Black Women’s Fiction and Medical Experimentation

The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare existing racial inequalities in our healthcare system. The magnified death toll for Black and Brown Americans coupled with concerns regarding the rushed vaccine development encouraged discourse around Black Americans’ historic distrust of medical institutions. What is the history of medical and scientific experimentation on Black bodies?

Over the last decade, Black science fiction and the speculative genre have enjoyed a renaissance of interest, support, and production. TV shows and films like Get Out, Nope, Lovecraft Country, and Kindred explored the nexus of the fantastic, paranormal, and gothic experiences of African Americans. Similarly, Black authors are engaging these topics and weaving in histories of inequality and bodily exploitation that go beyond chattel slavery and the antebellum, pre-Civil War period. Black women authors like Kaitlyn Greendige, Megan Giddings, and Dolen Perkins-Valdez have written novels that uplift forgotten histories of twentieth century experimentation, coercion, and medical malpractice on Black bodies. The authors highlight the ways vulnerable Black communities have been exploited and manipulated whether through financial or emotional means.

In Kaitlyn Greenidge’s first novel We Love You Charlie Freeman (2016), the Freeman family takes part in an experiment to live with a monkey. The novel is set in 1990 New England and comments on the unique valences of Northeastern racism. The family is supposed to treat this monkey, Charlie, like the youngest child of their family while also teaching him sign language. The Freemans take part in this trial at the Toneybee Institute, unaware of the institution’s racist history. The novel oscillates from different perspectives, including Nymphadora from 1929. Nearly sixty years before the Freemans, Nymphadora is convinced to pose nude for a scientist working for the same Toneybee Institute. Nymphadora first agrees so the researcher will stop following and examining little Black school children. She continues to pose for the researcher because of her immense loneliness. She only stops when she realizes he is sketching her to compare her naked form to that of a female chimpanzee. Worse yet, he experiments on groups of Black men, giving them unknown substances and also comparing their reactions to chimpanzees. The researcher advertised the experiments as “work of the mind” for these unemployed Black men, but once the men start the work, they find it is “un-Christian” and “unnatural.”

While many people know the comparison between Black people and apes is racist, they don’t know why. Greenidge engages the history of experimentation on Black people as well as eugenics, encouraging readers to further uncover this history. Eugenicists believed certain human qualities could be bred, which supported inaccurate beliefs about biological racial hierarchy. Although eugenics has its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, racist ideas about affiliating Africans with primates spans centuries. Wulf Hund and Charles Mill write that in the late 1500s “Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara. He characterised the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals.” The intimacy the Freeman family, especially Laurel, develops with chimpanzee Charlie alludes to these histories and anxieties of bestiality. During a pivotal Thanksgiving dinner scene a tertiary character, Uncle Lyle calls out the elephant in the room. He observes:

I’m just saying what I happen to see in this room. A whole bunch of black folks eating dinner provided by white folks, interacting with a monkey, so that nice white lady . . . and that young man behind the camera . . . can film it all. And take some notes. And it isn’t exactly clear where those notes end up (208).

Greenidge’s novel taps into this longer history of both white voyeurism and experimentation alongside eugenics.

In Megan Giddings debut novel Lakewood (2020), protagonist Lena drops out of college to participate in mysterious experiments. Lena must care for a mother with a debilitating illness, thus Giddings highlights the real way poor, young Black Americans must support elders while simultaneously trying to build wealth from a deficit. A 2015 article from the Atlantic emphasizes this point: “In college, black and Hispanic Millenials are more likely to have to work one or two jobs to get through, missing out on opportunities to connect with classmates who have time to tinker around in dorm rooms and go on to found multibillion-dollar companies together” (Jones). While young adults of color receive less financial assistance from their parents, as much as 70-80% according to one poll, expect to be supported. If contemporary young adults of color are tasked with both supporting themselves and close family amidst rising inflation and more labor competition, how can and do they make ends meet? It is no surprise this vulnerability makes them a prime audience for dubious opportunities.Through Lakewood, Giddings highlights the way the current environment coerces young, poor Black Americans into dangerous jobs because of too few financial options.

Lakewood also alludes to the history of unethical experiments on US prisoners. For decades leading up until the 1970s, the US federal government experimented on institutionalized and incarcerated individuals. Since African Americans have always been overrepresented in prisons and jails, from national rates of roughly 40-60%, “any discussion of U.S. inmates is closely bound up with race.” In Lakewood, most of the participants are people of color while all of the observers are white. Experimentation on Lena violates her bodily autonomy and erodes her sense of reality. She is isolated from family and friends—Lakewood research officials confiscate her phone and social media, texting her family for her. Although Lena signs an agreement to participate in these experiments, she essentially agrees to take part in all experiments no matter how vague or ambiguous they are. This begs the question, is that informed consent? As experiments become more disturbing for Lena, she cannot consult anyone outside of Lakewood about her experiences. Similarly prison experiments navigated a blurry line of consent, since the full nature of research and studies were withheld from participants. This history includes violent and inhumane transgressions like “giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the nose of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill patients at a New York hospital.” As Harriet Washington illuminates in Medical Apartheid “stripped of their freedom, their civil rights and their family and community connections, black prison subjects were almost as legally invisible as slaves in antebellum experiments.” By the conclusion of Lakewood, Giddings leaves readers to consider how systemic abuse is passed down through generations.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s third novel Take My Hand was inspired by the real story of the Relf sisters who were sterilized without their consent by a federally funded agency. This story exposes readers to the history of mass sterilizations on poor, Southern Black women and girls, whose reproductive rights were violated because they depended upon the government for benefits and subsistence. This assault on the Relf sisters’ bodies happened just one year after revelations about the Tuskegee syphilis study that also occurred in Alabama. In her Author’s Note, Perkins-Valdez says she wrote the novel because she wanted to know “how could these events have happened in plain sight?” (353). Her novel takes on the perspective of a fictional nurse who is charged with providing birth control for two sisters–India and Erica Williams. Due to assumptions about cultures of poverty, promiscuity, and pathology, these girls are sterilized. In both the case of the Relf sisters and the fictional Williams, this occurs because a guardian signs a form they cannot read. Valdez “used the historical record as inspiration to imagine the emotional impact of this moment and others like it” (354).

Take My Hand tackles a different aspect of eugenics, the history of population control. Government actors took advantage of Black miseducation and illiteracy to coerce consent that violated a person’s physical well-being or that of loved ones. The 1973 case Relf vs. Weinberg delivered a victory by asserting the federal government could not fund involuntary sterilization procedures. Although this case catalyzed the necessity of “informed consent,” these issues are still prevalent today. In recent years, news has spread of sterilizations on migrant women in detention centers. History continues to painfully repeat itself despite legislative victories. Creative production and fiction can bring awareness and advocacy to these issues. Like Greenidge and Giddings, Valdez draws attention to the way Black bodies have been harmed and exploited by government entities and medical institutions in the name of science and public health. We must all stay vigilant and informed.