The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male has long passed into story and legend as one of the ultimate crimes perpetrated by the American White Racist Establishment against African-Americans.
And it's a story and legend that has been in the news, lately, since the very Reverend Jeremiah Wright likes to cite Tuskegee as evidence that the U.S. government would be willing to do almost anything to hurt African Americans - like, for instance, inventing the AIDS virus in a CIA laboratory and then siccing it on the black community.
Wikipedia offers the standard narrative.
But in 2004, Richard A Shweder, the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, published a remarkable essay: Tuskegee Reexamined - from which one can only conclude that the standard narrative is pretty much totally wrong.
Since I'm a lazy sot, and since I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, I'm not going to......
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