Black Ecology in COVID Times

“I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death in my body like a condemnation,” writes African American poet Audre Lorde in her journal. Those are the words of a breast cancer survivor’s brush with death following a double mastectomy, but her words also voice the moribund condition of Black Diasporic subjects attuned to the miracle of their existence as descendants of slaves. “Science said so” hints not only at Lorde’s diagnosis as a cancer survivor but also at her condition as a subject from the Black diaspora. “For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive,” she writes. Since Blacks were never meant to survive, they are often destined to be treated as always already dead. To that effect, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” conducted by the US Public Health Service and spanning 40 years (1932–1972), recruited six hundred Black male human subjects who had been told they were being treated for “bad blood,” vaguely referring to syphilis and some other ailments, when the true nature of the project was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis on the human body. Scientists had singled out those who were not supposed to exist, to take notes on their anachronistic death. Today, one talks of “bad blood” between the Black community and medical science. The COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among African Americans attests indeed to a community that would rather hold on to their “bad blood” than trust science again, at the risk of their own lives. But even though the Tuskegee experiment is one example commonly used in the COVID-19 era to bring awareness to racial bias in science, medical mistrust within the Black Diasporic community far exceeds the contours of the American South.