Of all of the "crazy" things Rev. Wright said, the ones that people have agreed to be most clearly out of bounds are his comments on AIDS. Wright claimed that AIDS was a government conspiracy to kill black people. That's clearly crazy. But as Hilzoy points out, for a man of Wright's age, its not that crazy:
One more date, both because it is itself outrageous and because it is something to bear in mind if you should happen to wonder why someone like Rev. Wright might believe that our government caused HIV: when the Tuskegee Study ended in 1972, Rev. Wright was thirty one years old.I imagine many of you know about the Tuskegee Study, but if you don't: it was a government study designed to see what happened to black men with syphilis when they were not treated. The men enlisted in the study were poor, and often illiterate, sharecroppers in Alabama. There were ethical problems with the study from the start, but the really appalling part came when penicillin became available in the mid-1940s (before then, there were no really good treatments for syphilis.) Once an effective treatment for syphilis became available, the moral thing to do would have been to halt the study and provide penicillin to everyone in it.
This wouldn't have been much of a loss to science: the study was badly designed, and pretty pointless once a treatment had appeared. There had also been a similar study on whites, carried out when no treatments were available, and there was no good reason to think blacks differed significantly from whites in this respect. More to the point, letting syphilis go untreated once a treatment was available is just plain wrong, and even if there had been more benefit to science than there was, that wouldn't have made it OK.
But our government didn't just not treat the men's syphilis. They actually prevented the men in the study from getting treatment on their own. Government researchers let these men sicken and die for twenty five years after an inexpensive and very effective treatment became available. They also let these men's wives become infected, and their children be born with congenital syphilis.
Results from this study were being published throughout this period. It was not a big secret. And, as I said, it was only ended, after public outcry, in 1972. That was forty years after it started, and twenty five years after penicillin became available -- twenty five years during which our government kept a group of its citizens from getting treatment for a fatal, horrific, and contagious disease so that it could watch them die.
Medical researchers often have a harder time winning the trust of African Americans than of most other groups of American citizens. None of the ones I've talked to doubts for a moment that the history of research on African Americans has a lot to do with this.
That is part of our collective history. I am only 36 years old. I was born in 1971. On the day I came into this world, the Tuskegee Study had not yet been stopped.
Know your history. Use it to place people's perceptions of their world into context.
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