Month: December 2019

In the beginning of the semester, I had no idea what to expect with the class Medicine and Racism. I’ve never thought about these two topics coming together and having anything in common, but I was wrong. As we read books such as Medical Apartheid and Fortune’s Bones, I found myself getting more and more interested each class. I found myself making connections and asking questions that I wouldn’t usually be asking.

When I first started this class, I was naive, just like Cee from Home. I did not understand how much of a privilege it was to have all of the available medical care we have today. Coming into this class I was much more like Cee than I’d like to admit, I never thought doctors would disrespect patients who were persons of color on purpose. I always assumed that doctors in the medical field would treat everyone equally, but I was so wrong. While reading Medical Apartheid it was disturbing to hear about what African Americans had to go through when it came to hospital visits and procedures being done to them. So many Africans Americans are afraid of the people in the medical field still to this day. I grew up knowing when I was sick, I could go to the doctor and they would take care of me and give me antibiotics that would treat the sickness. “…African Americans did not need me or anyone else to inculcate a fear of medicine. Medical history and practices had long since done so(Washington,22).” African Americans were not able to get this benefit and in fact feared for their lives when they were forced to go to a doctor. Some African Americans still fear going to the doctor, to this day, because of all of the racism in the medical field throughout history. There are some doctors taking steps to fix this, for example Dr. Zia Okocha. Dr. Zia Okocha said, “This Black History Month, I implore my colleagues to not only take time to recognize the contributions of Black people in the United States, but also to acknowledge the many ways Black bodies have involuntarily contributed to medical advances we take for granted.” Dr. Zia Okocha wants to inform his coworkers all about the history of African Americans involved in the medical field. Dr. Zia Okocha has noticed how African Americans are constantly judged for their decisions in regards to their health and believes it’s time for this to change. Dr Zia Okocha has read Medical Apartheid and looked more into the Tuskegee Study to understand the many ways African Americans were abused and exploited by the medical system. While we unpacked and got more in depth in Medical Apartheid, the truth was so shocking. Throughout history African Americans were always given the “short end of the stick.” They were constantly disrespected and tortured and I knew this in regards to slavery but I never thought about what it would be like for African Americans in connections with the medical field. One example of when African Americans had been tortured was when women were being forced to be sterilized without giving consent. In Medical Apartheid, Wasington tells the reader about Fannie Lou Hamer. “…Hamer had lost more than a tumor while unconscious-the surgeon had removed her uterus, rendering Hamer sterile(Washington,190).” Fannie Lou Hamer was unconscious when the doctor removed her uterus so there was no way for Hamer to give consent. The doctor had no right to do this to Hamer and there was no reason for him to remove Hamer’s uterus.

Medical Apartheid opened my eyes and allowed me to see the struggles African Americans went through in medical care, and still go through today, when it’s something I don’t even question. Racism in the medical field is still a big issue today, there are still cases of African Americans being treated differently or poorly. The medical field is supposedly full of people who are there to help you get better, but this wasn’t always the case. African Americans were used as subjects in medical experiments and were forced to be poked and prodded for doctors selfish reasons. “Other experiments involve nontherapeutic tests that are not designed to help the experimental subject(Washington,55).” Doctors were using African Americans as subjects and were treating them like they were not humans and did not have feelings. Although doctors did ask for the patients consent, they typically did not give all of the information and did not tell the patient everything that would be done to them. “Physicians did typically ask a patients consent to conduct experiments, but they did not explain their reasoning or detail their intent(Washington,55).” This led me to question the whole idea of consent. While I read this quote from Medical Apartheid, it reminded me of the deception studies that Ben Chapman had conducted. Ben Chapman used deception studies when he conducted an experiment to show how easy it was to spread bacteria just by washing a chicken. Chapman did get the subjects consent, but he did not give them all of the information about this experiment. Chapman figured that if he told the people what he was looking for, they would change how they washed the chicken. Chapman used a genetically bred non pathogenic E. Coli in his study, he used this because it had minimal risks. One man in the study was upset when he found out that the E. Coli was involved in the experiment and he was not told about it. The man did give consent to be used in the experiment but he was not told everything about the experiment, just like how the African Americans were not told everything that was being done to them.

I feel that the reason I was like Cee was because, like her, I was protected from all of the danger. Frank protected Cee for as long as he could from all of the danger that the world threw their way. In a way, I was also protected, my skin color protected me from going through the fear that African Americans had to face. I cannot begin to understand what these people had to go through and the torture and pain they had to deal with all because of the color of their skin. I have never thought twice about going to a doctor when I was sick, or not being told all of the information about the antibiotics prescribed to me. Taking this class was a wake up call for me, just like Cee’s wake up call was Prince, and Dr. Beau. Cee started to see that not everyone was there to help her, some people used her for their own selfish needs. Prince used Cee to get the car, and Dr. Beau used Cee for his experiments. By taking this class, I started to see problems in this world that I have never thought about and never even noticed.

While reading Zulus, I noticed how much the society judged Alice Achitophel. Alice did not look like everybody else so the society treated her like she was not a human being and did not have feelings. They ridiculed and picked on Alice all because she was different in their eyes.“No one ever sat next to Alice Achitophel, not even for warmth on such days as this, and the riders had long ceased casting suspicious and accusing looks her way, so she thought of herself as being alone on the tram, thought of it as her tram(Everett, 21).” No one is sitting next to Alice on the tram and instead, choose to stare at her and mock her. Alice was so kind but no one took the chance to get to know her because they were so busy judging her based on her looks. She was just trying to sit on the tram and get to her destination but the other people on the tram were not welcoming to her. As I read how the society treated Alice, it made me think of how I judged this class in the beginning of the semester. When I picked up my books for the class they all looked very boring and like something I normally would not pick out to read. But just like how the society judged Alice based on her looks, I caught myself judging these books by their covers. As we read the books though, I found myself enjoying them and excited to read them and discuss them in class the next day. I enjoyed reading Zulus, Clay’s Ark and Home the most. Although at times I was frustrated with the books and the events happening, it made the class discussions so much more interesting because I was getting everyone else’s thoughts and opinions on the reading.

Taking this class has helped me develop not only as a student, but as a writer. In the beginning of the semester I was quiet and did not like talking in our groups, but as the semester went on, I was getting more involved and talking more in class and sharing my thoughts on the readings. Not only did I become more confident in sharing my opinions in class, I became more confident with my writing. Writing the public blogs and getting feedback helped me a lot throughout the semester. I went to office hours with the teaching assistants and asked them what I could fix to make my blogs better. Dr. McCoy’s feedback helped me tremendously as I continued to write my blogs. Seeing what I could fix to become a better writer made me more confident in the work I published.

At the beginning of this semester, we were provided a detailed epigraph serving as our course compass. It is a quote by Dionne Brand that Dr. McCoy noted while attending Brond’s reading at the Northeast Modern Language Association in Toronto. To quote, “My job is to notice…and to notice that you can notice.” This powerful statement applies both to the academic and cultural perspectives offered.

In my first blog post, I wrote about the possible significance of this quote. I write, “Realizing that we have a conscious effort to be (or not to be) accepting of racial differences is something that all Americans must come to terms with. Simply knowing isn’t enough.” At the beginning of this class, I did not know the material in this class would challenge my views of the world. Looking back, I can not say that I fully understood the course epigraph at first. I objectively viewed racial issues: either one is racist, or they are not. After experiencing the texts in this class, however, I am led to believe that the experiences of black people are far more complex than I had originally known.

The topics in this class are very sensitive, especially for those who may experience racism to this very day. As a white male, I often asked myself “How do I speak on the experiences of people I did not live?” After many conversations and research, I realized the only way to confront these issues is to change my own narrative. I learned through this course’s texts that vocabulary is everything. For example, the terms “enslaved peoples” is one that recognizes the various backgrounds of people brought to this nation via the slave trades. It seems to me that pushing ourselves to expand our vocabulary is necessary for understanding the complexities these texts may offer. This appeared to be a common theme in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. He uses a host of vocabulary words that we may not be familiar with. In class, the number of words that we collectively had difficulty in defining may indicate the complexities of any conversation or story.

I used the phrase oppressive master in my first blog post to describe the power dynamic of slavery. However, I recognize now that I was guilty of prescribing the single story of slavery to black people in America. Many public schools only teach about enslavement or Jim Crow laws, thus limiting the dark history of African Americans to only a few stories. My first reading of Medical Apartheid was quite shocking to me. I did not realize that enslaved people were publicly displayed in zoos or dissected in large university classrooms of well-known medical schools. Given the texts explored in this class, there exists a variety in nonfiction and fictional accounts of black lives. Home by Toni Morrison is a historical fiction set in 1950s America while Medical Apartheid addresses the factual accounts of medical research and experimentation on black bodies in the past few hundred years. Making connections between nonfiction and fictional texts was a difficult task because it required me to consider the implications of racism in a broader sense of the word. It is easy to look at a character in any novel, especially of a different time, and simply observe their role in the novel. This was how I approached English classes prior to this one, a strategy that was difficult for me to leave in the past. The gruesome details of disrespecting black bodies, found in Fortune Bones or Home, gave me a different reading experience than I had previously known The challenge for blogging was being able to address racial issues in the novels while applying them to real-life experiences found within Medical Apartheid. I found that recognizing the vocabulary used by each author to address their claims was necessary to be able to create my own academic work. By doing so, I could address issues that I may not have personally lived through. Instead, understanding the language and vocabulary of this discipline was a lesson that I can continue to use in my academic and personal life.

I’m not good at noticing things. My step dad believes that this will be perilous when I start driving, that I will be too caught up in something else to notice the road before me. When I’m walking places, I notice little things. The birds above me being the most common. I stare at them in the clouds, wondering if I’m peering up at a bird of prey or another stupid seagull. I will not notice the cars around me as I continue walking. It really is a wonder I haven’t been hit, and probably proves my step dad’s point. I want to be a school psychologist when I’m done with all my own schooling. I want a job that revolves around me being able to notice the behaviors and patterns of functioning in others. However, I could barely notice history when it was found in fiction. This inability to notice led me to finding some difficulty in this class, but it also led to growth. Had you asked me “How much consent do we really have?” at the beginning of the semester I probably would have just looked at you, wide-eyed with no answer. And to be fair, even now I don’t have a complete answer, an incomplete one yes, but because of the readings and discussions of this course I can continue to work on that question until I find a complete answer.

At first I completely misunderstood the epigraph. I believed that the epigraph related back to what I had been taught in high school, to notice things within a text and connect them back to each other. I didn’t think of how noticing things in fiction works could be applied to nonfiction works, and I certainly didn’t think of how that could be further applied to my day to day life. This lead me to read deeply into the nonfiction texts, as they were fact-checked and revolved around historical events. Of course, fiction texts could revolve around historical events, historical fiction is a sub genre, but I saw that as something loosely based on an event, especially when compared to nonfiction. So I clung to Medical Apartheid, as if it was my lifesaver instead of the “both/and”. For a while I wasn’t sure I was noticing anything at all. Then one day while I was commenting on the relationship between African American patients and charity hospitals, I called this relationship a “trade-off”. The word had just left my mouth, before I stopped, looked at Dr. McCoy who was watching and said “No that’s not right. A trade-off means giving something and getting something else of equal value, and that’s not what was happening in charity hospitals.” I like to think that this is when I first began to notice things, especially my own language. I was careful about what words I used and asked myself if the words I used really allowed for me to articulate what I meant. However when you look back at the blog post I made on this experience, you can still see how I attempted to ground my own noticing in the past, and in Medical Apartheid. I wasn’t ready to let my noticing serve as a “both/and” quite yet. 

When reading Toni Morrison’s Home I began to relate to Cee. Cee notices things but doesn’t understand what she’s noticing. She has been so sheltered by her brother Frank that she isn’t able to see when she is in danger. When Cee has an interview for a job as a doctor’s assistant she doesn’t make the connection between “him being a scientist” (pg.60) and the books in his office (pg. 65) on the science of eugenics. Cee also notices the good in the doctor’s actions, such as him sending patients to charity hospitals, or allowing other doctors to watch his work, but she doesn’t see how this can be bad. We can, especially through our outside readings, yet without those readings I would have been just as sheltered as Cee.  Many of us were aware of the danger Cee was in at the mention of the word “eugenics” (pg. 65) but we still had to look up the titles of the books to understand what they were about. Cee mentions needing to look up eugenics to better understand Doctor Beau’s work, and knowing that word would certainly make her aware of the danger she is in. However not all of us (me included) made the effort to notice the books, their titles, and what they were about. When we did look them up we saw they were anti-African American propaganda and books on keeping the Nordic race alive. Seeing this we are able to notice what Cee does not notice. This also shows us what we miss when we aren’t noticing. We have to be actively noticing and ready to see how what we notice connects with the world around us. If we just see the bad in the past, we leave ourselves vulnerable to be in Cee’s shoes, unable to see when it is in front of us. Looking back I now know I needed another push to start actively noticing. 

That push came when we began reading Clay’s Ark. Clay’s Ark made me unsettled from the start, maybe it was dangerous start, maybe it was switching from past to present, or the various ways consent was ignored. From the kidnapping to the forced infection of Blake and Rane to the way the Clay’s Ark organism changed its hosts, I found the way consent was ignored disturbing. We had spent the semester talking about how the medical field had historically ignored or manipulated the consent of African Americans. From using enslaved people to grave robbing to lying about injecting people with plutonium, Harriet Washington had it covered in Medical Apartheid. At that moment our reading was on how the birth control movement was walking hand in hand with the eugenics movement. I saw this paralleled with Rane’s blatant disregard for the kids the organism would make her want to have. Rane goes as far to say “I’d be willing to abort with an old wire coat hanger.” (pg. 532) when told that the organism makes you need and desire children. For Rane this means that her wishes, her choosing not to consent to pregnancy will be taken away upon forceful infection. This made me think that it was almost a direct opposite of how doctors had taken away women of color’s right to bear children through things like the “Mississippi appendectomy” (Medical Apartheid pg. 190). I saw both taking away motherhood and forcing motherhood as a loss of autonomy, something that was still around today and could be seen in the debate around reproductive rights. I began to draft up a blog post, but I wanted to make sure the argument was strong, and it was there that Dr. McCoy posed the question to me: “How much consent do we really have?”

Now, I was told I didn’t have to answer it, but to think on it, and I was thankful for not needing an answer. I didn’t know the answer, or what the right answer was. And that’s when things began to click, that I was always looking for the right answer, when sometimes there is no right answer. Of course there are wrong answers when it comes to consent, like taking the ability to consent away from someone. As a psychology student the idea of informed consent was that it had to be freely given after someone was made aware of all the risks and benefits, as well as being told they could back out at any time. That was how I came into this class viewing informed consent, and I felt learning about how the medical community had abused it, only strengthened my idea that this was the highest standard of consent. But how was I to notice when consent was lacking if I didn’t even know how much consent we had in the first place? 

Zone One by Colson Whitehead showed me that I could notice when consent was lacking, even in fiction. Mark Spitz, serves as a way to look and navigate through the world after the zombie plague has swept through. One of the things we as readers are drawn to is the mutilation of corpses, known in zombie genre as “taking trophies.” I had never seen what a violation of one’s bodily autonomy this is, despite watching it happen in The Walking Dead years ago with my family. Now I noticed how if using unwilling bodies for dissection was wrong, then so was taking pieces of those bodies. And I know, I am here typing out how Daryl taking someone’s ears is problematic, and someone is bound to say, “but those are zombies.” And? What is a zombie? The living dead, an undead person, a person. Corpses, throughout history have had their bodily autonomy violated, especially African American corpses. Enslaved people had to worry about the “dissection season”, which occurred around the winter time. One Virginian slave remarked “Please God, I hope when I die, it’ll be in the summertime.” (Medical Apartheid pg. 131). Dying in the summertime meant bodies could not be harvested and enslaved even after death, yet if one died in the winter their body could be further used for the experiments of doctors and scientists, even if they never consented.The violation of these bodily rights was seen as acceptable because African Americans were dehumanized to the point of being seen as a subclass. In the case of Zone One, the undead are seen as a subclass, if even seen as human. Because they are viewed as less than human or once a person, it is seen as acceptable to humiliate their bodies after killing them. Mark Spitz humanizes the undead, in comparison with others, including those in charge who say “No, you’re right. Mustn’t humanize them.” (pg.195). Like the lawmakers and powerful men in our world, those of Mark Spitz’s world understand the dangers of humanizing those one exploits. 

Looking back on this course and the things I have learned I hope it encourages you to ask yourself the same questions. How much consent do we have? How do we extend that consent to the walking dead, should the world ever come to that? When we notice but are unable to put it in context with the world around us, we leave ourselves vulnerable to repeating the mistakes of the past. Zombies lose their bodily autonomy because we forget that they are people, people just like you and I. African Americans lost their rights because people also saw them as less than a person, that they did not deserve the full protection informed consent offers. How can we continue to improve on who and under what situations informed covers if we don’t look at where consent is lacking and who is not protected?

We can’t. We cannot thoroughly examine how to keep updating informed consent without looking at the both/and, or in this case how consent was taken away in the past, how that was changed, but how that may fail in the future. We must be aware of both the past and the future and how they can connect to each other. How do we do this? Keep noticing, notice the tropes in your favorite shows or novels that seem wrong, notice when they call on the past, keep looking into the things that confuse you. Keep asking yourself questions, keep thinking on the questions posed to you, ignore the search for the right answer. Instead focus on the incomplete answer, the building towards an answer that won’t just give you the points needed for a good grade, but that will allow you to grow as a person. That may mean not having an answer and make peace with that. But do not make peace with missing the both/and, with missing the things you notice. Look into what you notice, there’s a reason you notice it. We can not continue to make progress without this, without each person bringing what they notice to the table. Actively noticing is the best way to help make sure we don’t lose sight of how we look out for each other. When we stop noticing, we continue to leave ourselves and others at the mercy of those who see us stopping, thus meaning we lose sight of the progress made and the progress still to come.

Throughout the novel, Home, by Toni Morrison, I was taken aback by many concepts.  At first, I was confused and questioned what was truly going on but as I continued on, concepts began to become more clear and made more sense.  By piecing together each event and understanding what was happening, the novel became more interesting to me. I started to think more about each little thing and connected occurring events back to previous ones from earlier on in the novel.  

To me, the true meaning of “interesting” is when something catches my eye and I begin to actively think about it and figure out what its true meaning is.  I also consider certain concepts and ideas interesting when they pique my interest and allow me to think critically and more advanced than I was before reading about them.  One concept that became interesting to me later on in the book was when Cee displayed her angst after being told that she was unable to have children when she decided it was the right time to do so.  Prior to her finding out that she was unable to have children, there was no interest expressed from her that she would’ve liked to later on in life. It makes me think about the times that I may never have thought of doing something but the second I heard that I couldn’t do it, was the exact moment that it was all I could think about.  It was a pivotal moment in the book because it was when Frank realized that his baby sister wasn’t a baby anymore and could make decisions on her own without any input from her older brother. He felt a sense of devastation since it came across that he wasn’t needed by her anymore due to this one decision; he had never been told by Cee that she wanted to have children so when he heard it for the first time, he was taken aback and didn’t know what to think.  Frank was no longer the older brother who could guide Cee through her life and protect her from every small incident that could possibly happen to her. It was an alien concept to him and he was unable to fathom the idea of not protecting his little sister anymore.

Another concept that I found interesting was at the end of the book.  In the last two chapters, Frank and Cee decided to visit the site where the father from the fight years prior was buried.  Frank had laid the bones down in the quilt ever so carefully that he didn’t destroy the remains and treated them with respect as if the father was still alive.  Once Frank and Cee paid their respect at the make-shift grave Cee decided that it was time to go home. She tapped Frank on the shoulder and said “Come on, brother. Let’s go home.”  It was the turning point at, ironically, the end of the book. It showed the readers that Cee was finally grown up and could make decisions on her own without her big brother. This whole book was “interesting” to me and had me thinking during every chapter about each concept and scene that occurred describing the lives that Frank and Cee were going through.

The will to resist acknowledging the truth about your past can be strong, but the push from the world around you to be truthful is often stronger. In the case of Frank in Home, we see a man unwilling to be honest about his experiences and his actions. In Medical Apartheid, we see a medical system that is still not able to acknowledge its own history. In Home, Frank is at least able to be honest with himself, and with us as readers, about what he has been hiding, but in Medical Apartheid we see that the medical industry is still not willing to recognize what it is founded on. I would argue that this helps explain why Frank seems like he is headed towards a better future, but the medical industry in the U.S. seems to be headed in the wrong direction.

Frank spends the entirety of Home going back and forth between the past and the present. He is never able to sit alone with his thoughts, and those closest to him notice his emotional instability. This is especially apparent when we hear from his ex-girlfriend directly and she describes the life she lived with him, before he left to take care of Cee. There is first his “public explosion (Morrison: 78)” and then the added weight of him not wanting to help with the household chores. She notices that he is hurting but she is never able to find out why. Frank eventually tells us the story of his friend who received oral sex from a Vietnamese child, and ends up shooting her. While it is disturbing to hear, it is more disturbing when we find out that it was actually Frank, and not his friend, who engaged in sex with a child and subsequently shot her. He recognizes how horrific this action was, even saying “How could I let her live after she took me down to a place I didn’t know was in me? (Morrison: 134). Not only does he finally admit that he killed the girl, but he also admits that he took part in a sexual act with a child. This realization comes towards the very end of Home, and after that he was able to reconcile an experience he and Cee had as children, as well as officially find a place to call home. By opening up to the mistakes he had made he was able to at least move on with his daily life, even if he still wasn’t at peace.

Medical Apartheid is a book based solely on the racist acts performed by doctors, scientists, and others involved with slavery or the medical field. We are given example after example of horrific events that took place throughout America’s history, and the examples could go on for what seems like forever. With one of the most famous being the Tuskegee experiment where black men were unknowingly infected with syphilis to see how it spread and what the long-term effects were, to the lesser known cases of Mississippi appendectomies, where women were sterilized under the guise of medical treatment in order to stop them from procreating. Harriet Washington works as a reliable narrator, with all of her claims being backed up by evidence she has found during her research, so we can rely on her to be honest. She has to act as the narrator to show us how awful the treatment of black people has been in the medical field, especially since we are unable to rely on the medical field to be honest with us. The institutions that are related to the torture and abuse of black people are still not willing to accept the history they have, so we must rely on outside sources such as Washington to be upfront.

When Frank is finally willing to be honest with us and with himself, he is able to move forward with his life. Although it doesn’t seem like he is completely at peace with himself or with his actions, he has done the hardest part, which is accepting what happened. The same cannot be said for the medical industry that is described by Medical Apartheid. There is a strong reluctance to accept what has happened in the past, and that means that we have never gone through the hardest part of moving forward as a society. When people like Washington are able to point out the injustices caused by the medical community we can see the clear connections between what happened back then and what is still happening now, but we cannot properly move forward until the institutions that caused this wrongdoing are willing to accept their past with us.