> Please elaborate

Done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40981302

> And I couldn't care less who agrees or disagrees with my views.

Then you aren't introspective enough for this:

> It's only by really understanding the past that we might ever try to hope to avoid repeating it.

to be anything more than an aspiration. (Or, less charitably, an excuse to make racism apologetics seem socially-acceptable.)

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.