Black and Blue by Hoberman John;

Black and Blue by Hoberman John;

Author:Hoberman, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press


The result is that the do-gooders, to their amazement and consternation, find themselves attacked instead of welcomed. When, a few years ago, Mayor Robert F. Wagner of New York City proudly announced a bold new program of mental health for Harlem, he was greeted by an explosion of anger; Harlem leaders forgot their own bickering long enough to unite in an attack on “welfare colonialism” and a demand that any new programs be developed by the community itself. In city after city, in fact, supposedly supine Negroes have been turning on their benefactors with such slogans as “we refuse to be planned for as though we were children,” “we're tired of being guinea pigs in sociological experiments,” and the like.15

A similar “colonial” scenario played out two decades later in New York City, as public health officials undertook to rescue African Americans from the ravages of AIDS. The white authorities were unpleasantly surprised when they encountered massive resistance among black citizens to a proposed pilot needle-exchange program. Even the black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, protested on the grounds that as a black man he felt “a particular sensitivity to doctors conducting experiments, and they too frequently seem to be conducted against blacks.” “Why,” asked the Reverend Reginald Williams of the Addicts Rehabilitation Center in East Harlem, “must we again be the guinea pigs in this genocidal mentality?”16 The medical missionaries who came to save Harlem from its bad habits did not recognize the nature of the colonial drama, intensified by its medical theme and the catastrophe of black drug abuse, in which they were playing a starring role. In fact, the authority to protect the public health is an intrinsically “colonial” authority precisely because it includes the authority to classify (stigmatize) and quarantine (segregate). The updated medical colonialism that came to Harlem to deal with AIDS arrived long after the stigmatizing and segregating of Harlem's black population were already a fait accompli. The new element on this occasion—the modern face of medical colonialism—was the combination of good intentions and the naïve disappointment that resulted when the expected interracial collaboration was rejected by its intended beneficiaries. What the white public health officials had not included in their strategy was a way to engage and disarm a profound black distrust of medical authority of which they seem to have been unaware. During Jim Crow this estranged relationship had been obvious to many white physicians, who confessed their ignorance of what black people were thinking and feeling and called upon black personnel to bridge the racial divide. In the 1980s, however, this sort of candor—and, therefore, any official acknowledgement of medical colonialism—was out of the question.

Over the course of the past two centuries, medical colonialists have arrived with good intentions and the promise of expertise than can benefit the “native,” “primitive,” or “underdeveloped” people they have come to serve. In the modern era, expertise is the ideal form of authority because it can dispense with overtly coercive methods in favor of the persuasive techniques that are compatible with liberal democratic norms.



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