#antiblackness

The way I got this ask only hours before 3x07 dropped. Damn I guess it really was our fault for perceiving the black victim of abuse as a victim of abuse

what the vampire lestat reveals is how blackness operates as a fetish, a a magical object that is at once grotesque in its capacity to withstand graphic body horror and mundane in that the mutilation and exhibition of black bodies has been, historically, a quotidian exercise. Blackness has value as a commodity fetish. For all the unnaturalness of this gothic horror show, what is most natural and not discussed in trades, by majoritarian fandom, the cast, the crew is the series' fascination with showing mutilated, disfigured, charred, burning, terrorized black flesh. What appears to be the true horror would be to show a black body reveling in their monstrousness, in their making a paradise out of hell.

Jacob Anderson's performance is the lever that turned a trapdoor into an escape route, and i am grateful for the work he put into Louis. going back to s2 finale interviews where JA looked at it as closure for Louis makes sense in light of the vampire lestat.

In 1968, consumer activist Ralph Nader complained to the Washington Post about the bationwide practice of "giving Negroes 25 to 50 percent stronger [x-ray] doses than white patients." G.J. Tarleton, a professor of radiology at the predominantly Black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, swiftly dismissed the claim as "a fantastic charge".

But California radiologic technicians conducting a 1966 survey revealed that 72 percent of the states X-ray technicians had opted on their own initiative to administer these higher X-ray exposures to Blacks because of their vague beliefs that African-Americans were physiologically different: "'Their bones are harder and denser'.... 'their skin is darker'.... 'their flesh is tougher'..."

Physicians from the Public Health Service and the American College of Radiology denied ever issuing such advisories to doctors, but it was technicians, not doctors, who were making the experimental adjustments without citing their actions in the official medical records.

Also, despite the denials, physicians were being taught to administer higher-than-indicated radiation doses to Blacks. For example, the 1963 edition of X-ray Technology, by Charles A. Jacobi and Don Q. Paris, a standard textbook, contained a charted recommendation that the standard radiation doses should be increased for Negro X-ray patients."

But MCV researchers deliberately caused third degree burns to the skins of other patients at Dooley, a charity hospital for Black children, and at St. Philip, its sister hospital for Black adults. These hospitals eventually yielded one hundred Black subjects a year between the ages of six months and ninety years for similar MCV burn experiments.

Doctors used radiation admitted at graduated levels to measure the precise amount of energy necessary to induce the specific levels of first to third degree burns. Investigators also produced the radiation burns on the arms of forty-four whites at different area hospitals and, at least in some cases, scientists acknowledge that these were produced for "investigational purposes."

The doctors and radiation physicians used their data to calculate the numbers of people who would die at specific distances from a nuclear bomb like that detonated over Hiroshima (approximately twenty kilotons). Evans's team deduced that Blacks suffered more intense burns than whites after the same exposure, and from this, researchers concluded that radiation burns from a nuclear event would injure Blacks much more severely than whites."

Moreover, [Dr. Eugene L.] Saenger's patients did not have to die to provide such information: researchers had known at least since 1956 that TBI destroys the bone marrow, but now they could calibrate the lethal doses more precisely.

Saenger, who was still a professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati Medical School as this book went to press, did not reply to my telephoned interview requests through the UC press-relations office or to emails in which I asked him to discuss his work. But in his public statements, he defends his research as therapeutic and consensual. The venerable American College of Radiology agreed, exonerating Saenger of wrongdoing on the basis of his denials and by ignoring the rules that govern experimentation during his tenure as a DOD researcher. The trajectory of Saenger's medical career did not falter and he never faced criminal charges.

Martha Stephens, a University of Cincinnati English professor, has written The Treatment, a comprehensive and unflinching history of the TBI test. Its chapters describe the long, bitter fight for justice that finally culminated in a five million dollar 1999 settlement between thirteen researchers and the subjects' survivors. The agreement also stipulated that the university would erect a permanent memorial naming the victims, and in June 2000, it complied by installing a small, curiously dated plaque labeled DEDICATED TO THE PATIENTS OF THE RADIATION EXPERIMENTATION, 1973-1974 and listing the names of over 170 patients.

The plaque was placed on the medical school grounds, behind a Dumpster and nestled between the kitchen and a parking garage."