Invoking “Tuskegee”: Problems in Health Disparities, Genetic Assumptions, and History

Since 1972 the word “Tuskegee” has functioned as a metaphor for racism, paternalism, and deadly deception in government-sponsored medical research. There remain new lessons to be considered. We must understand how concepts of race become spoken and written about and then embedded in science that has racist implications. We have to consider how the researchers in the Tuskegee syphilis study assumed that syphilis was almost a different disease in Blacks and Whites, and yet were eager to make race disappear as the study’s results would be used to generalize the concern for the dangers of syphilis. If we only look at what happened in that study as the past, or learn from it in narrow ways, we are in danger of re-creating the thinking that made it possible in the first place.