Even the Rat Was White: Racist Facts You Should Know About Western Science

During the early 1800s British and American scientists concluded that the Negroid race was inferior to Caucasoid race due to the small measurements of the skull or the crane. This scientific postulation was carried over to a scientific movement called Craneology. Today this science is now called "pseudoscience". Yeah right.

The black blogosphere has been abuzz with the recent online article posted in Psychology Today that revealed "research" stating black women were the least attractive.

I did not have the opportunity to read the article because it has since been pulled from Psychology Today's site due to the flood of online protests and critiques.

Nevertheless, this article should not be shocking because Western science, Psychology included, is founded on racist ideology and worldview that operates from a hierarchy placing Caucasian or white as the superior race, while African/Negroid are the bottom feeders of the totem pole.

I really am not interested in using my brain power to dissect the absurdity of these claims, rather, I will provide some historical facts around the racism that is still pervasive in Western medicine, which is considered modern medicine.

There is a book called, Even the Rat Was White by Robert V. Guthrie, that provides a historical view of the racist foundations of science, and heavily look at Psychology.

Lastly, let me state that black people, starting with enslaved people, have been the disproportionate population that has served as guinea pigs in scientific studies. Even today, prison populations and the military subject people to a slew of scientific study that falls under the umbrella of "bettering the human race."

BTW, ask a person in the military how many vaccinations and pills they take?

Gynecology
J. Marion Sims is called "the Father of Gynecology" due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama who were often submitted as guinea pigs by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure. He kept seven women as subjects for four years, but left a trail of death and permanently traumatized black women. 

Anarcha was one of the women Sims experimented upon. A detailed history of this monster is in Harriet Washington's book, Medical Apartheid.

Sims believed that Africans were numb to pain and operated on the women without anesthesia or antiseptic. The procedures usually happened this way. Black female slaves who were guinea pigs would hold one subject down as Sims performed hysterectomies, tubal ligation, and other procedures to examine various female disorders.

Sims also performed a host of operations on other slave populations. The following excerpt details his "practice" on enslaved infants.

Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on his captives. He took custody of slave infants and, with a shoemaker’s awl, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment.

Skin Color
Founding Father and American physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush proposed that black skin or "the black color" was a inherited skin disease from ancestors who suffered from some form of leprosy. To him, this ailment could be cured through proper assimilation. He also agreed with his white contemporaries that the Negroid race were direct descendants of monkeys.

Vitiligo

Here is a quote from Rush:

Negroes were not by nature intellectually or morally inferior. Any apparent evidence to the contrary was only the perverted expression of slavery, which "is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it."

Steatopyogia

Khoi Khoi woman

In December of 1815, French anatomist, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville conducted an autopsy on a woman who would be known as the Hottentot Venus in front of a group of salivating scientists, one of which was Georges Cuvier, the father of anatomy. Her genitalia and skinned body was kept on display in a Parisian museum until the mid-1900s, where they were eventually placed in storage.

Saartjie Baartman or Sarah Baartman served as the fascination of England and France due to her physicality, in particular, her buttocks. Cuvier would term this "physical disorder" as steatopygia in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1817.

Steatopygia is described as the is a high degree of fat accumulation in and around the buttocks. The deposit of fat is not confined to the gluteal regions, but extends to the outside and front of the thighs, forming a thick layer reaching sometimes to the knee.

Steatopygia became one of the determining factors of European scientists to validate hypersexuality of African women; thus rationalizing the common sexual crime of rape and forced breeding. Interestingly, how today's article talks of black women being less attractive, yet not too long ago, it was envogue to rape a black woman by white men.

Baartman's story is one of sadness and great misery. Though all the details of her journey to England to be placed on display in circuses around England, and central squares in Paris, and high society parties, are still sketchy, it doesn't take a smart person to know that her death, just several years after her embarkation on Europe's shores was due to a life of hardship and gross exploitation.

Drapetomania
American physician, Samuel A. Cartwright termed this "mental disorder" for slaves who wanted to escape slavery. It was a sickness of the mind that caused enslaves blacks to run away. Symptoms of drapetomania included sullenness (depression) His work was published in the following publication.

A serious drapetomaniac, freedom fighter and escaped slave, Harriet Tubman.

Samuel A. Cartwright, "Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race", The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 1851:691-715 (May)

The Eugenics Movement
This 19th Century scientific campaign based on superior and inferior genes was spawned in Europe. Heavily influence by Charles Darwin's theories on evolution, eugenicists purported that certain genes and social characteristics produced superior humans, while others created sub-par, almost animal-like creatures.

The standard (or superior being) was based on Aryan features/Nordic, thus those who "deviated" dramatically from pale skin, blue eyes, and blond or light-brown hair were categorized as low grades.

German scientist measures the physical dimensions of a Jewish Nazi camp prisoner during WWII.

Eugenics became the scientific foundation in Nazism, and its validation for extermination. Jews were subjected to various genetic tests and experiments by Nazi scientists who were attempting to understand DNA and genes.

In the United States, eugenicists pushed public policy on reproductive and citizenship rights, and marriage licensing. In fact, the concept of the perfect race was heavily developed in California before the rise of Hitler.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, whites who had moved to California were involved in massive massacres, and experimentation of the indigenous people. The project was to see how a "perfect human" could be bred out of "undesireables."

Fannie Lou Hamer

In the US, though, Connecticut was the first state to implement eugenics laws. Those who were deemed "unfit" to breed were sterilized, and could not marry each other, and certainly not one who belonged to a more superior race. Mentally and physically challenged people, poor people, and people of color and Eastern European immigrants were placed in the category of being "unfit". Women were subjected to non-consensual hysterectomies, and these populations were often used as scientific guinea pigs.

In Mississippi, there is a term for women who were given hysterectomies without consent. It is called a "Mississippi Appendectomy" because women were told they were getting the appendixes removed or a minor reproductive procedure, and ended up without a womb.

60,000 Americans were sterilized in the eugenics movement, the most famous African American is Civil Rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer who never had children because she went to the doctor for a small "woman's" procedure and woke up with a partial hysterectomy.

Today, eugenics movement is seen in various initiatives, such as the 90s push of getting women addicted to crack to stop reproducing, and the recent, Republican Representative John LaBruzzo who would like the State of Louisiana to pay poor women $1000 to get their tubes tied.