Ashley’s Blog

How is it that whenever the American/English Culture meets peoples of a different race we think of them as the lesser person? It has happened throughout history with the Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, and more recently the Hispanics. We consider these people “uncultured savages” that we need to civilize into our ways of living. We try and provide them with education, which includes a new language and a new way of viewing life. Not only do we provide them with the “right education” but also with a new fashion, and new ways of performing everyday tasks. But how is it being the better person removing them from their familiar land, family, and ways, and forcing them to be slaves and/ or workers.

            However, I believe that we were the lesser persons. We were the ones that denied their backgrounds and ways of life. So who are we to say that we are cultured or civilized? The Native Americans were intrigued by their encounter with the English, and they accepted our ways of living. Except when those ways included taking their land, children, and wives away from them. The same goes for the other races; we violated their rights, in today’s standards, as a human being. Back then we didn’t consider them human per say.

            I just believe that we should not be learning or believing that they were the ones that were uncultured or civilized, it was the English people that were, for not accepting their ways of living.

As a continuation of the theme stated above, once
America became “the great melting pot,” these sort of obligations as the “biologically inferior” turned mainly towards the African Americans. In response to the movie, Ms Evers Boys, who does the government think they are by feeling the need to “study blacks.” Where is it documented that the government did the same sort of study on the white population? Did they allow the whites to continue to develop a deadly disease that would eventually lead them to excruciating pain and eventually death? Lastly, did the government even intend on treating the people after their study had been completed?

            These questions I believe were to controversial for the movie to try and answer, it just laid out the facts of the situation. I believe that in the time that the
Tuskegee incident happened, the American government would not have allowed such cruel things to be done to whites. So how come it was ok for the blacks to undergo the pain and suffering but not white people? And they justified themselves as trying to compare the disease’s progress between the two races, but where was the information that had been collected from the white groups?

            This is an extreme opinion but I believe that the
Tuskegee experiment was just an excuse for white government officials who were still angry about the Civil Rights movement to try and “get back” at the black population.