Labor Day Work

 

WORK OF THE DAY

 

"When the tradition of struggle and remembrance breaks, the past is forgotten and the system triumphs." (113)

 

Kevin Powell, Who's Gonna Take the Weight?: Manhood, Race, and Power in America (2003)

 

 

They want volunteers for the testing of COVID-19 vaccines, and they ask "Why are those people not volunteering in great numbers?"  Highlight "those people," a phrase signaling that a systemic racial contract question has been asked.  It is not a mystery that those people do not hasten to be objects of experiments.  The majority of those people  just eschew probable stupidities as they remember and act to save their lives.  When dangers  appear in the ruins of an increasingly crumbling democracy, the wise refuse to be complicit self-destruction.

 

The wise remember

 

J. Marion Sims treating vaginal fistula in the bodies of enslaved women and his refusal to use anesthesia.

 

The Tuskegee "bad blood" experiments (1932-972) and Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie's coordination of those experiments with assistant from Eugene Hubiot Dibble, Jr.

 

The Tuskegee obscenity as a prototype for the medical crimes SS physician Josef Mengele conducted at Auschwitz.

 

Secret experiments on the bodies of incarcerated people.

 

These instances and many more are things the wise remember as they do as much as they can to prevent the triumph of the system.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            9/7/2020 9:48:26 AM

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