Michelle Obama and the Tuskegee Experiments

[BPSCG]

From a New York Times article that includes this anecdote about her work at the University of Chicago Medical Center:

In the mostly black neighborhoods around the hospital, Mrs. Obama became the voice of a historically white institution. Behind closed doors, she tried to assuage their frustrations about a place that could seem forbidding.

Like many urban hospitals, the medical center’s emergency room becomes clogged with people who need primary care. So Mrs. Obama trained counselors, mostly local blacks, to hand out referrals to health clinics lest black patients felt they were being shooed away.

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

“She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,” said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

Black girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia. You'd think a hospital's vice-president of community affairs, getting a salary of $300,000 a year, would do better than that.

 

[BenBurch]

From a New York Times article that includes this anecdote about her work at the University of Chicago Medical Center:
Black girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia. You'd think a hospital's vice-president of community affairs, getting a salary of $300,000 a year, would do better than that.

Do you differ on how it would have been perceived? This was entirely a matter of perception here! Remember that, at least in Chicago, most black people will NOT sign an organ donor card because they fear that they will be allowed to die in the ER after an accident so a white person can have their organs...

 

[Darth Rotor]

Do you differ on how it would have been perceived? This was entirely a matter of perception here! Remember that, at least in Chicago, most black people will NOT sign an organ donor card because they fear that they will be allowed to die in the ER after an accident so a white person can have their organs...

This is an unfortunate bit of woo that political rhetoric can keep alive.

(For a tasteless joke on this topic, we can discuss a variety of tropes on how whites would never permit an organ from a black person to be implanted, due to the horrors of one drop tainting all and fear of becoming black . . . but maybe not in this thread, today.)

DR

 

[BPSCG]

Do you differ on how it would have been perceived? This was entirely a matter of perception here! Remember that, at least in Chicago, most black people will NOT sign an organ donor card because they fear that they will be allowed to die in the ER after an accident so a white person can have their organs...

So, as a high-salaried hospital vice-president of community affairs, she was getting paid to encourage that paranoia?

 

[Upchurch]

Black girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia.

Potentially lifesaving, yes. Potentially dangerous, as well. They were talking about using these girls as research subjects.

Racial paranoia? The Tuskegee experiments were not delusional paranoia. It was still going on as recently as 36 years ago. You don't think a little caution on her part was warranted?

 

[Tricky]

From a New York Times article that includes this anecdote about her work at the University of Chicago Medical Center:

In the mostly black neighborhoods around the hospital, Mrs. Obama became the voice of a historically white institution. Behind closed doors, she tried to assuage their frustrations about a place that could seem forbidding.

Like many urban hospitals, the medical center’s emergency room becomes clogged with people who need primary care. So Mrs. Obama trained counselors, mostly local blacks, to hand out referrals to health clinics lest black patients felt they were being shooed away.

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

“She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,” said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

Black girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia. You'd think a hospital's vice-president of community affairs, getting a salary of $300,000 a year, would do better than that.

Gosh. She didn't want them to use black people as guinia pigs? How awful of her. You know, there is a reason why they test these things first before releasing them to the general public. Yeah, the vaccines are potentially life-saving, but also potentially life-taking. If it had turned out that there was a problem with the virus and that they had tested it primarily on poor black women, do you think anybody might have mentioned Tuskeegee?

You really have to twist things with a torque wrench to make this look like Michelle Obama did something wrong.

So, as a high-salaried hospital vice-president of community affairs, she was getting paid to encourage that paranoia?

LOL. Are you offering price cuts for encouragement of paranoia?

 

[WildCat]

Potentially lifesaving, yes. Potentially dangerous, as well. They were talking about using these girls as research subjects.

Racial paranoia? The Tuskegee experiments were not delusional paranoia. It was still going on as recently as 36 years ago. You don't think a little caution on her part was warranted?

Have things changed since then Upchurch?

Was Michelle Obama leading on the issue, or pandering to paranoia?

You absolutely need to test medicines and vaccines among the whole range of ethnic groups, because not all react the same to them.

 

[Brainster]

Potentially lifesaving, yes. Potentially dangerous, as well. They were talking about using these girls as research subjects.

Racial paranoia? The Tuskegee experiments were not delusional paranoia. It was still going on as recently as 36 years ago. You don't think a little caution on her part was warranted?

The Tuskegee experiments amounted to denying treatment. And didn't Michelle effectively deny a vaccine to teenage black girls? I can see why given the past that there was a need to educate people here and to discuss potential risks and benefits.

And to point out the obvious, since the concern was "white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls" couldn't they have located some black doctors? I mean, this is Chicago, right?

 

[Upchurch]

Have things changed since then Upchurch?

I would hope so, but it was just earlier this year that I heard a group of white men talking about how Barack Obama would need extra security with the implication that they'd all be okay if he didn't get it.

Was Michelle Obama leading on the issue, or pandering to paranoia?

Good question. The article doesn't give much in the way of details concerning the research or Michelle Obama's reasons for why she stopped it.

 

[Upchurch]

Let's back up a second.

Black girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia.

BPSCG, what are you basing this conclusion on? Do you know specifically her reasons for stopping the research?

 

[BPSCG]

So, as a high-salaried hospital vice-president of community affairs, she was getting paid to encourage that paranoia?

LOL. Are you offering price cuts for encouragement of paranoia?

Her job is to educate the community, not to aid in the perpetuation of ignorance. Yeah, it might have been a tough row to hoe to sell her local black community on vaccine trials. But that's why she was getting paid the big bucks.

And that ignorance and paranoia still cost black lives today:

More than 20 years after the AIDS epidemic arrived in the United States, a significant proportion of African Americans embrace the theory that government scientists created the disease to control or wipe out their communities, according to a study released today by Rand Corp. and Oregon State University.
That belief markedly hurts efforts to prevent the spread of the disease among black Americans, the study's authors and activists said. African Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, according to Census Bureau figures, yet they account for 50 percent of new HIV infections in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among those who preach that the government invented AIDS to wipe out the black race are Michelle Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

 

[BPSCG]

Let's back up a second.

BPSCG, what are you basing this conclusion on? Do you know specifically her reasons for stopping the research?

Just what the story says:

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

I have a feeling this is going to get some significant air play over the next few days. We'll get her explanation, I'm sure.

 

[Tricky]

The Tuskegee experiments amounted to denying treatment. And didn't Michelle effectively deny a vaccine to teenage black girls?

No. As soon as the vaccine was generally available, teenage black girls could obtain it as easily as anyone else. She provided that teenage black girls weren't selected preferentially for potentially beneficial but potentially dangerous testing. This won't spin, Brainster.

 

[BPSCG]

She provided that teenage black girls weren't selected preferentially for potentially beneficial but potentially dangerous testing.

So you're saying the hospital community affairs VP decided the girls in her community shouldn't be offered the chance to be in the trials? Don't you think the parents of the girls should have been allowed to make that decision, after getting complete information about the trials, with the community affairs VP there to help answer their questions and concerns?

Or is dem black folk too stoopid to make up dere own minds?

 

[Brainster]

No. As soon as the vaccine was generally available, teenage black girls could obtain it as easily as anyone else. She provided that teenage black girls weren't selected preferentially for potentially beneficial but potentially dangerous testing. This won't spin, Brainster.

And fortunately teenaged black girls are just like teenaged white girls, so it's no big deal that they didn't test on them.

Rolling my eyes here. Actually reading between the lines, I suspect the real issue was that it would be one of those "double blind" studies where half the girls got the placebo and half of them got the vaccine. Getting the placebo may have been more the issue than the risk of the vaccine (as that is effectively what the Tuskegee guinea pigs got).

 

[jj]

It's amazing, how these anti-Obama types will keep using magicians forces, etc, in order to run down a candidate.

You, I, and everyone else know that if she allowed it, the same people would be taking up the "she risked blacks" cry.

It's deliberate, intentional attack propaganda in my book, most likely propaganda being substituted for the real reason that people have a problem with the candidate.

 

[Upchurch]

Just what the story says:

In other words, next to nothing? Pretty flimsy information to jump to the conclusions that she was pandering to racial paranoia or perpetuating ignorance.

Why is this in the 2008 USA Presidential Elections board?

 

[SezMe]

So, as a high-salaried hospital vice-president of community affairs, she was getting paid to encourage that paranoia?

Her job is to educate the community, not to aid in the perpetuation of ignorance. Yeah, it might have been a tough row to hoe to sell her local black community on vaccine trials. But that's why she was getting paid the big bucks..

No, it was her job to recognize the facts on the ground - facts that you, yourself document here - and to react accordingly.

She put the horse before the cart. The correct order of events was for Obama to educate her local community on all the details THEN propose the study. Her stopping the events from happening in the inverse order was the right thing to do.

Among those who preach that the government invented AIDS to wipe out the black race are Michelle Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

BPSCG, it is beneath you to play Wright in this thread...or, at least, it should be. I'm having to come around to Upchurch's view that Obama has really warped your usual principled stands.

 

[BPSCG]

It's amazing, how these anti-Obama types will keep using magicians forces, etc, in order to run down a candidate.

You, I, and everyone else know that if she allowed it, the same people would be taking up the "she risked blacks" cry.

It's deliberate, intentional attack propaganda in my book, most likely propaganda being substituted for the real reason that people have a problem with the candidate.

Ah, you busted me jj. Saw right through my phony facade. I confess, the real reason I won't vote for Obama is because I can't stand an uppity nigra.

 

[BPSCG]

She put the horse before the cart. The correct order of events was for Obama to educate her local community on all the details THEN propose the study. Her stopping the events from happening in the inverse order was the right thing to do.

Okay, you're saying before doing step 2 (proposing the trials to the community), she should do step 1 (educate the community about the trials).

Fair enough, though I think you could make an argument that you should do both concurrently.

But she apparently didn't do step 1 at all, then took it on herself to kill step 2.

BPSCG, it is beneath you to play Wright in this thread.

Sorry, I have to disagree with you on two points:

1) It is totally appropriate to bring Wright up here, because he perpetuates the ignorance that makes blacks mistrustful of the medical community. What he preaches (or preached, since he's retired now) is the ignorance that Michelle Obama was paid to fight. Barack Obama wants people to believe he knew nothing of the ugly talk coming from Wright's pulpit. Are we supposed to also believe that Michelle Obama was also unaware of Wright's accusation that the government deliberately created the AIDS virus? Or should we instead believe that she did know of it, but didn't care, even though she was paid to fight against exactly that kind of ignorance?

2) Regarding it being beneath me: Nah. Accusing Obama of having a sex-and-drugs limo party would be beneath me.

People here justifiably mock Nancy Reagan's fondness for astrology and astrologers as an embrace of ignorance. Michelle Obama's easy tolerance of shocking ignorance in her own profession should not get any lighter treatment.