The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing the medical vulnerability of Black Americans into stark relief. Watching the news daily can feel like witnessing percentage points drop off our chances of survival, ten at the time. Meanwhile, I have seen a number of Black people express fear that a future vaccine could instead be a government tactic to poison, track, or otherwise harm people (particularly Black ones).
This fear comes from a history of real medical violence, and faced with the sheer callous neglect that this administration has shown and the knowledge of America’s history of medical apartheid, I don’t blame Black Americans for distrusting pharmaceuticals as a solution.
But this response also misunderstands the strategies that white supremacist institutions use to target us. Studying the history of race science, racism, and social movements in the United States has taught me that discouraging us from seeking preventative medical care is just another part of the plan.
We have centuries of evidence that Black communities are systematically neglected when it comes to medical innovations from medication to surgical techniques. Observe recent attempts to recast decades denying the human pain of Black patients as having “saved” us from an opioid crisis. White supremacists expect and want us to be skeptical of public health experts and medical practitioners. Health information is a resource, and they do not want Black people to have it.
Propaganda and disinformation about life-saving resources are powerful tools within the statistical logic of eugenics, because the goal is to shape the entire population according to a specific vision of society where whiteness and fitness to belong are synonymous and interchangeable. Discouraging Black Americans from seeking healthcare is an efficient way to keep Black people and their neighborhoods, cities, and regions vulnerable to environmental crises like Hurricanes Katrina and Maria.
When Black people do not have access to vaccines, we experience outbreaks of devastating diseases that are no longer experienced by white Americans. Black communities also experience these public health crises as worsened health outcomes—and medical debt—across generations. Consider the outbreak of measles among poor Black and hispanic kindergartners in Chicago from 1989-1991, and the fact that measles survivors can experience brain damage and other lifelong disabilities. Eugenicists use policy to engineer these persistent inequities.
Avoiding vaccines might feel like an individual act of resistance, but at the population level this could leave entire communities with compromised health and greater difficulty slowing the spread of disease.
The neighborhood where you live predicts many aspects of your health. Through segregation and urban planning, the US ensures that people of color disproportionately live with polluted air and poor sanitation. The high concentration in the Black community of “comorbidities,” health conditions that make illnesses deadlier, is by deliberate design. In this way, the US touts scientific progress and improved national health while the health gap between Blacks and whites persists.
That’s why the oft-cited Tuskegee Syphilis Study selected Black people who were poor, uneducated, and residents of rural areas. When doctors told the Tuskegee victims that they were getting routine healthcare when they were actually being selected for observation because they were known to be longtime sufferers of syphilis, they chose a town where Black people would be uniquely unable to access health information or an ethical medical opinion. This made it easy to continue to deprive them of treatment for decades after Penicillin was proven totally effective because those being experimented on could only receive the treatment if they asked for it.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was not about injecting Black men with mad science drug cocktails; it was about preventing them from accessing healthcare so that the US Public Health Service (USPHS) could collect data about what untreated syphilis does to Black men’s bodies.
To be clear, Black people resisting vaccines is only a symptom of the problem, and blaming them is also part of the plan of white supremacy. In a 1969 ad-hoc committee meeting to discuss the “political problem” of continuing the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, one of the investigators (a Dr. Sencer) reasoned, “The educational level of the Negroes in the Study is so low that it would not be possible to explain informed consent to them.” 71 Likewise, a future cohort of sociologists will compare our death rates to the death rates of whites, and reason that the disparity is because we “chose” not to vaccinate or to social distance.
This moral sleight of hand is the same thing that happens when the New York mayor slashes train service to enforce social distancing, forcing essential workers to pack into cars inches from one another traveling between the segregated neighborhoods where they live and work. It is invoked when Dr. Anthony Fauci talks about “health disparities” and lets listeners imagine how those disparities came to be.
By failing to name racism as the ultimate cause of health disparities between Black people and (implicitly) white people, Fauci forecloses governmental and institutional interventions. If Black people are “just” sicker than everyone else, our mass deaths due to COVID are a predictable tragedy, not a set of institutional practices that must be changed. In this way, it becomes both efficient and expedient to allow Black people to die instead of taking emergency measures to dismantle structural barriers to our survival.
Lack of access to technology, drugs, and information is already killing us so efficiently that skepticism of vaccines is only compounding factor. It is not that Black Americans are “paranoid” or “irrational” for fearing that medical technology will be used against us. Rather, we lack the historical data that pharmaceutical corporations, insurance companies and governments possess. That data shows that failing to vaccinate a population for a disease is a much more efficient vehicle for localizing mass death than any targeted program.
While Black people are vulnerable to targeting when medical treatments are being developed, we are also among the last to benefit. That is the conspiracy.
There are about 40,000,000 people in the United States. The data about who is dying of COVID is showing Black Americans representing as much as 43% of deaths. It is easier for the President to handwave hundreds of thousands of deaths when Black people are represented among these deaths by three times their percentage of the population. This fact will also dictate the solutions that are offered, how they are financed, and their timelines.
Like most medical care in the US, vaccines tend to be costly, making them disproportionately unaffordable to Black people who tend to have less disposable income. And they are provided by institutions like pharmacies and family practices that are disproportionately less accessible to Black communities. Access to testing sites and tests compared to the racial statistics on COVID outcomes are exactly what you would expect if your goal was for the most white people to survive while the most Black people die.
Our greatest danger, then, is that vaccines will not be accessible to us, whether because of supply, cost, or medical gatekeeping. Eugenicists can then depend on the CDC to blame Black people’s bodies and behaviors for the unconscionable rate of deaths and comorbidities among Black people.
The current presidential administration has trafficked extensively in eugenic ideals. The White House based its initial COVID response on an essay titled “Coronavirus” by law professor Richard Epstein. Comparing Washington State, New York, California and Massachusetts, Epstein wrote, “Many of the dire media accounts do not mention evolution.” “After the initial outburst in Kirkland,” he cautioned, “the target population was fitter.”
Eugenics thrives by affecting public policy through race science myths. The myth that Black people are immune to coronavirus, based in a false belief that human beings have evolved as genetically distinct racial groups, is already killing Black people. If myths about vaccines discourage Black people from seeking treatment for Coronavirus, we will immediately see the narrative that Black people do not take our health seriously, or understand public health because of qualities that are essential to our “race.”
Once you understand that population control and beliefs about the types of people in an “ideal society,” it is clear that antivax ideology is a dangerously misguided framework for addressing the specific type of medical violence that Black people experience as a racialized population with high rates of disability and chronic illness.
I am not suggesting we merely accept the state of medical inequity and anti-Black medical malfeasance in the US. Instead, we must organize to mitigate the specific disparate impact of COVID on Black people due to existing racial health disparities. We should do that by identifying and dismantling eugenicist polices and practices. And we can’t wait 12-18 months to do so.
We must fight for community oversight of development of any vaccinations of treatments. All vaccine data should be transparent to the public and include racial comparison information. We must not allow trials that oversample Black Americans.
While we still can, we need to fight for a completely free, nonproprietary vaccine. We must preemptively fight against the inevitable attempts to test the vaccine on imprisoned people, poor people, and non-Americans.
We must develop local medical fact-checking resources as alternatives to social media, and make sure people know about them. We need to be suspicious of “race science” claims, because it is structural inequalities, not our genetics, that are producing our health disparities.
We must advocate for Black workers. The health of our communities overall depends on minimizing the transmission of coronavirus from their workplaces and public transportation to their households.
We must fight for a proportionate medical response to the impact of coronavirus in our communities, which is worsened by legacy and current medical apartheid. We must resist colorblind solutions that discipline Black communities for health inequalities that the state systemically nurtured across generations of urban planning and medical apartheid.
Suggested Reading
Dan Vergano, Why The Coronavirus Is Killing Black Americans At Outsize Rates Across The US, Buzzfeed, 2020
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface, Harvard University Press, 2019.
Benjamin, Ruha, People’s science: Bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier, Stanford University Press, 2013.
Dr. Leslie Kay Jones is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. She writes about social movements, race and technocultur. She was raised by two southerners and the internet.
Follow her on Twitter
