One of the reasons I enjoy Robert Heinlein is that he makes no bones about his belief that certain folks just aren't cut out to do certain things. As I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I am bombarded with spirituality and superstition with a huge dose of ignorance from poorly educated people and it annoyed me to no end. Naturally there are plenty of legitimate reasons for the Lacks' general state of education and I'm not claiming they have no right to privacy because of their mother's involuntary contribution to medical science, but transcribing that ignorance is incredibly embarrassing and only reinforces my latent belief that some folks don't have the right to hold an uninformed opinion.
Although I agree with author Rebecca Skloot's editor that the chapters devoted to the Lacks' personal history be pared down or cut altogether, she paints an intriguing human portrait of the racial undercurrents in the frontier of biotechnology. The fact that her husband was a rake and passed horrible diseases which directly contributed to her developing a virulent form of cancer diminishes the chance that a wealthy white woman would have been the progenitor; had this happened the story wouldn't have been as compelling. With the shadow of the Tuskegee Experiments in the near past, the history of slavery reparationism to fall back on, and a colorful cast of characters to give the story some flavor, a lot of humanity is injected into this atypical magical negro story.
Mysticism is inexorably connected to Henrietta from the opening pages onward. Fateful, often portentous, contradictory actions are referred to by family as acts of Henrietta in the same manner others speak of God and His work. Perhaps its my lapsed Catholicism which never stressed the sort of engaging worship and belief common for the souls of black folks and my general distaste for the spiritual that make me loath to read those passages. I don't mean to knock religion in general: I happen to think Protest-ants have it dead wrong, at least from a humanist perspective, when they claim that man is redeemed by faith alone no matter how loathsome you are as a human being.
I've never read Plato but I'm told he advocated, at least as mental exercise, a benevolent dictatorship which would consider the interests of the people as a whole. Henrietta's cells were taken when medical law was in its infancy and by the time the Lacks' learned of their actual use the infrastructure for the manufacture and use of them was too large and too complex to legitimately sue for damages decades later. Like slavery and slave owners these doctors and scientists (generally) operated in legal and ethical standards of the day. We look back at slavery and wonder how on Earth anyone could be a partied to it and think themselves righteous, just as doctors and researchers lied, mislead, or caused irreparable distress for the Lacks. Comedian Chris Rock claimed that slavery, while certainly wrong, let the descendants of thousands of Africans live in a generally better place than the one they came from; he likened it to an uncle who molested you as a kid but paid your way through college. Without slavery the Lacks' family wouldn't be here and without Henrietta the Magical Negro's cancer cells medical science would have slowed to a relative crawl and many millions more people would have died. Next to all this, the drama of a poor family from Baltimore seems insignificant.
Oops! You lost me with your last sentence, Alex. We can never think of individuals as being insignificant. That opens the door to doing terrible, terrible things "for the greater good."
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, it's always easy to convince ourselves that what we want to do is the right thing. Indeed, you mentioned slavery, and many slave-owners convinced themselves that this was to their slaves' benefit, as well as their own.
Few people think of themselves as villains. From what I've heard, even muggers justify their acts. But to really do evil under the guise of doing good, you must think that individuals are insignificant, compared with the good of all.
Sometimes the end does justify the means, but that's a very dangerous way of thinking. I'm not a libertarian, and I understand that we're social animals. We live together, and often enough, the needs of the group must be paramount. But individuals can never seem insignificant.