Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation

Chapter author: Britt Rusert

Page author: Chance Gamble

Summary
In her chapter, Britt Rusert argues that social-scientific discourses about Macon County primed the space to be considered as a laboratory and its inhabitants to be viewed as resources for the Tuskegee Study. She claims, "the fiction of governmental 'care' in the Tuskegee Study masked a structure of scientific exploitation that was racialized, gendered, classed, and deeply connected to the history and afterlife of slavery" (26). She finds in the Tuskegee Study “powerful and prescient warnings about how ‘care’ and ‘coercion’ have been intertwined within and beyond the health ‘care’ system under racial capitalism” (26). Rusert makes it a point to trace the history of “carceral geographies” after the civil war that were used to convert “the residents of Macon County… into a research population well before” the Tuskegee Study (27, 28).

One of the primary proponents of the discourses she finds responsible for this conversion of Macon County is Booker Washington. She cites his prioritization of hygiene and practical pedagogies as proof that “nothing, at times, seems more disgusting to him than black class aspiration” (32). She finds a paradox in his demands for “impossible cleanliness of the bodies and spaces of Tuskegee at the very same time as he encourages racial uplift through hard, dirty toil in the southern soil” (33). As leader of the Tuskegee Institute, Washington is responsible for training educators in his ideologies. Rusert’s title for this essay is a play on the experimental syphilis study and Washington’s Institute, which was called the “Tuskegee Experiment” by some.

Drawing from the works of Foucalt and Colin Dayan, Rusert moves to how “‘Care’ and the interventions made in its name are the perfect coer for intensive surveillance, oversight, and exploitation, especially in a biopolitical regime” (38). She reasons the Tuskegee Study allowed the US to gain medical knowledge and power by using black bodies as a natural resource for studying the disease, even at the cost of individual lives. This is symptomatic of a larger system of underdevelopment “central to capitalist modernity” (39). Referencing Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rusert creates her own “uneven development” for consideration “within studies of contemporary bioscience and medicine” (39). This is the idea of a zero-sum game in which increasing the growth and development of one space relies on taking those resources for development from another space.

Rusert ends with a coda focusing on Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales and Jean Toomer’s Cane as examples of how fiction can function to combat racism. She finds these works examples of texts that can “be read as a resistant, even revolutionary, position” (45). She echoes Ruha Benjamin’s call for speculative fiction as innovative antiracism.

Connection to other readings
Here are some thoughts about how this chapter connects to other readings from our class (or even outside of it!)

Connection to other chapters
Scratch a Theory, You Find a Biography: A Conversation with Troy Duster: I think this connects because they both talk about science and technology, but I also think that Duster's conversation about research at Norco Corona fits in well here.

Perreira's "Consumed by Disease" discusses the racialized body as a site to be surveilled through medicine. Once inside the institution, some patients went medical experiments, so this portion of the essay ties in with this reading.