You know, I had a weary response semi-scripted in my head to those people making a fuss over Obama’s old minister’s belief in conspiracy theories about where HIV came from, a response that would both be understanding of why people fall for conspiracy theories while still maintaining that the truth is the most important thing, and conspiracy theories need to be pushed back against. With a soupcon of explaining why the underlying themes of conspiracy theories about the medical profession that proliferate in the black community are understandable, considering the circumstances. But luckily, wiser heads than me have tackled this problem, so I recommend reading them instead on this issue.
But what is interesting to me is how disingenuous some of the attacks against Rev. Wright are when it comes to actual concern for stopping the spread of HIV.* While not downplaying the role that HIV crankery plays in the spread of the disease (as Kevin notes, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has dismantled the infrastructure to respond to the disease in the wake of believing said crankery, but for racists eager to embrace this, it’s worth noting that Mbeki did so over backed by white advisors and over the objections of black officials), I’m going to say the larger problem here and everywhere around the world is lack of access to protection and lack of education about how to protect yourself from contracting or passing HIV.
As a demonstration of what utter, irresponsible bullshit is going on, I present you the figure of Michael Gerson. Gerson is very concerned about HIV conspiracy theories.
This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.
But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.
And Gerson should know about crankery and battiness on the issue of sexual health, because he’s one of the nation’s leading cranks who is eagerly spreading wack-a-doodle theories that are getting people killed unnecessarily. Gerson has been a huge player in trying to make sure that AIDS relief money sent to Africa is not used to do anything crazy like prevent the transmission of HIV. He pushes abstinence-only here and abroad. After Democrats managed to push through a much weaker PEPFAR bill than they should have, he ran to the WaPo to whine some more about how all the world needs is to start yelling louder at people to keep it in their pants, as if millenia of pushing that message has worked (or as if it were fair to deprive people of sexual expression when there’s a way to do so that’s relatively safe).
Meanwhile, statistics are being bandied around showing what a dismal failure abstinence-only is in the U.S. But statistics only tell part of the story, which is why I recommend reading Pamela Merritt’s article about her experiences as a health educator, dealing with kids who are getting real sex education when it’s too late to avert all the consequences. Pamela went in to teach budgeting and household skills to pregnant teenagers, and discovered that what they really needed, on top of these skills, was some real sex education.
I’ll never forget a fifteen year old mother-to-be telling me that she had thought drinking a certain caffeinated soda following unprotected sex would prevent pregnancy and I’ll never forget her shy embarrassment when confessing that she still wasn’t sure how her pregnancy happened. Through my work I have met young women who didn’t know why they menstruated, thought they could tell by looking if a partner had AIDS and more than one who thought soaking in a bleach bath would prevent pregnancy or even HIV transmission.
Through my teaching, the disconnect between the policy debate over abstinence-only programs and the reality of young women’s lives has been revealed. On one side, proponents of abstinence-only programs claim that they are working, while on the other side, the teen STI infection rate in St. Louis city is the highest in the nation. On the front lines healthcare providers and volunteers like me meet young women who learn prevention post-infection, who explore contraceptive options after a pregnancy and who are growing up in a culture where sophisticated media outlets sell sex as power and speculate over baby bumps — yet sex education can now be summed up by Just Say No.
One of the diseases that’s on the rise is HIV, putting the concerns about the disease claimed by abstinence-only proponents like Gerson into sharp question.
We’re lucky in the U.S., because our HIV transmission rate is really low compared to the nations targeted by PEPFAR dollars, so the number of people that are going to die because they forgo condoms, having heard from some abstinence-only “educator” that condoms don’t work. But replacing actual barrier methods with pats on the back and admonishments to women to tell their husbands to quit cheating on them could be exponentially more deadly in African nations. Gerson should be ashamed of himself for pretending he’s on the high road, when he’s pushing a sort of woo that’s likelier to have far uglier consequences than anything Rev. Wright was saying.
*As a side note, the use of proxies to attack a candidate are growing increasingly bizarre. I doubt a single soul belaboring “concerns” about Wright’s beliefs on this issue thinks that Obama shares them, so really, it’s just more lies and bullshit.
17 Responses to “Two kinds of woo contrasted”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Conservative Christians like Gerson have the whole cognitive dissonance thing down to an art, I swear. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be beautiful to watch in a perverse sort of way.
Consider that HIV has decimated the gay and black populations pretty well. Consider the relaxed attitude of the Reagan Health group. Consider the paucity of funds. Consider the arrest patterns for drugs (always the ‘dealer’, never the buyer). Consider the stereochemistry of the virus. Consider that many serious scientists still wonder about the source of the virus. Consider Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
As hilzoy has pointed out, Wright was the same age as Emmett Till. When Wright was 31, the federal government finally ended the Tuskegee project, which involved secretly witholding treatment, for experimental reasons, from blacks with syphilis.
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/03/the-past.html
Given that background, I can forgive a black man of Wright’s age a little paranoid fantasy, even though his remarks about AIDS were deeply wrongheaded.
One of my uncles was deeply prejudiced against Japanese. He was wrong, of course, but given that he survived the Battan Death March in 1942 as a prisoner of the Japanese, his attitude was udnerstandable and forgivable. Wright is there in the same catagory.
There’s an excellent article over at Salon that parallels this post:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/25/rev_jeremiah_wright/
Next book club suggestion: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington.
I’m going to read it anyway, but Pam commented a while ago that this forum is (and liberal white people generally are) reluctant to address racial issues, so maybe adding this book to an upcoming readers’ club would be a positive step toward education and dialog.
Here’s the Democracy Now! interview with the author. I can definitely see why Obama’s pastor would entertain the thoughts he has.
Mold:
Um, what the hell are you going on about?
I’d participate in a book club on Medical Apartheid. I bought it, and just haven’t made time for it yet.
At least the Tuskegee experiments are taught in ethics modules in every medical school in the US by now.
Will:
go look up “History of HIV/AIDS” and “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment” on Wikipedia. Or, heck, if you don’t trust Wikipedia, any other broad encyclopedic source.
The thing that struck me about AIDS conspiracy theories and the black community is that, since day one, HIV/AIDS has been tied to Africa and African diasporan communities (i.e. Haiti). Several of the first victims to surface in the US were African-American. The whole thing was kept as under wraps as possible by the US government for almost 15 years. It’s very easy to see on the surface why people without access to good information could believe it was a conspiracy against black communities worldwide, especially older folks who remember the story from the beginning and not just the sanitized “yay Magic Johnson!” version featured in the popular media nowadays.
Shit - bad math. Should have typed “almost 10 years”, instead of “almost 15.”
Will: presumably arguing that Wright is mistaken at worst, not crazy. His other factual claims (that I’ve seen) look plausible or true.
“Next book club suggestion: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington.”
I second the suggestion. Excellent volume. I had been delaying reading it because the subject was simply so depressing. I finally started the book while writing the post Amanda links above (thanks so much!); it’s a revelation on every page, even for someone who knew this subject reasonably well already.
What comes through is the unbelievable pervasiveness of distinctly medical mistreatment of blacks through the centuries (on top of all the other forms of mistreatment). The incredible number of ways people from the highest and most educated ranks of white society found to abuse black Americans without their consent - including long after the Civil War - and the bizarreness and creepiness of that medicalized abuse, is hard to fathom.
The book is not without minor flaws, but it will become the indispensable reference on this issue. Not much theoretical content, but loads of fact.
I’ll third, 4th, 5th, or whatever the suggestion of Medical Apartheid — it’s a subject that’s really started to fascinate me in the wake of all this Rev. Right punditry.
I haven’t read “Medical Apartheid” but I should. It looks like a good and informative (albeit depressing) read.
Middle-class whites tend to forget that blacks have VERY GOOD reasons for not trusting the medical establishment, as other commentors have pointed out. The Tuskegee experiment was one of the worst, but by no means the only time where black people were abused and killed in the name of “science” and “medicine.” It’s not crackpottery or willful stupidity - it’s past bad experiences. You can’t really blame black people for not trusting “mainstream” medicine, or thinking that HIV is a conspiracy designed to eliminate them.
I would like to point out that the craziest and nuttiest and most conspiracy theory leftists…were the most correct about the war and GWBush. The CW, MSM and the rest were WRONG. Rev. Wright does not seem scary after this.
Have not seen the book of which you speak. However, I have read old medical journals, diaries, and planter business notes. You want creepy? Check out how the b@stards bred humans (slaves) like they did livestock. Read the unedited thoughts of professionals that truly considered blacks as subhuman. These were the educated citizens.
The only factual claim in Wright’s rants I disagree with is that AIDS was an engineered virus. But there was still enough foot dragging in the ’80s over AIDS to give plenty of ammo for cospiracy theorists. Koop finally came through in ‘88 and tried to set things right, but the damage had already been done.
Still, things got better and the late Reagan, HW Bush, and Clinton admins made progress. W has been a disaster: W can’t even back Uganda’s highly succesful anti-AIDS program.
It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the US government, or anyone else, could have engineered HIV. We just didn’t have the expertise in genetic engineering in the 1970s. Hell, we don’t have it now.
But it’s no real secret that the Reagan administration showed an appalling lack of concern over the disease, conservatives even calling it “God’s punishment” against gay people. The fact that it also spread like wildfire through African-American communities was probably the icing on the cake to those fuckers. So it’s extremely plausible that the Reagan administration deliberately allowed the virus to spread.
Frankly, this is like the discussion about 9/11, and whether or not the Bush administration explicitly planned the attack in collusion with bin Laden. I don’t think that’s very plausible. But the public record does demonstrate an appalling lack of concern about bin Laden’s plans, and clearly shows that, despite repeated warnings from the intelligence community, the administration was doing its level best to ignore the possibility of an attack. So, again, did they make it happen? No, probably not. But did they let it happen? That’s a lot more believable.