Trump said he felt better than he had 20 years ago — seeming to equate his unprecedented care with that available to average Americans. But especially for communities of color disproportionately, access to the kind of medical care Trump got is limited.
Ignoring the health of Black people, and discounting their deaths as a consequence, is nothing new. Black health in the U.S. South from the colonial period throughout much of the 20th century has mostly been a history of self-reliance and governmental neglect. The history of the 1849 cholera pandemic, for example, exposes how White elites blamed the victims of pandemics to maintain the economy — in this case cotton and sugar production.
In 1833 and 1849, the United States, like much of the rest of the world, suffered from unprecedented cholera epidemics. Across the nation, the pandemic struck the working class the worst. Historians have long written about how doctors during this period often blamed victims of cholera, instead of their own inadequacy in treating the disease. During the first half of the 19th century, White physicians in New York City censured the supposed immorality of the immigrant poor rather than addressing the illness that they knew little about and certainly could not cure.
Enslaved Black people in the rural South were similarly vulnerable to cholera. Despite laboring outside, enslaved people often lived in tightly packed quarters. This dynamic increased the likelihood of interpersonal spread of the intestinal ailment. No simple mortality rate exists for the South’s 1849 epidemic, but even the imperfect historical record reveals a disproportionate toll on Black southerners. Both in number of cases and deaths, Black people suffered disproportionately more than Whites in the South.
Yet, cholera on plantations was at least partially preventable. Few enslavers built privies or outhouses for enslaved laborers. As a result, human waste often was deposited near crowded residences where overworked enslaved people lived. Moreover, it was common during a pandemic for the river, stream or well to become infected with cholera. This was a nightmare scenario for an intestinal disease and greatly contributed to the illness’s rapid spread.
An unwillingness to invest money in housing for enslaved people and a callous disregard for their lives meant cholera could quickly burn through the population with devastating results. Writing about cholera in 1849 in St. Mary’s Parish in Louisiana, James B. Duncan described how the disease struck plantation after plantation without any apparent pattern. On one plantation, 10 or 12 enslaved people might perish, but the disease would completely skip a neighboring plot. C.H. Stone, another doctor who practiced near Natchez, Miss., witnessed the local Black population as it was devastated by the disease. On a plantation home to 239 enslaved individuals, he noted “129 were attacked, of whom fourteen grown ones and nine children died.” This accounted for nearly 10 percent of the enslaved population on that plantation.
Yet White physicians regularly responded by blaming the victims. In Samuel A. Cartwright’s writings about cholera, the doctor claimed that hysteria, not the illness, was responsible for most cholera deaths among enslaved people. Many other doctors agreed. In 1850, C.B. New wrote that a physician had to learn how to control the psyche of enslaved patients during an epidemic. “Cholera,” he asserted, “creates a panic, which powerfully predisposes” enslaved people to the disease.
Cartwright’s incorporation of proslavery politics into medicine went beyond his approach to cholera. The New Orleans physician was one of the South’s most famous and controversial figures before the Civil War. Despite some legitimate medical accolades, Cartwright was best known for inventing the psychiatric disease “drapetomania.” This illness, he claimed, caused enslaved people to run away. Through these kinds of invented racial, psychiatric ailments, Cartwright used the language of medicine to naturalize Black people’s enslavement. In the case of drapetomania, he professed enslaved people had to be mentally ill to loathe and leave bondage.
Depicting enslavement as healthy was central to enslavers’ strategy for preventing abolition. Despite a shared agenda, southern doctors were far from consistent in their theories and rhetoric. Other physicians in the region claimed enslaved people were apathetic about their health. Writing about the epidemic in Bayou Lafourche, La., William A. Booth claimed enslaved laborers were “fatalists.” “The worse it rages, the less they regard it,” he rationalized. Whether claiming it was panic or apathy, most southern doctors agreed cholera’s enslaved victims were to blame for their own deaths, not unsanitary working and living conditions. Southern physicians — who relied on enslavers for much of their business — had a vested interest in naturalizing Black people’s subjugation.
The 1849 cholera epidemic occurred in the shadow of the sectional crisis that culminated in 1861 with the beginning of the Civil War. Preserving slavery meant preserving the cotton economy, thus Southern politicians and physicians worked tirelessly to present the slave system as humane and healthy. This imperative often meant bending reality to serve their political needs. Sudden epidemics such as cholera, though, uprooted these narratives. Instead, they drew attention to the fundamentally unhealthy nature of enslaved labor.
Still, deaths among these individuals were predictable and preventable. Despite dominant narratives of being urban epidemics, covid-19 and cholera have had a profound impact on rural Americans as well. Rather than take responsibility or promote public health, antebellum commentators, not unlike the president today, chose to ignore, downplay and shift responsibility to the victims themselves. Their actions had devastating consequences — as they do today.
October 07, 2020 at 07:06PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/07/no-mr-president-covid-19-is-not-easy-everyone-overcome/
No, Mr. President. Covid-19 is not easy for everyone to overcome. - The Washington Post
https://news.google.com/search?q=easy&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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