Convocation | Harriet Washington
February 13, 2018
Accurate history will not be spoon-fed to you. You have to go look for it.
Harriet Washington’s talk on Monday night in the Hitchcock Theatre was a call to action. Dr. Washington is a well-known medical ethicist who is currently a fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute. She has been a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School as well as holding various positions at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, the Harvard School of Public Health, Stanford University, and the DePaul University College of Law. Ms. Washington’s latest book is titled Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
Ms. Washington recounted her somewhat unusual upbringing as a way to explain how she ended up in her current career. Both of her parents were in the army, and they chose to bring the family with them as they were posted from base to base. Ms. Washington grew up in Europe and Asia, only coming back to the United States when she was eleven. Her parents were forthright about their desire to protect their children from racism in the United States, so when Washington did return as an eleven-year-old, she was able to see the racism in the United States from an outsider’s perspective. This experience led her eventually to study history, as she believes, “You must know history to see the patterns.”
Ms. Washington is a sleuth and sensitive reader of history. She uses her skills to call attention to the injustices still heaped upon the African American community in its relationship to the field of medicine. Ms. Washington presented a series of slides that detailed various well known “facts” that used to be believed about African Americans. These “facts” included historical stereotypes such as African Americans are not intelligent, they are sexually profligate, and they have medical characteristics that are different from those of Caucasians. One of the most damaging of these myths for the African American community has been the myth that blacks could tolerate pain to a much greater extent than whites. The many medical studies historically performed upon unwilling African American patients were unconscionable, all the more so because some of the perpetrators are now hailed as heroes of medicine for their discoveries. As a disturbing example of the presence of patterns stretching from the past to the present, Ms. Washington cited statistics from contemporary emergency rooms. Even today, black patients are given significantly less pain-relieving medication than white patients, in spite of levels of patient-reported pain.
For many Cate students, the events outlined by Ms. Washington were startling. “I’ve learned about the Holocaust,” said sophomore Ava Weinstein, “but I’ve never heard about this.” Marcos Brasil, ‘20 was equally surprised that the proof of many instances of experimentation on African Americans has been so hard to unearth. By burying procedures in medical libraries, accessible only to the few, it is “knowledge withheld,” he declared. However, although many of the facts that were cited during Ms. Washington’s lecture were very difficult to hear and believe, not everyone saw her work as depressing. “She presented a problem as well as a solution,” said one student. “By showing a list of people who have made a difference, she showed that some of these issues have been solved.” Ms. Washington certainly agrees. “One person doesn’t always make a difference,” she concluded. “But one person can.”
Click here to watch Ms. Washington’s segment on CNN during the 2014 Ebola crisis.
About Convocation
Convocation is a celebrated tradition of boarding school life at Cate. A series of speakers and performers addresses the School every Monday in the theatre after a formal dinner in the Raymond Commons. The Convocation Series often reflects the year’s inquiry question, which guides the pedagogy for the school year. This year’s inquiry question: Is Truth Universal?