Race, Racism, and Biology
“The experimental exploitation of African Americans is not an issue of the last decade or even the past few decades. Dangerous, involuntary, and nontherapeutic experimentation upon African Americans has been practiced widely and documented extensively at least since the eighteenth century.
Attempts to understand the distrust of this history generates are confused and distorted because few know its facts beyond a few oft-cited experimental outrages, notably the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. History of medicine courses, medical museums, and even much medical scholarship leave one unaware of the long tragic history of medical research with African Americans.” – Harriet A. Washington[1]
Race, as defined by the Human Genome Research Institute, is a social construct used to group people. It was constructed as a hierarchical human grouping system, generating racial classifications to identify, distinguish, and marginalize some groups across nations, regions, and the world. Race divides human populations into groups often based on physical appearance, social factors, and cultural backgrounds.[2]
