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January 26, 2004
Political Animal
Tuskegee re-examined 
My own interest in learning more about the Tuskegee syphilis study began with a dinner conversation with a friend, who is a doctor. Earlier that day I had received a communication from the head of an IRB committee indicating that ‘Tuskegee’ was reason enough to have all research questions and procedures at the University of Chicago screened and approved by an IRB. Although I knew relatively little about the details of the Tuskegee Study, I had somehow acquired the impression that many decades ago during the days of unregulated medical science the US Public Health Service had actually infected black men with syphilis. This is a not uncommon belief among black and white Americans who have heard of ‘Tuskegee’.
But my friend told me: ‘Nobody was given syphilis in the study.’ All the participants (black sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama in 1932) already had syphilis, ‘but they were not treated for the disease’. I then asked him how syphilis was treated in 1932 when the study started. ‘There were some horrible, painful, expensive long-term treatments around but I don’t think they really worked’, he said – ‘there was no effective therapy at the time’. ‘Had there been an IRB system in place in 1932, applying the medical research norms of those times, would the IRB have approved the project?’, I asked. ‘I am not sure, but they might have’, he said. I began to suspect that there was both less and more to ‘Tuskegee’ and the political role it now plays in popular consciousness than has met the public eye. Spiked Science
January 24, 2004
Music
Rhyme And Punishment Back in the day, rap was some bama-ass shit. When hiphop appeared in its earliest recorded form, in the late ‘70s, D.C. residents couldn’t get with the bright leather suits, dooky gold, and thick Northern accents that seemed intrinsic to the genre. In large part, the music was dismissed as just another export from the Big, bamafied Apple. Washington City Paper
January 20, 2004
Political Animal
Collard greens, fried chicken undermine message of King This lunch featured fare such as collard greens, cornbread and fried chicken. I was shocked that NU [Northwestern University] thought it was honoring such an influential and iconic individual by offering stereotypical “black” foods at their dining halls across campus. Second letter. She’s going to continue to be disappointed as many corporate HR departments are quick to offer up a “Soul Food” lunch and allow staff to wear jeans in honor of Martin Luther King Day instead of giving a day off. She’d also be surprised at the number of folk who show up for their “holiday meal”. The Daily Northwestern
Interview
Life in Mugabe-ville Even after all of this intimidation—the posting of armed agents at the polling stations, arrests, torture, shutting down the newspapers—they know they still defeated Mugabe in the election last year. They voted the MDC into office in all the major cities and then basically voted Morgan Tsvangirai in as president. That not only shocked Mugabe—that shocked Zimbabwean voters. They realized, “Whoa, we are a force.” So the country right now contains parallel universes: one is the universe as it ought to be, and the other is the universe as it is, which is Mugabe-ville. In Mugabe-ville, none of the facts that they’ve created on the ground have translated into much. So the people feel like, “Well, we won the elections, so we’re just waiting for the world to come around and recognize it.” The Atlantic Online
Music
The Sweet Sounds of Really Bad Singing I’d propose that the father of modern bad singing is Biz Markie, the rapper best known for the classic anti-love song “Just a Friend,” from 1989. His bellowed plea — wildly out of tune, and totally unforgettable — sounded like something concocted after a day of romantic disappointments and a night of heavy drinking: “Oh baby, you/ You got what I need/ But you say he’s just a friend.” With each repetition of the chorus, he sounded funnier and more unhinged. New York Times
Political Animal
A Story of Black Insurrection Too Strong for 1973 “The Negroes are the trouble spot,” a black aide tells a white senator who is behind in the polls in “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” Ivan Dixon’s film about mounting a black insurrection in six American cities. Based on a provocative book by Sam Greenlee, “Spook” encountered plenty of trouble itself when it was released in 1973. The story goes that the government pressured the distributor, United Artists, to pull the movie from theaters. Facts are hard to come by, but “Spook” quickly disappeared, consigned to cult status and a murky life on bootleg video. New York Times
Books
Scholar Examines Black Inventors “When we look at black inventors, most did not have the same opportunity white ones did,” he said. “We have to create a new metric of what success is. We can still consider them as African-American heroes or champions. But it’s most important that we develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what their lives were like and what their relationships were to the larger world.” New York Times
Books
Plagued by Drugs, Tribes Revive Ancient Penalty [...] a growing number of tribes across the country, grappling with a rise in drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, poverty and violence, have used banishment in varying forms in the last decade. Tribal leaders see this ancient response, which reflects Indian respect for community, as a painful but necessary deterrent. New York Times
Books
“I miss the entertainment of the streets” But his mom was a different story, a stranger he both hated and loved: “This one time, my mom came by the house, I must have been 13, no actually I must have been 14, 15, right. She started having problems with her stomach. Gall bladder, something like that. So she wanted to go to the hospital. She was walking really, really slow, so I left her behind—about four or five blocks. So, once I got to Brookside Hospital, I was waiting on her, and she said, ‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.’ So I left. In my mind, I was thinking, you know, I’m doing to you what you did to me. I’m walking away from you like you walked away from me.” Salon.com
January 3, 2004
Political Animal
Vengeful Majorities Market-dominant minorities are the Achilles heel of free market democracy. In societies with such a minority, markets and democracy favour not just different people or different classes but different ethnic groups. Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances, the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by opportunistic politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority. This conflict is playing out in country after country today, from Bolivia to Sierra Leone, from Indonesia to Zimbabwe, from Russia to the middle east. Prospect Magazine