A year ago today, a nigger by the name of Adrianne Gladden-Young was whining that too many of the scientists who were trying to cure the Wuhan Flu are white. I thought it was only fair, since the scientists who created it were all yellow.
I am a scientist who, for the past nine weeks, has been studying the respiratory virus that is disproportionately killing people who look like me. “I can’t breathe”—the way George Floyd pleaded for mercy as a white police officer in Minneapolis killed him late last month—has become a slogan for those protesting against police violence and systemic racism in America. But it also captures the deep inequities that have allowed the coronavirus to claim so many black lives, and neither the scientific community nor the public-health world is confronting the problem directly.
Well if she's dumb enough to think that "I can't breathe" was something Thug Floyd said "while pleading" then no wonder she was being kept away from the centrifuge. Not only was it something he said long before cops were forced to physically engage with him (it's a common trick these criminals perform) but he never pleaded for mercy...as seen in the video, he violently kept trying to resist arrest. Also note the lack of altruism involved: white scientists are working to cure people, while nigger scientists only care if the victims "look like them". Pathetic tribalism, or full on racism? You decide (but the answer is both).
I fully understand how viruses work. They exploit vulnerabilities, invading and quietly using their hosts’ cells to replicate, and then spread to other vulnerable hosts. As a black woman, I am doubly vulnerable—to COVID-19, and to the systemic racism that has always plagued my community.
Gladden-Young didn't give an example of systemic racism, of course. She can't: it doesn't exist. This is not what we expect from the scientific community.
Our vulnerability does not earn us any special attention or public-health resources. For centuries, it has done the opposite, offering indifferent authorities an excuse to help us grudgingly or not at all. As the historian Vanessa Northington Gamble has documented, many leaders and health-care professionals during the 1918 influenza pandemic granted care and medical services—albeit limited and of low quality—to their black counterparts solely out of fear that disease-stricken black communities posed a public-health threat to white neighborhoods.
That's bad of course, because whites did it. When a negress like Gladden-Young does it, as she admits to within that article, it's a sign of how wonderful she is.
A century later, our needs are still routinely pushed aside. As the pandemic spread this spring, early triage plans for the expected surge in patients requiring intensive care included proposals to withhold lifesaving treatments from people with underlying health conditions such as lung and heart diseases—conditions that black people are more likely to have.
Whitey told you to go easy on the fried chicken, don't go blaming us because you just can't resist...
It's curious that Gladden-Young is also unaware of how triage works. Remember that in the early days of the Wuhan Flu scare, it was believed that there would be tides of dead bodies in the streets because the media (and activist scientists like Gladden-Young) kept insisting this was a horrendously deadly and contagious disease.
That meant that there would be a batch of patients who wouldn't likely benefit from time in the ICU and were lost causes no matter what we did. In the real world they ended up taking up spaces in ICUs anyways and then being a big bugaboo to whiny left-wing doctors. In the triage preparations of March 2020, they were the "P4" category. Gladden-Young might be sad that large numbers of blacks (who we knew early on were much more likely to die from this than whites) fall into the P4 category, but that doesn't make putting them there inherently wrong. Again, isn't she a scientist? If "the science" says "let the negros die in the gurney and use our precious resources to save the most people possible who happen to be white" then why is she complaining about it?
Meanwhile, even experts who specialize in health disparities felt obliged to note that protecting the health of black patients also protects “all Americans.” We have been diminished as liabilities to the health-care system or as outright vectors for disease.
Welcome to public healthcare, when every patient is a liability that's best to be shunted to the side. Again, this shouldn't news. In the meanwhile, I've been diminished by falsely being accused of being "an outright vector" for the Wuhan Flu just because I protest innocents being put in jail or dare attend a rodeo. Spare me your false outrage.
What research has been conducted to help black communities for their own sake? Even after years of efforts to reduce racial disparities in science and medicine, black populations are still dramatically underrepresented in medical and scientific data sets. Less than 10 percent of doctorate-level scientists are black.
Maybe their grades aren't high enough (even though many schools, including Harvard where Gladden-Young currently works, have already vastly lowered academic standards so that even any blacks could be admitted)? Maybe not very many blacks bother to apply (I hear graduate studies is a lot of work). Years of getting a free leg up and still aren't getting the results you want? C'mon Adrianne, you're a scientist, what did Einstein (apocryphally) say about the definition of insanity?
Studies of community health—which are more likely to involve analysis of health outcomes in black populations—are less likely to receive funding than studies focused on molecular and cellular science. (The former category also happens to be the type of study that black researchers are more likely to conduct.)
Sounds like an inferior field of research. Hey, what a coincidence!
Making matters worse, the science, research, and medical communities have lost the trust of black communities after years of exploitation, abuse, and neglect—from the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to the infamous use of Henrietta Lacks’s cancer cells in research without her consent to the controversial approval of a “race-based drug” to our present awareness that health-care providers systematically underestimate black people’s physical pain. No wonder so many black Americans avoid participating in studies that might exclude us from the benefits or, worse, use science to link individuals to crimes they did not commit.
You want to have your cake and eat it to: you object to both having the attention of and being ignored by medical science. The "systematically underestimate black people's physical pain" by the way links to an article that just talks about cultural misunderstandings. Black people's skin isn't thicker after all [so explain how 50 Cent got shot so many times and survived while John Lennon didn't! -ed]. Good to know, but by the way it's not a myth that their IQs are lower. So stop systematically overestimating black people's mental acuity, lady.
While we're at it, let's stop wasting time on "outreach" to convince darkies that it's okay this time it's totally okay we're giving them experimental vaccine with no long-term health data, since you and your ilk keep exaggerating tales of past abuse and then expect everybody else to bear the brunt of your propaganda. That was going to be the next thing you brought up, wasn't it?
The pandemic has revealed still more official obtuseness about African Americans’ health needs. In recent testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, the infectious-disease expert James Hildreth—the president of Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution in Nashville, Tennessee—shared the story of an effort by the Tennessee National Guard to offer free COVID-19 testing in public-housing projects in that state. Even as patients with the coronavirus died undiagnosed, many of the testing sites sat empty because residents were wary of the National Guard. “Not surprisingly,” Meharry said, “the people living [in the public-housing developments] were apprehensive, and they stayed behind closed doors.”
WHAT DID I JUST SAY? No "obtuseness" about your "health needs" is involved in sending emergency services to help you out only to have your own illogical biases keep you away. This is your failure. Be better.
The pandemic will eventually peter out. But racism and bigotry have infected American institutions for centuries, and the public-health, medical, and science authorities are not immune.
She still haven't provided examples of "racism and bigotry" in "American institutions". Though it looks like the likes of Gladden-Young and James Hildreth have enough ignorance and tribalism within that it sort of spills out into the world around them, like when Sickle Cell Anemia starts making you see colours that aren't actually there.
What black Americans need is for leaders in the public-health, research, and medical communities to stand up alongside us—to engage us not as victims, but as leaders and problem-solvers. One way to do so is to collaborate with and recruit from the historically black health-care and scientific institutions that serve us and know us. As Hildreth put it, “Let us take our place in this fight.”
Don't worry, nobody is engaging blacks as victims...unless you meant as victims in the most recent robbery or violent attack on Jews or Asians. Instead, we keep asking why "historically black health-care and scientific institutions" even exist. It's still segregation when you do that.
Does Meharry Medical College get around to teaching Newton's Third Law of Motion?
In the long term, efforts must continue to reduce the research-funding gap, invite more black Americans into the STEM pipeline, and provide appropriate support for both black health-care professionals and black students in medical and scientific fields.
How about no? How about all schools are treated equally and strongly encouraged (private) or mandated (public) to accept the best students no matter their skin colour? If that means no black student gets into "the STEM pipeline" ever again, so be it.
The words of George Floyd echo the systemic injustice and racist violence we have suffered for years. We can’t breathe.
Much like the statements (and $20 bills) of Gorilla Floyd, this claim of "systemic injustice and racist violence" is a fraud, a complete and villainous fabrication. We expect tribal negros to lie and fake victim status in order to get something free from superior taxpaying whites. We expect scientists to listen to evidence.
When the two collide, it's clear which side wins.
