(August 8, 2016 at 6:16 pm)Yeauxleaux Wrote: We're talking about the country that had (still has really) the KKK, burned down "Black Wall Street" because it felt threatened by black people with money and had segregationist policies, all within living memory.[...]
Then there's also stuff, like The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which was run by U.S. Public Health Service until 1972.
Quote: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.”
History like this, combined with consistent displays of racism and demonization of the poor makes it difficult to persuade people, that they're being paranoid and/or being manipulated by opportunistic demagogues.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
