Poor Black People, the "throwaway people"

[undergroundrailroad]

washingtonpost.com

A Nation's Castaways

Katrina Blew In, and Tossed Up Reminders of a Tattered Racial Legacy

By Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, September 4, 2005; D01



On TV, we watch them: His braids are flying above his head and he's got a wild look on his face. He's running, one arm clutching a load of looted clothes, the other reaching back to tug at his pants, which are in danger of sliding past his rump. She's crying and forlorn and too young to be carrying a baby in her arms, but carrying one she is, and both are dirty and sweaty and hungry, reduced to an animal-like state of waiting and starving and begging for help. We see them through our respective prisms of race, and call them "refugees," as if they are foreigners in their own land.

They are the Other, these victims of Katrina.

And in this country, the Other is black. Poor. Desperate.

Mainstream America too often demonizes the Other because, well, we've been conditioned to do so. And because it's easier to put people in a box and then shove it in the corner, away from view. Then it becomes their problem, not ours. To talk about race, for those who are weary of it, is to invite glazed-over eyes and stifled yawns -- or even hostility.

But Katrina blew open the box, putting the urban poor front and center, with images of once-invisible folks pleading from rooftops, wading through flooded streets, starving at the Superdome and requiring a massive federal outlay of resources. Or dead, wheelchairs pushed up against the wall, a blanket thrown over still bodies. The Other is there, staring us in the face, exposing our issues on an international stage. It is at once an embarrassment -- how did we go from can-do to can't-do-for-our-own? -- and a challenge, critics charge: How do we stop ignoring the folks in the box, the inner-city destitute, and realize that their fate is ours as well?

Poor black people, says Lani Guinier, a Harvard University law professor, are "the canary in the mine. Poor black people are the throwaway people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard."

[Karenina]

1. Let's just say the FIRST throwaway people...

The "Katarina exercise" was about testing the parameters. Haiti?

[fortyfeetunder]

2. Or America's experiment in ethnic cleansing

The "shoot to kill" reminded me of the ethnic cleansing in E. Europe...

[undergroundrailroad]

3. And let's not forget The Tuskegee Experiment where poor black men and

their spouses/SO were used as laboratory animals. That took place between (not that long ago).

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

Different tragedy, same concept. The "throw away people".

:cry:

[FrenchieCat]

4. I'm still shocked about that one to this day.....

that was sooooo Hitler and sick.


Don't forget the 800,000 Rwandans machete to death.....no one had anytime for those throwaways either.

Darfur--same thing.

Big Medical labs selling untested drugs in Africa-that's close to the Tuskegee experiment as it gets. Testing AIDs drugs, hence the discount...as well as other "cures".

See the movie "The Constant Gardener" for more info on that last point. Great film informing us on a terrible practice by the big pharma COs.
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=info&id=1808680118&intl=us

Batting 100% it seems!