The racists won't stop

Despite Obama's mastefully delivered speech on Tuesday, the racist white media, especially Fox, continues to mischaracterize and flat-out lie about Rev. Jeremiah Wright's connection to Barack Obama, sking why he has not shunned Wright completely.

Here's the relevant excerpt from Obama's speech
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

The talking heads at Fox have focused narrowly on only a few intemperate comments excerpted from Rev. Wright's sermons, yet they have ignored the fact that relationships are complicated, and that you can't reduce Rev. Wright's career and his pastoral care of Obama and his family to a few sentences out of a lifetime of service.

Moreover, it is unreasonable to expect that Obama should completely abandon his relationship with a man who is as close as family to him merely because  Wright made some unfortunate remarks.

As for the paranoid conspiracy theories about AIDS and 9/11, [b]yes they are irrational[/b].

However, we know that the U.S. Public Health Service conducted the 40-year Tuskegee Experiment on 399 poor, black sharecroppers by denying them medical treatment in order to track the long-term effects of untreated syphilis.  We also know that medical researchers have performed other unethical experiments on indigent blacks without informed consent. From The Washington Post's review of Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington (I read this a few months ago--horrifying!):
The infringement of black Americans' rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the 20th century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine -- half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen -- by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

African-American mistrust of medical research that leads to wildly implausible conspiracy theories is irrational, but the history that has fueled that atmosphere of suspicion is very real.
 
I found that this cartoon gives some much needed context:

Britt-cartoon-3-19