An interesting yet disturbing period of medical history

How Black Slaves Were Routinely Sold As ‘Specimens’ To Ambitious White Doctors

The history of human experimentation is as old as the practice of medicine and in the modern era has always targeted disadvantaged, marginalised, institutionalised, stigmatised and vulnerable populations: prisoners, the condemned, orphans, the mentally ill, students, the poor, women, the disabled, children, peoples of colour, indigenous peoples and the enslaved.

Human subject research is evident wherever physicians, technicians, pharmaceutical companies (and others) are trialling new practices and implementing the latest diagnostic and therapeutic agents and procedures. And the American South in the days of slavery was no different – and for those looking for easy targets, black slave bodies were easy to come by.

A disturbing upward trend

U.N. Report Shows an Increase in Trafficking of Children

One in three human trafficking victims is a child, most victims are female, and traffickers operate with wide impunity, the United Nations said Monday in a report on modern-day slavery.

The 2014 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, also found that the proportion of children among victims appeared to be rising. Its first report, in 2012, said the proportion had been closer to one in four.

In some regions, like Africa and the Middle East, the new report said, two out of three victims are children.

There is a gender issue here, as:

Other statistics in the report showed that girls account for two out of every three child victims, and that together with adult women, account for 70 percent of all trafficking victims.

And the scope is wide:

The report found that trafficking was a problem all over the world, with at least 152 countries of origin and 124 countries of destination. More than 6 in 10 victims have been transported across at least one national border, it said.

We need to find a way to make this less profitable, find the perpetrators, and free those enslaved. It's so pervasive and only recently has it been really studied or even talked about. Even here in Lexington, a couple were arrested for using slave-labour in their stores. I'm not sure how that case is playing out, but the point is, this is all over the place, including in our own backyard. We need to take notice, and support groups that are trying to make a difference at preventing, freeing, and rehabilitating these people.

I had a very nice Fourth of July

I:
• Slept in.
• Visited with three friends.
• Watched 12 Years a Slave with one of them, which was a very good movie, although somewhat difficult to watch, but underscored the fragility of freedom for the day.
• Did a small grocery run.
• Listened to music.
• Had a brief nap.
• Watched the fireworks at Idle Hour, which were awesome, especially with the running commentary by my co-worker's grandchildren. At one point someone briefly lost a child in the crowd and the police and firefighters came, and her grandson was sure we'd all be arrested.

What I didn't do was go to the parade/downtown festival, which is a shame, but with my knee the way it is, it makes no sense to walk on it all over creation. Let's face it, pain isn't fun. I was really looking forward to it, too, and the weather was lovely today--cooler without a hint of rain.

I checked in on TvTag (formerly GetGlue) after the movie and someone said 'it was very true to the novel'. It wasn't based on a work of fiction, but rather on a 19th-century memoir/slave narrative of a free man who went through the harrowing experience of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. My friend didn't know it was a true story either, and I think my telling him made it somewhat harder for him to watch. I must say the acting was very good. I particularly think Chiwetel Ejiofor did an excellent job as Solomon Northrup. Personally, I am surprised he did not win the Oscar for his performance, but then I haven't seen Dallas Buyers Club, so I haven't seen Matthew McConaughey's performance. Michael Fassbender was very good as Epps, and Lupita Nyong'o was very good as Patsey. But I thought Ejiofor really was the best. I am glad the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, at least. I would like to read the book, Twelve Years a Slave, which I have on my Kindle but haven't gotten to yet.

Well, the fireworks are still going off outside in my neighbourhood. There's a dog upstairs that has quieted down. I hope my friends' dogs are doing okay. Two don't really mind the sounds, but one just gets terrified and will stay under one's desk at his feet. But they used to have neighbours who set them off next door and they moved some time ago, so maybe it won't be so bad.

By the way, remember the show 'Vicious' I was writing about? I did get to see the first episode (that's all that's aired on PBS as of yet). It is very funny. It comes on the same time as 'Salem', which has two more episodes, but fortunately you can watch on the PBS website as well.

Okay, I think I'm going to start winding down for the night. It's almost midnight. I might play a little on the Atari before bed. :)

Horrible

Abducted Girls Forced To Marry Nigerian Extremists

Scores of girls and young women kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Islamic extremist abductors, a civil society group reported Wednesday.

Parents say the girls are being sold into marriage to Boko Haram militants for 2,000 naira ($12), Halite Aliyu of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum told The Associated Press. She said the parents’ information is coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram is known to have hideouts.

This breaks my heart. To be sold into marriage (which happens far too quickly to girls and young women in our world, and mostly we turn a blind eye to it), especially to thugs who seem to despise women and any kind of education, is terrible. It is a form of slavery. It is unpardonable that this still happens in this day and age, and I hope that the government acts quickly to save these girls, including asking for international help, because so far it seems groups like this can act with impunity there.

Disturbing numbers, but something we need more awareness of and need to end

Thirty million people are slaves, half in India: Survey

Some 30 million people are enslaved worldwide, trafficked into brothels, forced into manual labour, victims of debt bondage or even born into servitude, a global index on modern slavery showed on Thursday.

Almost half are in India, where slavery ranges from bonded labour in quarries and kilns to commercial sex exploitation, although the scourge exists in all 162 countries surveyed by Walk Free, an Australian-based rights group.

Its estimate of 29.8 million slaves worldwide is higher than other attempts to quantify modern slavery. The International Labour Organisation estimates that almost 21 million people are victims of forced labour. "Today some people are still being born into hereditary slavery, a staggering but harsh reality, particularly in parts of West Africa and South Asia," the report said.

"Other victims are captured or kidnapped before being sold or kept for exploitation, whether through 'marriage', unpaid labour on fishing boats, or as domestic workers. Others are tricked and lured into situations they cannot escape, with false promises of a good job or an education." The Global Slavery Index 2013 defines slavery as the possession or control of people to deny freedom and exploit them for profit or sex, usually through violence, coercion or deception.

Here is a link to the actual Walk Free Foundation -- Global Slavery Index. The United States, by the way, linked 134 on the list, with a calculated number of enslaved at 59,644, with a minimum estimated at 57,000 and a maximum of 63,000.

Words fail me

This was the first thing I read this morning. The sheer brutality and kindess embodied in this story leaves me speechless.

From horror to hope: Boy's miracle recovery from brutal attack

You cannot die! You cannot die!" the father mumbles to the bloodied, mutilated boy who lies unconscious on his lap.

His hands press down on the boy's slashed-open stomach to keep the insides from spilling out. He sobs convulsively.

"Listen to me! You cannot die!" he repeats his morbid mantra. "If for nothing else, to exact justice."

The two are on a rickshaw headed to a hospital in Dhaka. It's not the most effective way to transport a dying child through the cramped, congested streets of the Bangladeshi capital. But it's all that the impoverished father can afford.

Hours earlier, four men had surrounded the 7-year-old boy, bound his hands and feet and cracked open his head with a brick. They held him down and took a switchblade to his throat. They sliced his chest and belly in an upside down cross.

And in a final brutal act, they hacked him sideways, chopping off his penis and his right testicle.

"It's amazing that he lived," a doctor would later say. "I'm really surprised he didn't bleed to death prior to getting to the hospital."

He was only seven years old at the time. Read the article. Educate yourself on the brutality of forced begging. See what a concerted effort by a team of individuals can do to help the situation. And see what you can do to help other children like this boy at CNN's Operation Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery page.

Okay, that's fixed

The cable modem had to be reset. On to blogging...

What is it with all the nooses popping up in the news? Are people really thinking this is a joke? That it's funny? Is it a bunch of copycats because other stories have been in the news? What? Here's what's going on, as detailed in one of the latest stories:

Hangman's Noose Targets Columbia Professor

• A noose is found on the door of a female black professor at the premier education graduate study programme in the country, at Teachers College at Columbia University.
  
  
• There's the highly publicised story of the Jena 6, sparked off by the hanging of nooses in a tree at a high school in Jena, La. (For the record I thought the white students involved with the nooses should have been expelled, not had in-school suspensions, and the black students involved in the beating of a white student should have been charged in juvenile court with assault and battery, or whatever is the equivalent in the Napoleonic system of law in Louisiana). The beating was obviously the most serious offence, though--I'm not sure I agree wholly with the marchers who protested, who seemed to be downplaying the seriousness of the assault on someone whom as far as I could tell from news reports, wasn't connected to the noose incident. Also, I think whenever Al Sharpton gets involved in a case, it becomes more about publicity than the issues. But that's just my opinion.
  
  
• A noose was found in September hanging outside a black cultural studies centre on the University of Maryland campus.
  
  
• Teachers at an elementary school run by Grambling State University decided to explain the Jena 6 story by using nooses on children and re-enacting hangings. Bad idea, although the lesson will probably remain with those kids their entire lives. It's up there with the case in sociology we always studied where they explained Nazism to elementary kids by sanctioning and treating children differently based on eye colour over the course of several days. Psychological manipulation of students isn't really encouraged these days, especially among the very young.
  
  
• At a high school at Gallaudet University seven students (including one who was black) assaulted a black student and scrawled "KKK" and swastikas all over his body with a marker.
  
  
• At the Coast Guard Academy two small nooses were found inside the sea bag of a black cadet aboard a tall ship.
  
  
• A construction worker at a Home Depot building site in Illinois found a noose made of foam packing material. Later a racial slur was found spray painted on the site.
  

Also, not noose-connected per se, but signs of racial tensions:

• An editor and editorial cartoonist at the Kentucky Kernel at the University of Kentucky apologised after a cartoon linking fraternities and sororities with a slave auction was protested.
  
  
• At a Pennsylvania High School three minority students, one Latino, one black, and one biracial were verbally attacked with racial slurs and wadded up paper was thrown at them outside the school right before classes began. Rumours were rampant that the white students would be bringing guns and staring a riot at the school.

In the multiracial, global sort of world we live in, I'd like to think we'd learnt a thing or two from the past. I'd like to think this is just stupidity in action, or the product of minds who don't get the significance of what they're doing. The most blatant racism I ever encountered (and I grew up primarily in the Deep South) was in a small town in Kansas that didn't have any minorities in it until an Asian family set up a restaurant. A teacher who'd been through the race riots in her native Detroit tried to put a stop to a lot of the jokes and attitudes she heard about blacks. But part of the problem was ignorance because they had never interacted with anyone different from themselves. (Okay, I did also encounter it in California, where I was beaten up and threatened by Latina and black girls, but that might be because I was an insufferable know-it-all with a Louisiana accent rather than my skin colour. But I tell you what--I lost the Southern accent. One incident also comes from something I unwittingly said in admiration that I now recognise was mistaken for a racial slur. In my innocence I complimented a black girl for her athletic ability (see, budding bisexual) and I was in my horsey-girly phase at the time and the only athlete I could think of was a jockey. It never occurred to me that those little plaster men they have in the front yards through much of Kentucky--almost all of which I'd seen were white--were called lawn jockeys and were primarily black. I lived in terror of that girl for weeks and I didn't understand fully what she'd thought I'd said until I was in my 30s and heard someone make the reference.)

Back to my point...nooses, uncool, folks. Use them and expect to be prosecuted or expelled. They're not just an unpleasant symbol, they can be construed as a death threat. I won't say every one is meant to convey that. We don't know all the circumstances to these cases. The professor, for example, is involved in a lawsuit with another party. Was it related to that? A disgruntled student? Someone wanting to stir up controversy--white or black? Who knows?

What is good to see is that there are plenty of people out there who protested these cases, making sure their voices of tolerance were heard. But it also shows that racist ideas still fester, although they may not be so overt to lead to lynchings--the ideas are still there. I only hope they will not explode to violence after all that simmering, especially as we become a society with more 'minorities' than the supposed majority. If you listen to whites, they feel marginalised and as if their culture is being pushed aside for everyone else's. In some ways that's true, in others it isn't. But something's going to give.

And compromise isn't always the way to take it, even though we may want to walk a moderate path. Look at the tensions between Turkey and the US over the Armenian issue. There are those who say there should be no resolution on the Armenian genocide--and make no mistake, by the definitions created the 20th century in the wake of the Nazis and other forms of 'racial cleansings', it was, indeed, genocide--because it will affect Middle Eastern peace. The Armenian question is also a sticking point with Turkey and the European Union.

The thing is, though, while we shouldn't necessarily be blamed with what our forebears did, we need to recognise that it happened. The Germans were complicitous with the attempted extermination of the Jews. Serbs tried to eradicate Croats. The Khmer Rouge killed many Cambodians. And Europeans both decimated the American Indian population and bought and sold (and in some cases, killed) people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves from Africa. The US put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, saying they'd collaborate with the enemy. Likewise, the Turks displaced and massacred the Armenians, saying they were aiding the Russians during WWI. History has known this for years. The West was aware of it at the time it was happening--like so many other genocides. But the Turkish government continues the denial.

Racial matters are never (no pun intended) merely black or white. They're messy and complicated. But if we work together, maybe we can make things a little better for our children, and their children.