When did the US Government start valuing non-white lives?

[DeaconSig]

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/22/415194765/u-s-troops-tested-by-race-in-secret-world-war-ii-chemical-experiments

Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.

"They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins," Edwards says.

An NPR investigation has found evidence that Edwards' experience was not unique. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race.

For the first time, NPR tracked down some of the men used in the race-based experiments. And it wasn't just African-Americans. Japanese-Americans were used as test subjects, serving as proxies for the enemy so scientists could explore how mustard gas and other chemicals might affect Japanese troops. Puerto Rican soldiers were also singled out.

So, there is ample evidence that the United States didn't value black folks (and probably folks of all non-white ethnicities) as being actual people- slavery being the biggest example, but the Tuskeegee experiments and this stuff above being other examples). We know that today, nobody could get away with running experiments to see if certain poisons were more effective on black folks that white folks. We also know that all ethnicities are more alike than they are different, from a genetic perspective, making such testing stupid.

My question is this: when did the country decide that black folks were real people who couldn't be abused and treated the way you would treat animals?

 

[ImTheCaptain]

i mean, they were ignorant of some basic biology and the tests were conclusive that races were affected equally, so I guess there was some value there.

 

[PhDeac]

i mean, they were ignorant of some basic biology and the tests were conclusive that races were affected equally, so I guess there was some value there.

Yeah. I don't know this is a specific example of the thread title. One of the consequences of sexism and racism was that much of research in the sciences in the U.S. was only conducted primarily using white men. Everything from basic drug trials to the Zimbardo prison experiment. So until recently, basic gender and racial differences in biology and behavior weren't know due to assumptions that past research on white men applied to everybody.

Now there's more cross cultural research because there are so many assumptions that what applies in the U.S. does so around the world.

 

[cville deac]

I heard this as I was waking up this morning and was disgusted but not surprised. Not just at what we did back then, but that the VA has been going out of their way for years not to treat them now. Then I had the thought, why didn't we just do this on German and Japanese POWs if we really wanted to do this and then apologize later if necessary. Then I thought that was a bad thought to have, and besides, we prolly didn't have enough POWs anyway early in the war to do experiments on, so that thought prolly wasn't practical. But the more I thought about, I wouldn't have been pissed much at all had we done this to Japanese and German POWs, especially considering the kinds of medical experiments both the Germans and Japanese were performing on all sorts of folks and the way that both were slaughtering all sorts of Jews, Poles, Russians, Chinese and Koreans. I guess situational ethics on my part.

 

[UNCG Deac]

Wouldn't they need to run the tests on both blacks and whites to determine differences in how they were affected?

 

[cville deac]

Wouldn't they need to run the tests on both blacks and whites to determine differences in how they were affected?

No, Mengele had the tests on whites covered. And even though it was wartime, as scientists, they agreed to share notes. And they both of course shared notes with the Japanese scientists who were doing their experiments in Manchuria. You know, the Japanese scientists we brought back here and hired after the war instead of prosecuting for war crimes.