COVID and the Black Experience: A Brief History of the Black Community's Relationship With Medicine
By Islam Ahmed and Amatullah Shaw
Recently, The Muslim Network hosted a virtual event entitled “COVID and the Black Experience”, where TMN’s Director of Programming, Islam Ahmed, hosted a conversation with Dr. Ayah Nuriddin, a Costen Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and African American Studies at Princeton University.
The discussion covered everything from the history of the exploitation of Black Americans masqueraded as the necessary advancement of science and medicine, and in turn, “the greater good,” to the effects of said maltreatment that reverberated throughout history and are still felt today.
To give context, according to recent data collected by The New York Times, at least 72% of all NJ residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and 87% have received at least one dose. Also, the CDC reported that as of December 2021, 76.2% of Black people in the US are fully vaccinated but in a separate report, Black people also make up the majority of hospitalizations with a COVID-related illness. It’s also been reported that 78% of Black Americans know someone who had been hospitalized or had died from COVID, which was the highest of all other ethnic groups.
So what do these numbers mean? Well, for one, they confirm what we’ve seen happen time and time again within society’s most vulnerable and marginalized populations: Black and African American people have fared worse in the COVID-19 pandemic than almost any of their racial/ethnic counterparts. Furthermore, back in 2020, Black people were twice as likely to die from COVID and made up the most deaths out of other racial and ethnic groups. But it’s clear that not much has changed. Medicine has continued to fail Black communities as it has for years now and has sowed deeply rooted distrust of the system that is supposed to treat everyone equally.
Then, Dr. Nuriddin related the upsetting, but familiar story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: back in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) conducted a study in Macon County, Alabama on 600 Black men to observe the effects of syphilis left untreated. As a result, many of the men died, went blind, became mentally ill, or sustained irreversible damage. The participants were told they were being treated for “bad blood” (a term used to describe anemia or fatigue) and were given free meals, free medical exams, and burial insurance in return. However, once a cure was found, these men were not provided with effective care.
Another such example of the exploitation of Black Americans can be found in the posthumous treatment of Henrietta Lacks, a patient that was unsuccessfully treated for cervical cancer in the 1950s. A sample tissue of her tumor was kept and studied without the consent of her family, who had at some point also become the subjects of scientific zeal. The extracted tissue ultimately provided a breakthrough in the medical field and her cells are still being used today for research.
But it doesn’t change the fact that Henrietta Lacks, and many other Black Americans, were once again used for medical treatments they would never get to benefit from. Racism and anti-Blackness are so embedded in every facet of our society that it will take strategic and systemic change. Dr. Nuriddin suggested that keeping the stories of Henrietta Lacks and the men of the Tuskegee Experiment at the forefront of our collective consciousness could prevent them from happening again.
The most effective way to tackle this specific, but persistent issue is to treat it as you would a disease, by first identifying the source(s). Over the course of the discussion, the source was revealed to be two-pronged: a) the reality that the mistrust exhibited by Black and African American communities comes from very real and corrosive incidents littered throughout history; b) the inaccessibility to information from credible sources, generally, and as it pertains to our current fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. There has always been a divide between the pioneers of science and medicine and the layman, a divide that- in the most reductive of terms- was borne of a lack of willingness and/or inability on the part of the experts to translate the jargon and make it intelligible to the average reader.
Dr. Nuriddin said that to address the first issue:
We must recognize that the mistrust is justifiable and take careful pains to reduce that mistrust by committing to making atonements and offering equally justifiable reparations.
There must be an effort made by both researchers to make essential information accessible as well the individuals they are working to serve by being open to listening to solicited, evidence-based recommendations of our healthcare workers.
Within our own Muslim sub-communities, we can begin tackling these seemingly insurmountable hurdles by educating ourselves and others of our country’s history and how the implications are playing out today. When it comes to rectifying the wrongs of Black American history and improving the Black experience, having conversations about how to be an abolitionist in today’s terms and ensuring institutions, like healthcare, are as equitable as possible is taking a step in the right direction.