Post 190 - September 17, 2020

Day 190…

And the days keep coming.

The day before yesterday, as I was walking home up Broadway, I came across a large crowd of people and firetrucks. The firetrucks had all of their lights flashing. 78th Street was blocked off and there was a whole line of news crews there with their cameras all pointed in the same direction. A small black drone was hovering next to a building just up the street. It looked like a gigantic insect.

Looking up ten stories, I could see that a work scaffold’s rigging had given out on one side and it was now hanging at an extremely precarious 45-degree angle. I missed the actual rescue, but everyone in the crowd was happily telling new arrivals exactly what had happened. Neither of the two window washers who were on it at the time were hurt. Firefighters had come over the roof and brought the two guys back up with them.

The life or death drama had passed with the rescue of the two men, but now the scaffolding still needed to be secured. The TV crews and, in fact the crowd, were hanging around hoping for a satisfying crash. I didn’t wait to see if that happened, but looking at the news coverage later, it appears that, thankfully, it didn’t.

On Facebook yesterday, a couple of friends of mine started posting stories about a whistleblower who has filed a complaint. The person who filed it is a nurse named Dawn Wooten who worked at a detention facility in Ocilla, Georgia run by a private firm called LaSalle Corrections.  Wooten claims that she was demoted in July for raising concerns about COVID-19 safety measures that were being ignored there. In her complaint, she describes deplorable living conditions and she says that immigrant women are being sterilized against their will there.

I took the posts with a grain of salt until later in the day I received a bulk email from my congress representative Jerry Nadler talking about this very whistleblower’s report.

“The report outlined multiple abuses of immigration women, including mass hysterectomies seemingly performed without the full, informed consent of the women. One woman reported knowing of five detained women who had hysterectomies over a three-month period. Other women reported receiving multiple different rationales for the surgery or having nurses yell at them for seeking more information before surgery. These horrifying allegations must be investigated in full and today.”

So, there is an investigation underway.

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi said yesterday, "If true, the appalling conditions described in the whistleblower complaint – including allegations of mass hysterectomies being performed on vulnerable immigrant women – are a staggering abuse of human rights. This profoundly disturbing situation recalls some of the darkest moments of our nation's history, from the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks, to the horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, to the forced sterilizations of Black women that Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others underwent and fought."

This is not the first complaint that has been lodged against LaSalle Corrections. Another ICE detention facility of theirs in Louisiana has been alleged to follow similar practices.

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman, who was undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer in 1951. Unbeknownst to her, some of her cancer cells were taken and cultured into what is still known as the HeLa cell line. Ms. Lacks unfortunately passed away later that year and it wasn’t until 1975 that her family found out that her cells had been harvested. Those cells, to this day, are used by scientists to study cancer and possible treatments for it.  The discussion about Ms. Lack’s rights, including her right to privacy, continue to this day.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a forty-year study that was formally entitled, The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male. The US Public Health Service started the study with Tuskegee University, a largely black college in Alabama. They enrolled 600 impoverished African American sharecroppers into the study saying that they were treating them for “bad blood”. They didn’t treat them at all. Instead, they administered placebos so that they could study the long-term effects of untreated syphilis. (which by the way can lead to blindness, deafness, mental illness, heart disease, bone deterioration, collapse of the central nervous system, and death). About a decade into the study, penicillin became widely available which could have cured these people, but the subjects were never told about it so as not to interfere with the study.

Fannie Lou Hamer was an African American leader in the Civil Rights Movement. When she passed, her eulogy was delivered by Andrew Young who was, at the time, the US Ambassador to the UN. In 1993 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. While having surgery to remove a tumor in 1961, she was given a hysterectomy, completely without her consent, by a white doctor. At the time, Mississippi had a compulsory sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor black citizens in the state.

Compulsory sterilization first started to appear in the United States in what is, now somewhat laughably referred to as the Progressive Era which lasted from about 1890 - 1920. These programs were set up for the purpose of eugenics.

Eugenics is the desire to improve the genetic quality of a given population. While we think of it now as applying just to white supremacy, or indeed any kind of racial supremacy, the arguments for it when it started were aimed more towards those with mental and physical disabilities. Those arguments were often based in economics.

People who were deemed “unfit to reproduce” either had hereditary handicaps or conditions or had low IQ’s or were criminals or deviants. Keeping these people from reproducing, so the theory went, kept these traits from being passed on and adding to the burden of society.

Deviancy, in this regard, had an extraordinarily wide scope of interpretation. For instance, it could, and was, applied to women deemed to be promiscuous.

Indiana became the first state to enact compulsory sterilization laws in 1907. California and Washington passed similar laws in 1909. Others followed.

There were of course legal challenges. In 1927, however, the US Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell upheld the idea saying that the forced sterilization of inmates at a Virginia facility for the intellectually disabled was legal.

As a result of that ruling, the practice became much more widespread. The 1942 case Skinner v. Oklahoma added a wrinkle that criminals could only be forced to undergo this treatment if it was done equitably. In other words, if it was done to the general prison population, then it had to be done to white collar criminals too.

While people argued that this saved the healthcare system a fortune in future expenses, forced sterilization, of course, also became a powerful tool of white supremacists.

From 1970 - 1976, between 25 and 40% of women who sought healthcare from the Indian Health Services were sterilized.

The US Government launched programs throughout the south against Black women and throughout the south-west against Latina women. The US protectorate of Puerto Rico had its own sterilization program.

The Oregon Board of Eugenics lasted all the way up until 1983. Their last forced procedure was done in 1981. It was in fact considered to be the last such procedure performed in the United States. That doesn’t seem to have been the case.

Over a third of all of the procedures performed nationwide were done in the state of California. The information about this program was put together in a book by two eugenicists named E.S. Gosney and Paul B. Popenoe. Apparently, that book was one of the things that convinced Adolph Hitler’s government that a widespread eugenics program was possible. They used that very book as a blueprint to exterminate 6 million people during World War 2.

During the Nuremburg trials following the end of World War II, Nazi defendants tried to justify what they had done claiming it was no different from what we, here in the US, were doing.

In 400 B.C. Plato suggested that humans could be selectively bred for the betterment of society.

“…the state, if it once starts well, proceeds as it were in a cycle of growth. I mean that a sound nurture and education if kept up creates good natures in the state, and sound natures in turn receiving an education of this sort develop into better men than their predecessors.”

What that betterment actually means, is open to an endlessly vast array of interpretations.

Our country needs all of us to function. We are a nation founded upon diversity which has led to our amazing growth and innovation.

We all arrived here from somewhere else. Even the Native Americans who have been here for uncountable millennia appear to have walked here from Asia in a time before memory.

We are all standing on the very same scaffolding doing our very best to keep it all level while we all try to live our lives. Target a particular group of people and our national scaffolding loses one of its main support cables.

For a country founded on diversity, we have a lousy history of acceptance of that diversity. Every single wave of immigration we have ever had has been met with hostility, anger, and fear.

Being different, in the United States of America, seems to be the greatest crime anyone can commit. Yet, it is the amalgamation of all of those very differences that can actually make us great.

Not to hammer home an obvious visual metaphor but, I mean, how could I not? There it was on 78th Street just dangling above me.

We, as a country, are hanging by a thread ten stories up in the air. We need every single one of the wires holding us up to remain strong. If we are going to balance ourselves, we need to build new and stronger supports that can help pull us up.

At the moment, all that we are doing is staring up at the impending disaster with mouths open and waiting for the crash. We need to stop being those people and, instead, become more like the group of firefighters who got in there and kept disaster at bay.

We can get through all of this, but we can only get through it together.

If our government is, indeed, forcibly sterilizing immigrants whose only crime is wanting to come here and build better lives for themselves and their families, then that, in and of itself, is reason enough to vote them out.

We have all, hands on our hearts, pledged a lofty ideal, time and time again. “…One nation, under god, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

It’s long past the time to make good on that promise.