Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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The experiment primarily focused on by the article was carried out on the general population of San Francisco in 1950. At the time San Francisco was 83% non-hispanic White alone. [1] The point of the Tuskegee experiment was to see if untreated syphilis affected blacks differently than whites, as was believed at the time. It was, in part, motivated by a previous experiment in Norway which had withheld treatment for white's suffering from syphilis, which formed the foundation of the modern understanding of syphilis. [2]

If it's unclear, I'm not defending or supporting any of this insanity, but emphasizing that the motivations were in no way racist. In general, if you want to learn more about the selection process for the various sociopathic experiments "we've" carried out through the years, the Wiki on MKUltra provides quite a lot of insight. [3]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28004553/

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Experiments_on_America...

Out of respect I wanted to reply and say thank you for the links, and justification for another view. While I would say deliberate prejudice very possibly wasn't in the decision making process, a risk assessment was made. One where the risk of gassing black communities in places like St. Louis was the "safer option" because black people were second class citizens. They had no means to challenge it. If they found out, who would believe them? Who would care? For this reason institutional racism was reinforced by the military and to say " well it wasn't to be mean, they had to gas someone unfortunately" doesn't really make the decisions behind it not a decision based on race to hurt those who couldn't stand up for themselves because of their race , and therefore racism. Were other cities that were mostly white gassed to test biological warfare distribution methods? Yes. Did it impact them negatively too? Yes. Did it affect them the same way? No. the white community had a chance to expose it? Yes. Did they have an opportunity to try? Yes. They tried, and it failed. But what of the mostly African-american counterparts? At the time, none of that. Looks.pretty racist from here.

St. Louis was chosen (alongside a number of other cities) because its climate/weather conditions were as close as the military could get to the USSR, with the goal of seeing how a biological weapons attack on Russia would play out. Here [1] are some images of Moscow from the 1950s. And this [2] is an image of the Pruitt-Igoe area (majority black housing project) that was sprayed in St. Louis. Those projects bear far more than a passing resemblance to the areas where we would have targeted.

I think really the point can be most boiled down that even if everybody was all the same race, those sprayings still would've happened. And, in fact, it did happen in many areas that were mostly white. The case in San Francisco was even worse. Instead of spraying people with chemicals, believed to be safe, they were spraying them with live bacteria - which near immediately caused numerous health effects. So by focusing on race, you ultimately end up ignoring the real underlying issue.

[1] - https://www.vintag.es/2017/03/46-rare-color-photos-document-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe#/media/Fil...

> ... were in no way racist.

Apart from the whole "purposely only testing people having a specific skin colour" thing.

Gee, that doesn't sound racist at all. :p

/s

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