Having logical, or indeed even sympathetic, reasons for doing bad things does not excuse doing bad things. This is the entire point, and how history should be studied, because it emphasizes the underlying lessons to be learned. In this thread every attempt to paint the researchers as evil racists is relatively easy to factually rebuke. And it's because they weren't. They easily could have been you or I. And this is why it's so important to study history and actually try to genuinely understand the perspective of bad individuals.
Basically the entirety of evils in human history is people saying 'Okay, I know I'm doing bad things. But I'm a good person and I have very good, exceptional, reasons for doing these bad things. And once this is over we'll have a much better world for everybody, so it's okay in this instance.' And a lot of the times, the logic and rhetoric used is appealing. This is why it's so absolutely important to understand it, study it, and endeavor to never fall into such rationalization ever again. Because after all is said and done, this grand utopia we envision at the end will likely never come to pass, or anything even like it - whether or not we succeed, yet all of these evils done in the name of the pursuit of such absolutely do come to pass.
I think I see the confusion. We're saying that "racist" is a useful description of a type of human thought / behaviour. You seem to think it's a demonising invocation of Godwin's Law that's incompatible with empathy.
One level more meta, though: if, as a society, we treat racist behaviour as inexcusable, that makes it less likely to occur. Treating racists as "reasonable, but mistaken" is actually in the neo-Nazi playbook. (I understand the impulse, though: I used to do it myself, until I realised that I was making up historical "facts" in order to justify the attitudes of racists. I really don't want to believe that some people are bad people… but racism is a choice, a habit; not a mere mistake about the facts. Ignoring that legitimises it.)
The issue is you're not "making up" anything. One group had a syphilis rate of 30%, about an order of magnitude higher than everybody else. Race, to me, is simply another group, and should be treated as such. So imagine if it turned out that blondes had had a syphilis rate an order of magnitude higher than everybody else. Would it have fundamentally changed things? I don't think so. And indeed at such point we would likely have all sorts of colorful quotes about blondes. Is that hairism, or now somehow not a grave offense because it's a different group?
Your abstract point is (mostly) valid, but you keep trying to tie it back to "and therefore that isn't racist". I described it as ¾ disproved by basic observation. You're defending the other ¼, then acting like that justifies the original claims.
I'll assume good faith, and ask: are you aware that you're doing racist propaganda? (I have literally heard these exact arguments, third sentence onwards, from self-professed White Supremacists.)
Please elaborate and tell me what exactly you think I'm defending or not, as opposed to just linking to somebody quoting some Wiki editor. Because otherwise I have no idea what you're saying.
And I couldn't care less who agrees or disagrees with my views. When formulating a view I always engage in the same pattern - look to the falsifiable facts and data on any given issue and come to the conclusion that I think is the most logically and factually well supported. Wherever that leads is what I tend to believe. Others say they do the same of course, but I can't help but notice so few seem people comparably obsessed with reading (or providing) sources on information (and the scarce time it is provided, it often tends to be from the TellMeMyOpinionIsRight.com type sources), which makes me doubt the overall sincerity of most on this.
I'm not sure that answers my question, but whatever - I'll play along. The statement you quoted was written by a Wiki poster, and is most likely false. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of people infected with syphilis did not pursue medical treatment (at least in Georgia). The clinicians for the Tuskegee study had an extremely difficult time even convincing the farmers to allow themselves to be examined when doctors were proactively approaching them. They ultimately required the assistance of an intermediary civilian (trusted by the farmers) to convince them. To suggest that the farmers were largely indifferent (if not averse) to medical treatment is fully justified, and absent some significant evidence to the contrary should be seen as true.
The thing you continue to conspicuously ignore is that it is the behaviors of the clinicians that were wrong, and behaviors are what I think everybody should focus on. Whatever the clinicians thought, said, felt, or whatever else is irrelevant. The race of them, the race of the subjects, and everything else - irrelevant. All that matters is their behavior, which are unjustifiable. Even if every single imaginable bias, prejudice, and everything else were 100% true, it would not make what they did right. And so the real value in the story is looking to put yourselves in their shoes hypothetically, so that you never find yourself in those shoes in reality.
> The statement you quoted was written by a Wiki poster, and is most likely false.
I was being dense. Thanks for pointing that out.
> It is a fact that […]
You're telling a story with the facts, and the conclusions you draw from that story are not necessarily facts. The medical establishment of a particular area often acts as though they are medicine, medical treatment, and that people distrusting them means they distrust medicine – when really, all it might mean is (say) that a group of people willing to run the Tuskegee Syphilis Study give off bad vibes.
> Even if every single imaginable bias, prejudice, and everything else were 100% true, it would not make what they did right.
Yes. Their claimed reasons transparently do not justify their actions; so either they had a weird moral system, or those were post-hoc justifications of a decision they'd already made. However, their stated reasons do reveal that they were racist, and racists often come up with post-hoc justifications for racially-motivated atrocities.
I agree with your last paragraph, in that racism isn't the only moral failure mode that humans exhibit – not the only trap we need to watch out for, lest we stumble –; but I think you're making a mistake in assuming that behaviour is either racist or something else. We can analyse it in many ways, and learn many lessons. (There's an extent to which we're really studying ourselves when we do that… but I digress.) There is no "the real value in the story".
> Their claimed reasons transparently do not justify their actions
This part I disagree with. They do. And that's the point - that bad actions, even if justifiable, do not suddenly become acceptable actions. You can have all the justifications in the world and, even if true, the second you start engaging in bad behavior - you are wrong. The entire point of studying history is see all of these people making justifications. And in many cases those justifications are compelling, logical, and reasonable - yet that does not then make the actions acceptable nonetheless.
Basically the entirety of evils in human history is people saying 'Okay, I know I'm doing bad things. But I'm a good person and I have very good, exceptional, reasons for doing these bad things. And once this is over we'll have a much better world for everybody, so it's okay in this instance.' And a lot of the times, the logic and rhetoric used is appealing. This is why it's so absolutely important to understand it, study it, and endeavor to never fall into such rationalization ever again. Because after all is said and done, this grand utopia we envision at the end will likely never come to pass, or anything even like it - whether or not we succeed, yet all of these evils done in the name of the pursuit of such absolutely do come to pass.