Wright's Tuskegee Claim; David Mills Is An Idiot

There's a shithead over at the Huffington Post named David Mills, an "Emmy-Award-winning TV writer and a former journalist," who has a problem with Rev. Jeremiah Wright's claim that "The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment! They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis!" in one of the soundbites that have been repeated ad nauseam (I refuse to say "one of Wright's sermons" because we haven't actually heard a sermon, just a couple of incendiary soundbites).

Mills writes, "Wright is wrong. That's not what the Tuskegee experiment was. In the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," federal researchers refused to treat a group of black men who already had syphilis, long after a cure had been found. "

Ohhhh!! Well, fuck, I guess that's a horse of a different color. I can't imagine why people aren't up in arms like David Mills is over semantics. So just to get this straight, according to Mr. Mills, we need to clarify that the experiment that went on for FORTY YEARS wasn't about the government injecting African-Americans with syphilis to research the results, these men were already infected and even though we had a cure, we didn't administer it so we could see and document what the long term results of having syphilis would do. Well in that case, how could the government be considered sinister in that scenario? We didn't infect them, we just didn't treat them.

Mills goes on to cite pundits and talk show hosts who, in their ignorance of black history, are perpetuating the "myth" that the US government infected African-Americans with syphilis. Although he does admit that the "Tuskegee experiment was the most shameful episode in the history of the U.S. Public Health Service," he can't get over the fact that people are misunderstanding what the experiment actually was.

Mills: To invoke the Tuskegee experiment to suggest that the government invented AIDS to kill black people, as Rev. Wright did... that dishonors the truth. There is no excuse for it. It must stop.

Okay Mills, we get your point. Now I'd like to make a little suggestion that you should think about.

I have heard the "government invented AIDS to kill black people" theory long before I ever heard it come up in a Wright soundbite. We know the first documented case of AIDS in the US was in 1981 although some could have been infected as early as 1978; but we also know that the earliest known case was of AIDS was found in a blood sample from 1959. So we're now talking about a disease that's been around between 30 and 50 years. (I could go on with a timeline of what happened when in the AIDS crisis, but you can see for yourself here.)

My point is this: if the US government made an experiment of denying treatment to African-Americans in order to study the effects of syphilis in Tuskegee, why would it be far fetched for people to believe that the US government initially dragged its feet when it came to the treatment or even a possible cure for AIDS?

When you consider the lack of funding for AIDS research (until a big jump in 1994 under a Democratic administration) coupled with the incredibly expensive drugs for AIDS treatment that most poorer Americans can't afford, people begin to connect the dots, whether rightly or wrongly, and pile it in with their inherent mistrust of the government (for good reason as history has shown).

Did the US government invent the AIDS virus to infect black Americans? Maybe not. Did the US government initially ignore the problem because it was only affecting homosexuals and the lower class? I would tend to think yes before dismissing it.

Perhaps Mills should try researching and reading a full sermon of Rev. Wright's before making a judgment or parsing the difference between active participation or complicit inaction.