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Vol. 9 No. 42…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…October 20,
2006
Intuit’s Vibe
The Quadroon Girl
Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (1807-1882)
The Slaver in the
broad lagoon
Lay moored with idle
sail;
He waited for the
rising moon,
And for the evening
gale.
Under the shore his
boat was tied,
And all her listless
crew
Watched the gray
alligator slide
Into the still bayou.
Odors of
orange-flowers, and spice,
Reached them from
time to time,
Like airs that
breathe from Paradise
Upon a world of
crime.
The Planter, under
his roof of thatch,
Smoked thoughtfully
and slow;
The Slaver's thumb
was on the latch,
He seemed in haste to
go.
He said, "My
ship at anchor rides
In yonder broad
lagoon;
I only wait the
evening tides,
And the rising of the
moon.
Before them, with her
face upraised,
In timid attitude,
Like one half
curious, half amazed,
A Quadroon maiden
stood.
Her eyes were large,
and full of light,
Her arms and neck
were bare;
No garment she wore
save a kirtle bright,
And her own long,
raven hair.
And on her lips there
played a smile
As holy, meek, and
faint,
As lights in some
cathedral aisle
The features of a
saint.
"The soil is
barren,--the farm is old";
The thoughtful
planter said;
Then looked upon the
Slaver's gold,
And then upon the
maid.
His heart within him
was at strife
With such accursed
gains:
For he knew whose
passions gave her life,
Whose blood ran in
her veins.
But the voice of
nature was too weak;
He took the
glittering gold!
Then pale as death
grew the maiden's cheek,
Her hands as icy
cold.
The Slaver led her
from the door,
He led her by the
hand,
To be his slave and
paramour
In a strange and distant land!
Disgruntled
feels: Faithless!
At long last, the truth emerges.
There is no compassionate conservative and that faith-based propaganda
is a devious ploy to get evangelicals to the polls to vote for
Republicans. Classic Karl Rove
psychological manipulation, it is the kind of fraud lobbyist Jack Abramoff and
Ralph Reed used on Native Americans that wanted to get and keep casinos. The neo-conservative junta, which runs
the Bush administration, sees religion as a sedative for the masses, liberally
used to lull sheep asleep while it acquires and maintains power. Of course, clever neo-cons call those so easily manipulated
unflattering names, such as goofy and nuts, as David Kuo claims in his new
book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." It is a case of the faithless fooling
the faithful.
Disgruntled says: Contrary
to urban legend, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution did not abolish
slavery. The word 'slavery' appears for the first time in this amendment. The
13th and subsequent amendments neither specifically repealed the 3/5 Compromise
(Article 1, Section 2) nor abolished its racist institutions, which include the
Electoral College. The legal foundation of US slavery remains intact. The 13th
Amendment merely identifies the circumstance under which US citizens may be
held in bondage (imprisoned) for committing a crime. It says nothing about the
political and economic slavery codified in Article 1 Section 2.
Disgruntled wants to know: Inside the
Beltway, the air is blue with much ado about former US Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL)
and his inappropriate contact with underage male pages. The fallout has GOP
gays acrimonious. Will there be another bombshell like a prominent member of
government leaving the closet and pointing fingers at those still hiding?
James Marion Sims
(1813-1883)
"I knew nothing about medicine, but I
had sense enough to see that doctors were killing their patients; that medicine
was not an exact science; that it was wholly empirical, and that it would be
better to trust entirely to Nature than to the hazardous skills of the
doctors." -- James Marion Sims
Born on January 25, 1813 in Lancaster County South Carolina, James Marion Sims
attended Columbia College, present-day University of South Carolina, where he
received a BA (1832). In November 1933, Sims left Charleston Medical College
and attended Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia; he graduated in 1835
and began his medical practice as a physician, although he soon changed to the
study of surgery.
In May of 1835, equipped with some surgical instruments and an eight-volume
medical text, Sims returned to Lancaster eager to practice medicine. He had no
clinical experience, logged no actual hospital time and no experience
diagnosing illnesses. In October of 1835, immediately after the deaths of two
infants in his care, Sims moved to Mt. Meigs, Alabama, where he apprenticed
under two doctors that were especially adept at killing patients.
Willing to break down cultural barriers in his pursuit of treatments for female
disorders, Dr. Sims became the first physician to actually view the genitalia
of his female patients. Between 1845 and 1849, he conducted a series of
experimental gynecological operations on countless enslaved African women. Many
died from infection and suffered addiction to the drugs Sims used to silence
their moans and groans and minimize movement following surgical procedures
performed without the benefit of anesthesia.
Sims' techniques and instruments changed women's reproductive healthcare. Sims
is credited with developing the first prototype for the speculum, which is used
to expand the walls of the vagina. He discovered the knee-chest position and a
surgical remedy for vesico-vaginal fistulas or vaginal tears, a prevalent
condition among enslaved women.
In 1853, Dr. Sims moved to New York City, where he founded the first hospital
in the USA dedicated to gynecology. Committed to the morality of owning slaves
and a strong ally to the South, Sims evaded the issue of slavery and race and
never admitted publicly that he experimented on slaves. Beginning in 1861, Dr.
Sims traveled extensively in Europe. His patients included Empress Eugenie of
France, wife of Napoleon III, Scotland's Duchess of Hamilton, and the Empress
of Austria.
While he faithfully sent money to support the Confederacy, Sims never returned
to the south. He returned to the US in 1868 and took the position of Chief
Consulting Surgeon to the Women's Hospital in New York. He resigned (1874) when
the Board of Lady Managers refused to admit women suffering from uterine
cancer.
From 1875 to 1876, Sims served as president of the American Medical Association,
then as president of the American Gynecological Society (1880). In 1881, Dr.
Sims was called on to administer surgical treatment to President James A.
Garfield after he was shot.
Sims died in New York City on November 13, 1883. Widely honored in his native
state, a monument dedicated to James Marion Sims-- "The Father of
Gynecology"-- occupies the northwest corner of the statehouse grounds in
Columbia, South Carolina. Renowned in New York City, Dr. Sims is honored with a
statue in Bryant Park. His autobiography, The Story of My Life, was
published posthumously (1884). (Sources: http://jeffline.tju.edu/,
www.healthcarehof.org/honorees98/sims.html,
www.coax.net/people/lwf/jm_sims.htm
and www.seedshow.com/jmsims.htm)
Pharmaceutical Tests on Prison Population Another Form of Modern-Day Slavery?
By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Around Alabama, South Carolina, and even in New
York City, you'll find statues of J. Marion Sims. What you won't find are
statues or, for that matter, many mentions of Anarcha.
Back in the mid-to-late 1800s, Sims performed at
least 30 experiments on Anarcha, a slave woman, in a quest for a way to treat a
19th century childbirth complication that caused many women to leak
urine from their vaginas after developing connections between it and their
bladder.
Sims developed a treatment for the painful and
embarrassing ailment that still afflicts many Third World women; he built his
legacy off of the pain of slaves like Anarcha. Women like her endured the
experiments with no anesthesia. People like Sims believed that black people's
pain and anonymity were merely part of the landscape of privilege to which
whites believed they were entitled.
A disproportionately-black population could be
reduced to guinea pigs. Recently, a federal panel recommended that the
government lighten up on regulations that restrict prison inmates from being
used as subjects in pharmaceutical tests.
According to The New York Times, such testing all
but ended more than three decades ago, after some prisoners were exposed to
dangerous substances such as dioxin. Leodus Jones, a former inmate at
Philadelphia's Holmesburg prison in the 1960s, told the Times that lotion tests
caused him to develop rashes, and his skin to change color.
We don't need to go down that road again. Now, I
understand that it's tough to make medical progress without some human
experimentation. There's also a possibility that some of the inmates who
participate in the pharmaceutical tests might wind up helping companies find
cures for ailments that disproportionately dog black people.
Though black inmates are not slaves as Anarcha,
when it comes to such experimentation, being in prison makes them vulnerable to
becoming slaves to coercion and their own desperation.
One of the reasons that drug companies are
looking to test more on prisoners now is because many of them haven't been able
to get large enough populations of non-inmates to test on. That's one of the
reasons why Vioxx was pulled from the market. Proponents argue that with
greater oversight, the possibility for abuse will be minimal.
Oversight in prisons never works as well as
people intend it to. On top of that, pharmaceutical companies tend to be driven
more by profits than by principle -- and we all know that when the drive to
make money kicks in, those who fuel the engines for that drive are ridden to
the core.
There's also another reason why I hate this. The
United States now is the world's biggest jailer, thanks to lopsided numbers of
black men being imprisoned for crimes that could be prevented if this country
had the will to revitalize their communities economically. Many of the black
men in prison are there because of crimes related to the crack cocaine trade --
a trade that has moved into black communities as jobs and amenities have moved
out.
Once again, this country can't seem to find any
use for black men until they are confined. When they are on the outside, they
are pushed out of jobs and education, and out of all the things that could help
them avoid a life of crime, but once incarcerated, their worth increases.
They become valuable to prison corporations that
capitalize on their pathology to create prison jobs for rural whites. They
become valuable to prison industries, where they work for meager wages in jobs
that either don't exist on the outside, or no one will hire them to do.
And now, they're becoming valuable to medical
research and to pharmaceutical companies -- companies whose drugs they or their
relatives probably wouldn't be able to afford without planning to eat oatmeal
for a week.
Yet, it's not surprising that someone would get
around to finding another reason to exploit this modern-day slavery -- the
slavery of mass incarceration. And while some prisoners might wind up helping a
company or scientists make history by hiring their bodies out to test a
treatment for a certain sickness, chances are no one will ever care about the
societal and economic ills that led to their imprisonment.
Nor, like Anarcha, will people even see their names.
About Me: An award-winning columnist for the Florida Times-Union who has appeared on Nightline and BET Tonight, Weathersbee's insightful commentaries have been published in the Houston Chronicle, Baltimore Sun and Kansas City Star. Read this and other essays at www.blackamericaweb.com.
Poets 4 Political
Prisoners
Poets 4 Political Prisoners was launched to educate the masses about the plight of US political prisoners. Through poetry and hip-hop, the group highlights these freedom fighters and activists and serves as a support mechanism for them through the creation and dissemination of materials, such as CD's and newspapers. Funds from the sale of these products help defray legal expenses and commissary.
The 16-city Poets 4 Political Prisoner Tour kicks off October 28, 2006 in Atlanta, GA. Past participants included Dusks Daughters, Amir Sulaiman, Fred Hampton Jr., Mukasa Dada, Bilal Sunni-Ali, Queen Sheba, Kazi Ture, Askia Toure, Black Out Arts Collective and a number of Def Poets. Contact Defendingthepoor@yahoo.com or visit www.Ftpmovement.tk for more information.
Economic Reality
In recent speeches, George Bush talked about the
"healthy" economy with its low unemployment rate, decline in
projected deficit, gross domestic product growth and the role of his tax cuts
in keeping the economic engine humming. According to most mainstream media, the
economy is not a negative for Republicans running on the Bush economic record.
In fact, they treat it like a non-issue. There is one voice, however, in
mainstream media that has consistently reported on a counter economic reality.
That voice belongs to Lou Dobbs.
In War On the Middle Class, the anchor
and managing editor of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight writes about the stuff
of his nightly reports on the economic war-front in middle America. Dobbs deals
with illegal immigration and broken borders, outsourcing of jobs, the failed
healthcare and education systems and the undue influence of lobbyists on
Congress. Dobbs believes both parties have failed to represent and serve the
nation's middle class. Given the government's abyssal performance, imagine how
the poor fared with it glass half empty perspective.
At the bottom of the economic ladder, the US
economy is far from "healthy." According to the US Census Bureau, the
number of children living in poverty increased in 2005. The low 4.7% national
unemployment rate means double digit joblessness for the young and black. Most
households rely on income from wages and salaries. Income from work as a share
of national income is shrinking. Median family incomes of whites and blacks
were $56,700 and $35,158, respectively, for a ratio of .62 in 2004.
Historically, the black to white income ratio has fluctuated between .5 and
.65. This is empirical evidence of the 3/5 Compromise, the invisible hand that
insures unequal outcomes for blacks and whites in the US.
Given this stable relationship, when conditions
for the middle class are spoken of in war terms, then rest assured conditions
are proportionately worse for those at the lower end of the economic class
structure, especially black Americans. That is an economic reality Lou Dobbs
might want to address in his next Emmy award-winning series.
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls
Email omowale32@aol.com
On Saturday October 21, 2006, the National Black United Front - Houston Chapter
hosts it's Annual Sankofa; Carvan to the Ancestors on the beach in Galveston
Texas off Sea Wall Boulevard. The Ceremony on the beach begins at 9:00 AM.
Those who intend to participate in the actual caravan are asked to arrive at
the National Black United Front - Headquarters, 2428 Southmore, Houston, TX no
later than 7:00 AM . The Caravan leaves at 7:30. All faiths are invited,
participants are asked to wear white. For additional information contact NBUF
at 713-942-0365 or email: omowale32@aol.com.
Email www.salon.com
The real menace to American kids...By Bill Maher...If you think the worst thing
Congress doesn't protect young people from is Mark Foley, wake up and smell the
burning planet. The ice caps are cracking, and we're losing two species an
hour. The birds have bird flu, the cows have mad cow, and our poisoned
groundwater has turned spinach into a side dish of mass destruction. Our
schools are shooting galleries....There are a lot of creepy middle-aged men
lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry,
McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. Recently, there's been a rash of strangers
making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death.
They're called military recruiters.
Email lrprice@snet.net
The Defense Department will resume mandatory anthrax inoculations for service
members and civilians deploying to U.S. Central Command and Korea, DoD
officials said today. A small number of service members assigned to homeland
defense units will also receive the [deadly] shots.
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