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.

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.

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 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.

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.