — and mostly illiterate — African American sharecroppers were denied treatment for Syphilis. [...] Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they were told they had "bad blood" and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial insurance in case of death in return for participating.
Not the date. Now, for a man who was an adult when the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was revealed, how absurd is it that the govt could knowingly experiment with gene-specific viruses? How paranoid is it to think that perhaps they'd test it on Black-specific traits?
Worse, the more you learn about the TSE, the worse it gets. Not only did it go on for forty years, not only did many men die needlessly, not only was it done on purpose, not only did this go into the 1970s, not the 1870s, but at least one reporter was trying to get the story out for years but none of the MSM at the time thought it was worth reporting. wtf?!
When I learned about the TSE as a young man, I was angry, but I was less angry at the govt than I was at those around me who simply dismissed out of hand that such a thing was even possible. In my view, it is this odd deference to authority and our own sense of misguided identification with those in power that allows them to wrap themselves in the flag. It's this resistance to the idea that someone representing "our team" would do something horrible like that (because then we have to do something about it) that lets redlining go on for so long, that allows cops to go free after committing acts of brutality, that makes it easy to justify torture, that shuts down debate and gets us caught up in stupid wars.
It sort of gets on my nerves.
So, even though it almost certainly isn't true that the govt created AIDS, and certainly not specifically to target Black folk, why isn't dismissing his comments on AIDS in the wake of things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and other reality-based context just as knee-jerky as fixating on "god damn" and ignoring the substance of Wright's comments on US foreign policy?