the underaddessed

 

THE UNDERADDRESSED

 

We have made some "progress" over the past two or three decades in creating stronger, detailed inquiries  about American cultures in general and African American cultures in particular.  Given the Siamese-twin relationship between the categories African American and American, nothing happens and is voiced in one category that doesn't influence the conduct of inquiry in the other.  Unfortunately, the dominant mode of inquiry is casually binary ---all black and white; the inclusions that would continue to lend voracity, authenticity,  and credibility to our constructions of knowledge are most often absent.  Just plain not to be found or exceedingly difficult to find.  Listening to Harriet A. Washington discuss her most recent book Carte Blanche; The Erosion of Medical Consent (2021) is a sobering exposure of our global Catch-22 in the midst of fear-inspiring pandemic.

 

I will not play the post-funky, tired as an overworked harlot  game of pitting one genre of writing over another for the amusement of systemic whatever.  I will just suggest that we make a more sustained investment in reading fact-based discourse regarding medical research, the inequity innate in medical research as intellectual property, and demonic aspects of  using uninformed and/or unwilling people as test animals.  Remember Tuskegee.  Never forget that the "bad blood" experiments are components of present and future histories in the USA and elsewhere. We remain "at risk."  Harriet Washington's works should be read with the same passionate  attention accorded to the works of Toni Morrison.

 

Washington has established her credibility such previous works as Medical Apartheid (2008),  Deadly Monopolies (2012), Infectious Madness (2016), and A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and the Assault on the American Mind (2020). If we read Mari Evans to be renewed, we ought to read Washington and be edified about Faustian activity in the domain of American medicine and health care systems.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            3/14/2021 3:22:45 PM

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