The same all over again
Pause and think about this. It is 1619 and a group of Africans who were destined to become indentured servants landed on the shores of the Virginia colony. Soon the European settlers realized that these indentured servants were easily identified. Voila, here begins slavery and the growth of the products they labored to plant, tend to, and harvest were very profitable- cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, peanuts and indigo.
Pause and think about this. The enslaved were counted each one 3/5 of a white man in the census to lessen the impact of the South These enslaved people were experimented upon. For it was thought that black skin was tougher than white skin. Women were not given 6 weeks after the birth of a child to recover. They delivered their babies in the fields. Look at the scars on our men’s backs.
After Emancipation another amendment had to be passed to give these African Americans the right to vote. Along came Jim Crow and the Dixie Crats. These were followed by the Tulsa Massacre. “According to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice 4,400 Black people had been slain in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950.” (Harpaz, Beth)
Pause again and think about this. ” In mid-1973 news stories revealed the forced sterilization of poor black women and children, paid for by federal funds. Two girls of the Relf family in Mississippi, deemed mentally incompetent at ages 12 and 14, and also 18-year-old welfare recipient Nial Ruth Cox of North Carolina, were prominent cases of involuntary sterilization.[ Jet magazine presented the story under the headline “Genocide.” (Caron, Simone M.)
Oh are we pausing again? 600 poor sharecroppers were promised health care. The U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments. PHS
When penicillin was discovered to be a treatment, these participants were not given the drug. “In the mid-1960s, a PHS venereal disease investigator in San Francisco named Peter Buxton found out about the Tuskegee study and expressed his concerns to his superiors that it was unethical. In response, PHS officials formed a committee to review the study but ultimately opted to continue it—with the goal of tracking the participants until all had died, autopsies were performed and the project data could be analyzed.”
Now let us look at today. Black men are killed by the police. There seems to be new case every week. CBS stated that 164 blacks were killed from January to August 2020. In Wisconsin Blacks make up 6% of population but are 10.66 times more likely to be killed by police. The list starts with George Floyd, Dante Wright, Ahmed Aubrey, Trevon Martin. Need I say more.
COVID 19 deaths of Blacks are disproportionate to the percentage of the population. Now during this world wide pandemic, Blacks lag in vaccination against this plague. Is it because Blacks are afraid of the shot? Is it because they lack access the vaccination sites. Is it because they may not have access to the internet? Is it because they are afraid that the shots they receive are not the same as white people?
Pause and think about this finally . Just food for thought. When good men and women of America do not speak up, we are all lost. We pray for the righteously aggrieved to speak, protest, vote and that others who believe will lend a helping hand..