Summary Of Race And Sexuality Through The Microscope By Lisa Weasel

Guidelines surrounding taking samples of human tissue for research have changed greatly, “…the NIH now has “very stringent guidelines” requiring consent for any tissues collected for their banks.”(Skloot 780). No matter who the person is or what race they are, all people are to be treated the same and must give consent for all samples. This does not mean that all race issues are gone though. This does not mean that doctors are taking samples of human tissues without consent, the issue is in general health care. It is not a secret that because of this, there are more health issues in minority groups, “…blacks and other minority groups in the U.S. experience more illness, worse outcomes, and premature death compared with whites.” (Tello 1). Henrietta would have suffered a great deal less and would have had much better care, but it is possible that she would have encountered some inequalities, even still, it would be nothing compared to what she lived

The truth is the doctors that took Henrietta’s cells were doing it for a good cause. They didn’t do it to ruin her and her family’s life, they did it to help people and save lives. There were no laws prohibiting the taking of one’s cells, in fact in a later Supreme Court of California ruling, it was actually defended. When tissues are removed from your body, with or without consent, any claim to ownership

In Deborah E. McDowell’s essay Black Female Sexuality in Passing she writes about the sexual repression of women seen in Nella Larsen‘s writings during the Harlem Renaissance, where black women had difficulty expressing their sexuality. In her essay, she writes about topics affecting the sexuality of women such as, religion, marriage, and male dominated societies. In Toni Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif” there are examples of women who struggle to express their sexuality. The people in society judge women based off their appearance, and society holds back women from expressing themselves due to society wanting them to dress/act a certain way.

The scientific community is culpable of viewing Henrietta Lacks as an abstraction rather than a human being in that they disregarded her right to privacy in extracting her cells

For this week’s assignment I am to discuss ethical principles, specifically the ethical principles that were violated during the research in regards to Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was a wife and a mother of five. She was a black tobacco farmer and was a native of rural southern Virginia but a resident of Turner Station in Dundalk, MD. Henrietta had mentioned to family that she had felt a “knot” inside her while pregnant with her fifth child but her family just assumed that it was due to the pregnancy. After giving birth, Henrietta started bleeding abnormally and profusely. Her local doctor tested her for syphilis, which

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a true story of a poor, Southern African-American tobacco farmer who died in 1951 at the very young age of 31 years old from cervical cancer. Little did she know that cells harvested from her tumor, which were obtained without her consent have lived on and on and became one of the most important tools in medicine today. Despite Henrietta’s story being full of legal and ethical issues, the story was one filled with success and anguish. Success for science as her cells served as advancement in medical research and development; yet was sorrowful for Henrietta and her family. This story occurred during a time of segregation in the United States, when Henrietta Lacks believed she

The treatment of African Americans in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks demonstrates the lack of ethics in the United States health care system during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the impression that medical doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital were solely injecting radium treatment for cervical cancer, Henrietta Lacks laid on the surgical bed. During this procedure Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr. shaved two pieces of tissue from her vagina, one from a healthy cervical tissue and one from the cancerous tumor, without Henrietta’s prior knowledge. After recovering from her surgery Henrietta exited the door marked, “Blacks Only,” the door that signified the separation between White and African-American patients. Had Henrietta been White, would the

Racism is immortal just like Henrietta’s cells it will always be around. People would do anything to be the first to discover something. At the end of the day it’s all about the money. The Mississippi appendectomies and the Tuskegee experiments were similar in the way that the government forced treatment upon minorities without consent. Henrietta’s case was different than Mississippi and Tuskegee because the doctor in Johns Hopkins didn’t experiment on her actual body but on her cells without consent. Henrietta’s case the Tuskegee experiments and the Mississippi Appendectomies are all different cases in different locations but serve the same purpose which is to take advantage of poor and uneducated minorities to

Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, begins with a quote from World War II concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own source of anguish” (Wiesel qtd. in Skloot n. pag.). This quote serves as a preview of the book and its underlying moral purposes, as Henrietta Lacks and her family are continually treated as objects without rights to their privacy and without regards to their worth or feelings. The dehumanization of the Lacks family by the media and scientific community not only resulted in consequences for the family, but influenced society, as well.

Scientist used A Henrietta Lacks for great vaccines like HIV but did you know that they didn’t get permission to do it? Science did abuse Henrietta Lacks because they used her cells without her permission .The scientist asked her family if they could use her cells for medicines and vaccines but got denied and still used her cells. The scientist should have given her family some of the profits for the vaccines still if they didn’t say yes or had an agreement. The first reason why scientist abused Henrietta Lacks is, since she was black scientist thought the media wouldn’t care about the families decision on using her cells.”Ebony quoted Henrietta’s husband saying, “All I remember is that she had this disease, and right after she died they called

It clearly obvious that to George Guy- the man who discovered HeLa cells- Henrietta was the same black women she was before she died and after she died. During this period of time, there were no set laws regarding that a patient must give permission or be notified if they cells were extracted from them. Even so, being African American and a woman during this extremely racist time period there was guarantee that she would even be told or lied to, similar to the 600 African Americans who were involved in the Tuskegee syphilis experimentation who were actually lied to.

The undertones of gender and race in scientific novels, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Rebecca Skloot’s Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, demonstrate that elements of Victorian gender norms and racial inequality still existed in the realm of science in the 20th century. Rachel Carson’s tenacity to break these historic gender norm, in order to warn the public of the dangers of pesticides, began to shatter the traditional barriers of women in science. However, the story of Henrietta Lacks serves as an example of how women, especially minority women, are still seen as lesser in the scientific field.

An intersectional approach is an approach which seeks to demonstrate how race, class, gender and sexuality make certain experiences different. Intersectionality is the overlapping of social categories such as race, class, gender and sexuality that leads to further discrimination against a certain individual or group. To take an intersectional approach to understand race, class, gender and sexuality, is to consider hardships not as a similar element for all individuals without regards to race, but instead consider where in a specific hardship different races, genders, classes and sexualities are affected different. According to Crenshaw, “many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the woman race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (Crenshaw, 357). Crenshaw explains that the personal experiences of women of color cannot be fully understood by looking at race or gender discrimination as two separate factors, but in fact can be understood if both aspects are looked at together. When race and gender are examined separately, this causes for women of color to be “erased”. Crenshaw says, “ And so, when the practices expound identity as “woman” or “person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate

Scientific racism has been used to oppress, enslave and to justify torture. In my essay I will explore how scientific racism has been used to detriment the health of women of colour. Throughout history women of colour have been experimented upon, sexualized and reproductively abused with scientific racism as justification or the underlying premise for the thought behind this abuse. I will explore this idea using examples throughout various periods of history, as well I will show the contemporary effects.

Similar to the author Kimberle Crenshaw, the author of “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” I would like to start my critical review essay by mentioning the Black feminist studies book entitled “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.” Having this idea of problematic predisposition to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive entities in mind, I would like to review Angela Davis’s book entitled “Women, Race, and Class”, and compare my findings to Kimberle Crenshaw’s groundbreaking article that we have read in class, where she famously terms the idea of “intersectionality.” I will start with the examination of similarities between Davis’s and Crenshaw’s arguments regarding the erasure of the Black women’s experiences in social sciences and feminist writings, and will also point out the additional consideration of class that Davis brings to the idea of intersectionality of race and gender initially suggested by Crenshaw, and further discuss the triple discrimination that Black women face on the fronts of race, gender, and class. My main aim in the review of the two author’s texts is to reveal the prevalent problematic notion in Black societies of viewing race implicitly gendered as male, and recognizing gender mainly from the white women’s standpoint.