Amber Ruffin explains how we got here on COVID skepticism in the Black community
Aux Features Late Night with Seth Meyers
Hey, there’s a COVID vaccine—wait, two COVID vaccines! And you probably can’t get it yet because of, reasons! Still, the medical community has rallied to invent, test, and release a life-saving inoculation in world record time, putting a penciled-in return-to-normal date on our collective calendar—sometime. Still, as Amber Ruffin explained on Friday’s Amber Ruffin Show, not everybody is rushing out to take the vaccine, finding out that they don’t yet qualify to receive it, discovering that the previous administration has left us with no plan whatsoever, and going back inside to wait.
But we kid the criminally negligent former president and his cadre of murderously bumbling accomplices to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Amber wasn’t here to point fingers, either. Oh, wait, yes she was, although not so much at those indifferent dimwits who couldn’t even be bothered to tell people to wear a damn mask, as at an institutional problem that’s seen some third of the Black community express reservations about taking the COVID vaccines if and when they become available. In a segment she calls “How Did We Get Here?,” Ruffin noted that, while it seems inconceivable that a community disproportionately affected by the pandemic wouldn’t be first in line (if such a line existed) to take a proven safe and effective remedy.
After all, it’s not like we’re talking about affluent white people—the main demographic of the so-called anti-vaxxer movement—who cite the likes of noted non-expert and former Singled Out host Jenny McCarthy or that disgraced doctor who’s been discredited everywhere but in the made-up minds of white parents who really want the measles to make a big comeback. As Ruffin put it when discussing America’s long and still-shocking history of medical racism, “Black people aren’t suspicious of the COVID vaccine because we read a book by Jenny McCarthy—a book I can only assume is mostly pictures—we’re suspicious because we’ve read our history.”
And what an all-too-predictable history it is. “Now I know what you’re thinking,” deadpanned Ruffin, “America? Racism? That sounds about right.” And Amber’s right, citing everything from the Tuskegee Study (let’s let Black men die of syphilis without telling them), to enduringly racist medical curricula (Black people’s skin is thicker so they don’t feel as much pain?!), to the fact that Black babies die twice as often as white babies during childbirth, since that whole feel no pain bullshit means that Black women’s pain isn’t taken seriously. And don’t get Ruffin started on the history of gynecology (pioneered on slaves), or the nonconsensual and uncompensated harvesting of cells from Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose tissues are still being used in medicine to this day. Not to mention her story being turned into best-selling books and an HBO movie that also pay no money to Lacks’ family. (“And you know HBO plays that movie every February,” noted Ruffin.)
So, while Ruffin encouraged her fellow Black people to get the vaccine as soon as it finally trickles down to their communities, she also warned those quick to dismiss the concerns of Black Americans. That since Black people in this country are thoroughly aware that, when it comes to public health, they’ve often been seen as dispensable guinea pigs whose agency with regard to their own health is disregarded for the “greater good.” Meaning for white people’s benefit.
Find out the Biden administration’s plans to actually distribute the COVID vaccine and rebuild public trust in the government’s treatment of the virus here.
25 Comments
Serious question for any black commentariat- are you actually scared to take the vaccine because you have read some of the horror stories about black people’s experience in the medical field? Does this extend to other areas? Like would you be afraid to get a lump checked out or go to the ER for a broken arm because they harvested cells from Henrietta Lacks or the invention of gynecology over 150 years ago started with slaves? There’s a bit of cheekiness in that last question but to be fair, that is the express claim.
Am also skeptical of this causality given that 1) the vaccine is being used on everybody, 2) anti-vaccination is not predominantly “black”. Sounds more like a “by the way”, or even a “there would be this reason also”, than a genuine sociological explanation.But again, my own skin is rather on the sickly-livid side of the spectrum, so what do I know. Also, not certain that darker-skinned AV commentators would know much much more. I assume AVClub (and The Root) perusers of all colors to be more similar to each others than to the anti-vaxxers of their respective skin complexions…
Livid means dark blue. If you are heavily bruised, that sounds like an entirely different concern.
Ah. I was just smurfing that it smurfed the same thing in english as in.
I also find it annoying how white anti-vaxxers are white people influenced by privilege while black anti-vaxxers are apparently influenced by fear. For starters, lots of white anti vaxxers are clearly just fucking idiots and not necessarily Jessica McCarthy types, and meanwhile lots of black people have the same access to social media as white people and there’s no reason they can’t also be influenced by nonsense. It’s almost like there’s a political agenda to try and explain why it’s not black people’s fault for being anti vaxxers which is just silly.
A lot of older anti-vaxxer’s are that way because of ththe 1976 Swine Flu vaccine. It was a cluster fuck that turned a bunch of people off vaccines and those people passed along that same distrust to their offspring.
Black people aren’t anti-vax on the whole. We get our kids vax’d like everyone else. Many, like myself get flu shots every year (when we remember) too. But having been experimental guinea pigs without our consent, having our best interests NEVER being foremost in the medical estsblishment’s interests, we’re not eager to be First Adopters for some bullshit cooked up in less than a year. And disabuse yourself of your preconceived notion about what Black people know and don’t. What you may have seen as our silent observation of situations, our impassive faces when management rolls out new procedures, our reluctance to scurry to the New! Fantastic! stuff being marketed is based in an old survival technique from slavery. We know shit quietly. Which is why whites instinctively ‘Canary In The Coal Mine’ us trying to find out what we’re doing so they can steal it.If you’re not sure this Black woman M.B.A. would ‘know more than you’, rest assured that I do. Then take out your 12th gen iPhone (be sure to hold it up to your ear), call & ask your aunts if any of them had a Thalidomide baby born with flippers for arms/legs that they hid in a home until it died – cuz they couldn’t stand morning sickness that women have had since time immemorial. Then call your tRump-voting but anti-government & science, Medicare-receiving parents and ask if they stockpiled Zantac cuz they ‘never had any problems’. Then when your ‘smart’ wife who was bulimic/anorexic from middle school, ate ‘macro’ supplements ordered from the former Soviet bloc, took every club drug any stranger offered her at a rave (cuz dealers never give untested formulations away free) can’t get pregnant or keeps miscarrying, maybe rethink all that you ‘know’.
The thing is, I really don’t get this “we” and “our”. To put it in reverse, I don’t feel that I know more about “white people” than you do.
Amber lays it all out pretty well, I don’t know why you need black commenters to do more work for you, when you could google that shit and do your homework first. Although Feminist on Fire has laid it all out pretty nicely for you.Also, medical racism is not just what happened 150 years ago, it’s an ongoing issue
So black people are a hive mind? One black person comes up with a theory and it’s forbidden to ask other black people if they agree? Interesting. And for some reason it’s only white people who ever throw down opinions like this. Rather than ask black people their opinion I should do research to understand why one black persons opinion is correct. Again, interesting thesis.
It’s not one black person, as again, a simple google search would tell you. And it’s not forbidden, it’s just douchey and arrogant to demand that black people explain it to you, again, when a simple google search will bring up many, many, black people who have already explained. it. And yes, you should do the research, which is a simple google search, to understand why many black people have suffered and continue to suffer discrimination at the hands of the medical establishment and why the medical community must take the initiative to end that discrimination and earn the trust of the people who have suffered at their hands.
Im not demanding black people do anything. Unlike you I’m giving them agency to express their own opinions. You’re the one insisting that it’s forbidden for me to ask their opinion, in favor of simply deciding one particular view point is right. You’re the cliche of the white savior. Black people don’t need your protection. They are allowed to express their own opinions. If one tells me I’m an asshole for asking their opinion on the topic I’ll listen. But you have no right to speak for black people by gatekeeping the questions white people are allowed to ask them. Sorry dude.
Again, I have never, not even once, forbidden you from asking their opinion. What have done is call out your entitlement for asking that black people stop whatever they are doing and justify their existence to save you from listening to what has already been explained to you, multiple times, and from doing a simple google search to answer your question. I am not gatekeeping, when a simple google search will answer your questions, when just looking at the video will also answer them. But you don’t want your questions answered, which a simple google search will do. You want to condescend to black people who have legitimate, ongoing reasons for how they engage with the medical establishment. It’s not gatekeeping when you are too fucking lazy to walk through an open door.
“What have done is call out your entitlement for asking that black people stop whatever they are doing and justify their existence to save you from listening to what has already been explained to you”This seems like a pretty hefty straw man argument, since he’s never asked black people do anything of the sort, nor has he denied racism in the medical field (you keep posting videos as if proving racism in the medical field proves its why most black people don’t want the vaccine, as opposed to them being manipulated by the same anti-vax garbage that white people are). All he’s doing is asking black people if their concern over the vaccine is related to racism in the medical field. He’s just wondering, and its sort of intriguing that you find so much offence, privilege, and racism in a white person opening a direct dialogue with black people. Let’s be honest about what is happening here. You really believe what Amber is saying and so you’re trying to create a “default win” scenario where what you believe must stand as the truth because to even open the floor to inquiry about the thesis is racist and the embodiment of privilege. I don’t expect you’ll actually see it that way, because people like you just know you’re right and therefore even asking questions is wrong.
He does make a fair comment. He’s asking black people for their opinion. They can freely give it or, if they believe its asking them to do work they shouldn’t have to do, they can freely withhold it. What you’re actually saying is that he has to accept this one person’s opinion as true and do his own research to convince himself that it’s true. But why shouldn’t he ask black people their opinion? Shouldn’t dialogue and the exploration of truth be the foundation of a rational and inclusive society?
So the same percentage of blacks & whites both dont want the vaccine. But with blacks its because of racism?
Oh, I can tell you why Black people are distrustful of the vaccine! Because we don’t need to read history books; we live with systemic, inatitutionalized racism that tells us that our bodies and lives are never even considered partially valuable – unless they’re in service to whites. Because history books are written by the killers, who desperately want to have their kidnapping, raping, child-stealing, lying by law, torturing and killing to be erased and their ill-gotten gains to be valorized as nation-building. We pass down information: verbally.Like: my grandfather’s generation sending someone to sit in the graveyard for week or two so whites don’t steal our bodies for medical schools – everyday occurrence! Alabama, 1970s.Or 1967 when Viet Nam draft numbers were calling too many white boys, my father (age 16) was rousted by cops on old Reconstruction ‘continue to get free Black labor’ laws. Because Blacks on the 40-50s weren’t allowed in hospitals and born at home, he had no state birth certificate, only a midwife report. Judge: you’re tall so I don’t believe your mother and father – jail for loitering or Viet Nam. He did 2 tours. Proof: if Bruce Springsteen sung about it happening to whites in BITU, you KNOW they did it to Blacks.Like: Former athlete uncles who can’t get pain meds for verified knee blowouts but white people can get hundreds of opioid pills for hangnails. January 2021Like: Highly-paid studies of medications for the 1-in-a billion diseases white people get (watch any local news’ 6:25 pm showcase of kids born with some crazy rare shit holding fundraisers) but no pay for high blood pressure meds studies which are super-common and prevalent condition among many types of people but is especially difficult to manage in Blacks. And let no one gloss over Henrietta Lacks’ case that it’s only about using her extraordinary cells without compensation. Doctors, who vow to do no harm, tortured that woman! Ignored her pain, subjected her radiation DAILY such that her stomach turned black! Did gynecological stuff to her that left her unable to walk! I can’t remember all the ways the medical establishment Marquis de Sade’d and documented how they agonized that woman because, reader that I am, I couldn’t read past the first ~half of the book.So hell naw! We have o way of knowing how they didn’t account for our bio-makeup when designing the vax (cuz nobody CONSIDERS Black people first, second or 15th!). No way of knowing there’s actually vaccine in those vials and not saline cuz THAT’s been done before. So, here’s a virus that was first shown to be mostly fatal to Blacks and POC, that MOST whites SHOWED (including a clearly racist President that half the country loved) they didn’t care about, lied and blatantly ignored. And Blacks are supposed to believe that scientists funded by that the same gov’t that was ok with separating brown infants from their mothers, putting them in cages and allowing pedophiles with guns to handle, were secretly, diligently working to save Black Lives like they Matter?! And they finished in 10 months?!I know commenters are only pretending with theoretical questions and just want to posit that Blacks are too dumb to save our own lives. The past four years have removed any veil from Black eyes that white people care about travesties done to us. At worst you’re racists who are alright with our murders in broad daylight or bed before cameras; at best, you are silently complicit in Everything that reduces our numbers to maintain white hegemony so you can drink at full bars, sweat in white gyms, and party with each other and pretend it’s about the economy. I only responded to show everyone else here just how, like QAnon and tRump supporters, you’ve been concertedly and consistently lied to your whole lives, in every conceivable way, about everything you think you know about Black people. We keep ‘making everything about race’…cuz it IS and it screws us.
Have you heard a lot of racists urging black people to get the vaccine?
I appreciate the response. I got in shit for even daring to ask your opinion but this is precisely what I was curious about – the actual opinion of a regular person and not some entertainer.
Count yourself lucky; she dismissed my response to her post. Also, based on my recent interactions with brilliantmistake I offer my sympathy on having to go through the same experience.
She’s everything that makes me feel alienated from the modern progressive movement. Someone comes up with a narrative that seems to conveniently align with a political stance (ie anti-vaxxers are nefarious idiots unless black in which case they’re rational actors) and any attempt to even ask questions is framed as victimizing the community further. They honestly have no conception that attacking the mere act of wanting information makes people more skeptical since nothing piques curiosity like forbidden questions.
In my recent experience interacting with certain posters(including brilliantmistake), they consider any question they don’t like to be “JAQing off.”
If it weren’t for this post, I wouldn’t have learned that most white Americans don’t wear masks! So glad I got that new, imaginationland fact dropped on me!
Y’know, if you keep frigging yourself off so hard you’re gonna fuse your pussy shut.
Amber Ruffin: “We should do a segment on vaccine hesitancy among the black community”.Producer: “Great idea. It’s important we do our bit to encourage as many black people as possible to take the vaccine.”Ruffin: “Totally! But only for about ten seconds. We should use the rest of the segment to undermine black people’s trust in doctors. Maybe we can even create a few more black anti-vaxxers!”Producer: “Why?”Ruffin: “Because fuck you. That’s why” *giggles adorably*