A Modern Day Tuskegee Experiment
Poor Children of Color Are Being Volunteered to be Lab Rats for the Rich in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana
Ranking right up there with the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Wilmington Coup is another dark moment of American history well-known to Black Americans and lesser-known to whites that occurred in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1932 and is playing itself out again today in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana as schools prepare to reopen. The Tuskegee Experiment, run by the US government, studied the effects of syphilis on Black men by telling the men they would be treated for the disease when in reality they were all being given placebos. This continued well past 1947 when penicillin was discovered to be an effective treatment. These men, along with people in Guatemala, were allowed to suffer blindness, insanity, and death so the US government could gather more information on how the disease worked.
These vulnerable groups were targeted specifically because the government knew society viewed their lives as not mattering. Fast forward 88 years and we see people making the exact same calculation today while ordering a school system that primarily serves poor students and students of color, back to school despite our district having the highest per capita infection rate in one of the states hit hardest by the virus. What's worse is these kids and their families are exactly who has…
