it is well understood that the american health care system has struggled with the reality of eugenics for over a century now, and that these policies have gone from having widespread popular and state support to being kept an open secret, to avoid scrutiny.

i'll admit i was a little surprised by this asserting itself as a political issue, as it is usually the kind of thing that is reserved for nuts at book signings and wacky anarchists with unwieldy blogs. but, it is indeed probably long past due for a national inquiry into the broad treatment of not just africans but also hispanics, native americans, jews, homosexuals, people with mental health issues and a few other groups across the entire system. we know that there was a time when operations were done on people without their consent; it's not clear to what extent this continues to happen, but you hear things. do marginalized groups die in elective surgery more often than others, for example? are they denied access to treatment by insurance companies in different proportions? can you pull these sorts of numbers out? can you try and make sense of them? because anybody who has looked into this knows that they are actually there, and there's nothing coincidental about it. it's not about class. and, it's not an accidental correlation, or a subconscious oversight. there should be no naivete about the conclusions drawn from the analysis; everything you'd pull out of such a thing would be entirely intentional.

so, the thought is that something like a higher birth mortality rate for african americans isn't going to be a consequence of class, or the result of subconscious bias by the doctors, but rather a pretty clear systemic policy to reduce the birth rate. why jump to these conclusions? because that's something that has actually been legislated by "progressive" groups in the united states (and some right-wing groups in canada), and something that nobody is really sure about the real extent of which it was ever actually stopped.

you'd have to start with an inquiry in order to actually understand the actual facts, which i will repeat that we are not entirely clear about, right now.