Normal, fucked since its inception
Out of 84 Brazzaville natives, 66% showed hypoglycemia; of these, 39% went from 0.90 g to 0.75 g and 27% were below 0.75 g. According to these authors the black must be generally considered as hypoglycemic. In any case the black withstands hypoglycemias which would be considered grave if not mortal in a European, without apparent disturbance and especially without either convulsions or coma. [...] These states are on the border between physiology and pathology. [...] The relativity of certain aspects of anatomic and physiological norms and consequently of certain pathological disturbances as they relate to ways of life and knowledge of the world, is apparent not only in the comparison of ethnic and cultural groups [...]
Canguilhem, Georges, 1991 (1943), The Normal and the Pathological, Zone Books, New York.
Its quite amazing that doctors were denouncing the occidentalism of medicine and its definition of normality on a physiological level since 1943. Like, one would figure out that if the women specific bike seat was invented in the 1990s, that cameras were designed for light skinned people (and I don’t know if anyone fixed that yet) or that web accessibility only became a real concern only in the 2010s, its just because governments or industries “didn’t know”. Whether they didn’t know or the gender, racial and class bias of the business owners make those problems invisible to them or that market incentives for non-fucked products were too low, the people in power had the most access to that knowledge. We only just found the tip of the iceberg of how the ownership of businesses and the control of the government by white priviledged fuckups has woven patriarchy, racism and capitalism so deeply in our daily lives, and we may only see the full size of the awful system that beats us in the face when we hung the last billionaire with the bowels of the last cop.
Interestingly enough, Canguilhem was the thesis supervisor of Foucault and Bourdieu.
