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Ok #ScholarsStrike it's time for some old-timey sex education talk! I'm going to talk about how sex ed and health activism was greatly hurt by white supremacy. Ready?
FYI if you want more on the specifics and sourcing here, you can check out my book _Sex Ed, Segregated_. Shameless plus over.
When historians talk about how racism creeps into all aspects of life, we mean all aspects of life. My specialty is sex education at the turn of the 20th century. I didn’t anticipate my topic to be so much about race. But the more I read the sources, the more it popped up.
The American Social Hygiene Association, the major sex ed org at the time, was rife with racial rhetoric. Its president, Charles Eliot, was an eugenicist who saw his mission as preserving the moral and physical integrity of the white race. That's literally what he said.
Medical care for black Americans, especially regarding STIs, was seen as unnecessary or even hopeless. and don't forget that Jim Crow was championed as a way to prevent social/sexual interaction between the races.
Physicians like Edward Vedder (90s kids, I know) wrote “Whites and negroes should, of course, be considered separately” because he thought Africans were a uniquely syphilitic race. (I mean, don't even get me started on yaws, which is not transmitted sexually.)
And because colonialism is always in the background, Vedder described how African women were ALL immoral because they ALL were having sex with the white men who were colonizing. (Um, doesn’t that mean the white men were also immoral? Ah, the racial and gendered double standard!)
So hey, if there is so much syphilis, shouldn’t doctors be doing some sort of treatment and education? Of course not! (Stares in Tuskegee Syphilis Study)
Black medical professionals, segregated out of institutions like the AMA, fought back, while still trying to maintain a degree of respectability. You often see some pretty classist responses, but on the whole, black physicians championed education and access to med treatment.
You get some awesome folk advocating for equality in healthcare at the same time they’re advocating for the vote, for education, for labor rights, for an end to lynching. You get some folks like Emma Azalia Hackley advocating race pride and equal education for black women.
You simply can’t look at any medical issue (cough, COVID) in America without looking at access to healthcare, since we as a nation lack universal healthcare.
And you need to look at how people are treated by health care professionals when they are able to access it. Time for a story.
During World War I, Captain Arthur Spingarn of the US Navy Sanitary Corps, noted discriminatory treatment of black troops. They were often denied passes to leave base, because white officers assumed they’d go have sex and get infected.
If they did leave base, they were automatically subject to treatment, whether or not they had sex (while white soldiers were asked and only treated if they admitted to having sex).
And — hold your breath for this one, folks — sometimes infirmaries did not sterilize treatment equipment between patients. Yes, they’re injecting soldiers with dirty needles.
When Spingarn asked the (white) surgeon in charge why they weren't cleaning the needles, he responded, “It was useless to try to cure negroes… they only got infected again.”
Racial stereotypes and racism influenced the ways sex education was built in this country, and continues to influence the ways we treat health and health education.
White supremacy literally kills in a thousand different ways. #ScholarStrike
