In the black community in the United States, most medical conspiracy beliefs are rooted in the painful history of medical mistreatment and criminal medical behavior that we know all too well, including:
• Experimentation on enslaved Africans the U.S. Public Health Service’s syphilis
• Experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama
• Johns Hopkins scientists George Gey and Victor McKusick’s stealing of the cervix cells of Henrietta Lacks
These events and occurrences are covered in books such as Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid, which details the long history of experiments and
abuses that black people suffered at the hands of white medical doctors and researchers at historically segregated hospitals, universities, and institutions. Although activists in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements have forced many changes, abuses in medical research and the pharmaceuticals industry remain pressing issues, including the ethical dilemmas posed by gene patents, biocolonialism, and research in developing nations that Washington discusses in another book Deadly Monopolies.
Just a few months ago, Wendy Tokuda, a reporter for KPIX in Oakland, aired a story said that children living in the inner city suffered from a more complex form of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) called “Hood Disease.” While the science behind PTSD is
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is valid, the label “hood disease” is applied to black people in a derogatory way as if to say that living in the ‘hood renders black people a disease. The label “hood disease” carries the connotation that blacks living in disinvested neighborhoods embody or personify disease itself. But as M.K. Asante Jr. creatively explains in his book It's Bigger than Hip Hop and Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in his long-form essay The Case for Reparations, the “ghetto” was created by racist policies such as segregation, restrictive covenants, redlining, and federal housing subsidies to create whites-only suburban communities. Interstate highways constructed to connect white residents with their jobs in the cities, were intentionally run through many black neighborhoods, tearing them apart and displacing more than 200,000 families, moving
many of them to public housing.
These are the federal policies that created the "‘hood." Neighborhoods we see today didn’t just emerge randomly. Baltimore neighborhoods such as Upton and Middle East were intentionally restricted from opportunity, while other neighborhoods like Roland Park and Homeland were developed as "whites-only" neighborhoods, as uncovered in research by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. Considering this background, the stress in these neighborhoods could just as easily been called “racism’s disease” or “white supremacy disease.”
The framing of science, medicine, and public health often leaves black people stigmatized and demonized or neglected and unprotected. Because