Race, Resistance, and the Rona

Part II

In the early twentieth century, African American physicians were particularly invested in challenging racial assumptions of disease susceptibility. As African Americans faced high rates of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis, these physicians sought to prove that these diseases were not the result of racial inferiority, but rather stemmed from environmental and social conditions. For example, a 1923 editorial for the Journal of the National Medical Association used statistical data from eleven states to challenge beliefs that African Americans were naturally susceptible to tuberculosis. The editorial stated that “there is no inherent tendency or susceptibility on the part of the colored race to tuberculosis,” and argued that the higher mortality rate was actually the result of “ignorance, superstition, unwholesome and unhygienic living conditions.”[1] Some African American physicians overtly challenged scientific racism by turning it back on itself. In 1912, Dr. E. Mayfield Boyle published a scathing open letter to a white physician who argued that African Americans were more susceptible to tuberculosis:

“If the mere prevalence of tuberculosis among American Negroes and its less prevalence among American whites need no further explanation than that the Negro's body is inferior to that of the white man and can only come to par with the latter through centuries of tuberculization, then one may also infer that the prevalence of, and almost exclusive tendency toward, suicidal tendency in the white race and its scarcity among American Negroes is indicative of inferior brain structure or mental endurance in the whites and the reverse in Negroes; that the Negro has emerged from centuries of suicidal mania through which your race is now wending its weary way.”[2]

Boyle satirically illustrated the flawed use of disease morbidity and mortality as the basis for racial assumptions of susceptibility. He further argued that if white people had natural immunity, why did this immunity not prevent “mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, and the like” from having high rates of tuberculosis morbidity and mortality.  He instead argued that improved public health and hygiene would address the environmental conditions that contributed to high tuberculosis morbidity and mortality.

“A snapshot from a molecular dynamics simulation shows the geometric order and disorder characteristics of eumelanin aggregate structures.” Image courtesy of Chun-Teh Chen.

Jumping forward to the late 1960s, the work of the late Frances Cress Welsing also illustrated how theorizing about racial science has operated as a resistive practice. Welsing overtly challenged the very premise of racial science by inverting its own logic. She argued that white people were a genetic mutation and thus inferior, and therefore they crafted structural racism to ensure their own genetic survival in a world dominated by non-white people. She also argued that melanin was the basis of black superiority. [3] Not only were white people deemed inferior and black people deemed superior, their marker of superiority had historically been the very marker of inferiority. Welsing, alongside her contemporaries like Neely Fuller, theorized about superior black bodies to resist centuries of racial science that marked black people as inferior to justify structural and scientific racism. Though there is no empirical scientific evidence for melanin theory or for race as a biological category, melanin theory illustrates the enduring continuity of black people using science to imagine new possibilities for the race.

Returning to the question of race and myths of immunity to COVID-19, these beliefs function as part of a much longer history of black racial science. Though it seems paradoxical, African Americans using racial science to dismantle scientific racism was a resistive practice. It does not fit with the ways that we think about race and science in our current moment, but it shows how African Americans interpreted the explanatory power of science to resist structures of racism. While it’s essential to avoid reifying race as a biological category, this history of black racial science and its current iterations create opportunities for new questions about what black resistance can look like. What does it mean to theorize black bodies as superior and immune when almost two centuries of racial science mark them as inferior and susceptible? What does it mean to theorize about healthy and resistant black bodies in a pandemic? What does it mean to imagine the black body itself, its organs, its muscles, its cells as sites of resistance to white supremacy? How can we imagine embodied forms of resistance as a path to alleviating the tremendous health inequalities made more visible by COVID-19?

I end with these questions because I still do not have the answers. As a black historian of medicine, it is devastating to see the past and present ways that black people continue to suffer disproportionate harm and suffering from scientific racism and medical injustice. However, it is heartening to see the ways that black people continue to survive despite unrelenting racism. I hope that these questions inspire us to imagine, to resist, to dream, to abscond to a world of health, healing, and power.

A. Nuriddin

[1] “Mortality from Tuberculosis 1921,” Journal of the National Medical Association Vol. 15, No. 1 (January-March 1923), 47

[2] E. Mayfield Boyle, “Tuberculosis and the Negro,” Journal of the National Medical Association 4, no. 4 (October-December 1912): 345.

[3] Frances Cress Welsing, Cress Theory of Color Confrontation, 1970; The Isis Papers