Saw an article that said Black people aren’t really volunteering for the COVID vaccine trials. WELL, this country has awful history with Black experimentation. From Black women slaves being tortured for gynecology to Black men in Tuskegee being given syphillis, we’re good.

We’ve always been seen as the greatest, disposable resource in the country. We get used, then abused, and then they move on to the next one of us. We were seen as livestock. We were seen as 3/5 of a human. We’re still seen as the lowest rung of society.

So if our value historically comes from being disposable especially in large groups, when the powers that be rah rah for Black people to come join them for testing, what do they expect the response to be? Calls to action like that have ONLY destroyed us or furthered trauma.

When there are people that can tell you how their granddad signed up for the “program” in Tuskegee only to leave, untreated and unknowingly infected with syphillis by the U.S. Public Health Service (less than 100 years ago) just because, why would we be comfortable with this now?

United States history may skip over these things, but we know that when Black people are suddenly first in line after being constantly pushed to the back, we can’t trust the “why.” We haven’t been shown that we can for 400 years. People prove to us every day that we can’t.

It’s not paranoia. It’s ptsd. And yes, the virus may be affecting our community hard, but we’re not in a place where we want to see whether or not that vaccine works at our expense. We’ve read the room. We’re going to need to see positive results with it elsewhere first.

It would be different if history didn’t show how the Black community is commonly sourced as test material, usually unknowingly, so I understand why they’re struggling to find more of us to sign up. Look at the climate. Trust is out the window.

So if you don’t understand why we aren’t running head first into traffic to be lab rats, think about this. It has a whole heck of a lot to do with this than you’d think.

This is just standard cause and effect.

There is too much trauma and too much happening with Black bodies to be volunteering for something that we barely have any information on.