#henrietta lacks

manual reblog because this needs to be discussed more.

science and technology relies this. and yet scientists and the public always forget the billions of people, of minorities that were used in death. without the consent of anyone related to them or of themselves.

Henrietta's cancer cells were taken from her and used before she even died. Most human cells used in research today, originate from her. And her family has never once seen any lick of profit from the man who first sold their mother/sister/grandmother/aunt.

for years her name was not properly released. For years she was only known for her initials as HeLa.

53rd Book I Read in 2026

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Author: Rebecca Skloot

Please read that again: White institutions experimented on young Black men to observe what effects syphilis and other STDs would have on human beings.

What they did NOT do was, experiment on Black men exposed to syphilis to see what would happen to Black people.

Do you understand the implications here?

THEY KNEW THAT BLACK MEN WERE HUMAN BEINGS, JUST. LIKE. THEM.

White people knew this. They understood that if a disease affects a human being who happened to be Black, then it would likely have similar effects on white people. Racists have always understood that Black human beings were human, just like them.

This fact makes racism even more evil and insidious.

And yet, we still have things like medical racism, where “doctors” and “healthcare professionals” treat Black people—not “people of color” but specifically Black people—as if we are somehow different; as if we somehow do not experience pain in the same way as other human beings.

Here is the hypocrisy: Black people are human enough to experiment on, and we are human enough to use our very cells for cures to cancers that effect all humans, but somehow we still are not quite human enough to be treated humanely … we aren’t quite human enough to be treated equally. Not human enough to be seen as human.

You know how capitalism privatizes the wealth but socializes the poverty? It’s exactly the same with anti-Blackness. Institutions will monetize Blackness when it is profitable, and demonize Blackness at all other times.

This is not a mistake, nor is it coincidental that this paradigm - anti-Blackness, racism and profitizing pain & inequalities - aligns so neatly with capitalism.