The HIV Question

So, I saw the clips. And it looks to me like most of what Jeremiah Wright said was about on-target. Easy to take out of context, and maybe with a little hyperbole thrown in, but for the most part, he's making some important points.

There was one clip I disagreed with, though, which was when Pastor Wright said that he believed the US government had invented the HIV virus to destroy people of color. I don't believe that. But I think I can understand the suspicion of the medical establishment, because as late as 1972 the US Public Health Service conducted experiments on black men by infecting them with syphilis and waiting for them to die of it so they could conduct autopsies. Here's the story about the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment. And a second article here on it. A relevant quote:

In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched.

Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone.