Democracy Deferred

WHILE the U.S. president zigzags throughout Europe, calling on European allies to join enthusiastically in his efforts at supplanting governments throughout the Middle East, PBS television talk-show host Tavis Smiley will host the “State of the Black Union” symposium for the seventh straight year.  Like the previous six symposiums, it will focus on how to create a national “African-American contract” that will address political and economic concerns.  The most significant concern this year, however, will be how to improve the health status of the black community. 

The most enlightened of European thinkers who applauded democratic institutions on their soil forecasted a stubborn conclusion:  that while democratic institutions advance socio-economic models through a capitalist ideology, they nonetheless perpetuate moral and economic inequalities among its citizenry.  Nowhere is this conclusion more transparent than a sobering examination of health-care in the United States.

The right to universal and comprehensive health-care for all Americans is all but a utopian aspiration.  Simply put, the U.S. health-care system represents an entrepreneurial model that “gives the highest policy priority to market principles” and “…commands social policies that trigger inequality in medical care…” leading to “…decreased health, premature mortality, and disability that disproportionately affect certain socioeconomic strata of our society”. 

There is not enough space here to show that African-Americans represent the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder; nonetheless, a surprising medical study recently conducted by the Rand Corporation and Oregon State University reinforces prevailing African-American attitudes towards their government that quite possibly reinforce this socio-economic trend:  a significant portion of African-Americans embrace the theory that government scientists created the disease to wipe out their communities.  Specifically, the HIV infection rate doubled among blacks (from 1 to 2%) while holding steady among whites (0.2%) during the past ten years.  There is more.  53.4% believed that an AIDS cure is being kept from the poor; 16.2% believed that the government created AIDS to control blacks; 15.2% believed that AIDS was created to destroy blacks; 12 % believed that HIV was created and spread by the CIA, and 43.6% believed that those who take new HIV drugs are government guinea-pigs.  These findings are no surprise to Na’im Akbar, himself a Muslim and professor of psychology at Florida State University:  “This is not a bunch of crazy people running around saying they’re out to get us”; this belief “comes from the reality of 300 years of slavery and 100 years of post-slavery exploitation”.  He cites the “Tuskegee Experiment” conducted by the federal government for fifty years, wherein scientists duped black men into thinking that they were being treated for syphilis while in fact they withheld treatment so they could study the course of the disease.  

The race problem here in this American democracy runs counter to Anglo-cultural values of individualism, material well-being and competition.  A key component of this democracy cherishes property more than individual liberty itself, while history records that generations of African-American slaves were branded as someone else’s property.  Chattel slavery indeed depreciated the moral propensity of a whole generation of African-Americans.  Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles ironically bemoans that past discrimination should no longer be an excuse for embracing “conspiracies”, thereby allowing HIV to continue its steady, upward climb within the black community:  “The whole notion of conspiracy theories and misinformation…removes personal responsibility…The syphilis study was real, but it happened 40 years ago, and holding on to it is killing us”.  Mr. Wilson should know that affect, spirituality and communalism are significant predictors of moral reasoning among African-Americans.  Somewhere in the historical time-line of this democracy these predictors dissociated itself, creating within the African-American community individual nihilism and an acute sense of meaninglessness.  One salient point is clear:  HIV in America is virtually a black disease.  73% of newly diagnosed women and 40% of newly diagnosed men are black, even though they constitute only 12% of the population. 

Just last summer, Reps. Brad Miller, chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, and Nick Lampson, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Howard Frumkin, chief of the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, informing him that his agency postponed testing trailers used to house hurricane Katrina victims for formaldehyde, a toxic chemical.  While Dr. Frumkin’s agency, under FEMA’s direction, assumed the responsibility of testing the trailers for formaldehyde, including compiling a detailed assessment of potential long-term risks of inhaling formaldehyde, FEMA officials instructed their scientists to omit any references to cancer or other health-related risks.  The Federal Emergency Management Agency placed tens of thousands of families displaced by the storm in 40,000 travel trailers; almost immediately, however, its inhabitants called FEMA to complain of various illnesses ranging from breathing difficulties, bloody noses and rashes possibly relating to high levels of formaldehyde gas.  Health experts reveal that exposure to formaldehyde gas can impact the fertility process, and leads to fetal malformations and spontaneous abortions.     

The writer is a recent revert to Islam and can be contacted at: drummondhugh@verizon.net