Introduction to Part V
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010
Summary
Black people in America do not have to be told that they have been the victims of bad medical treatment. They have found this out repeatedly whenever they have presented themselves for care at thousands of hospitals and at innumerable doctors' offices and clinics, where they have often been ridiculed and accused of being the cause of their own medical misfortunes.
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson (1975)Although antebellum physicians were frustrated in getting a scientific grip on the slippery question of racial origins, their postbellum successors suffered no such disability. Just prior to the opening shots at Fort Sumter the work of Charles Darwin appeared, and scarcely had the guns fallen silent at Appomattox before Josiah Nott synthesized much of the new theory with previous work on race done by the American School. Darwin's theory of evolution might create difficulties for fundamentalists for decades to come, but it proved a godsend to racists willing to interpret the Bible a bit more liberally. For Darwin made it possible to bypass the inherently heretical question of a “recent creation” to account for the black man's lack of development and return to the biblical concept of an original creation. All men had been created as one but following that creation peoples had diverged considerably in their respective evolutionary journeys-whites emerging from that journey forged and tempered-a dynamic, intellectually blessed race, while blacks were still stumbling along a trail that had led to near hopeless retardation as a member of the genus Homo, rungs behind on the evolutionary ladder.
The peculiar institution had provided a snug paternal, noncompetitive world for the black in which he thrived. But emancipation had changed all of that. Now the races were thrown together in a competitive situation, and the race least fit was, as Darwin was interpreted, inevitably doomed.
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- Another Dimension to the Black DiasporaDiet, Disease and Racism, pp. 187 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981