The Smithsonian Ethics Education Conference Series- The Tuskegee Experience

Classic scholarship identifies three types of memory in ancient culture. First, there is the more sentimental recall of personally significant moments. Second, there is the passively detached memory of past historical events. A third sense of memory has great significance. This is a type of active remembering wherein the past reinterprets the present in the hope of the future. With this scholarship in mind, this year we remember the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the unethical human research syphilis experiments that were conducted for 40 years in the community of Tuskegee, Alabama. Some citizens today may recall those events with individual remorse. Others may assign these atrocities as tragedies back then and over there, but not possible today. Yet the 2010-2011 revelations of even worse experimentation perpetrated by the same scientists on the poor of Guatemala bring back the Tuskegee Experience forcefully before our eyes. Did Tuskegee occur simply because of poor oversight? Did these tragic experiments occur because of a lack of regulation or law? Perhaps these events, as well as other horrors such as the Holocaust, occurred most fundamentally because of the ever-present possibility of dehumanization and moral objectification of persons. In short, we always live in the fear of human persons tragically being demeaned for the sake of power, domination and gain. Sometimes others are used under a false veneer of progress. How do we respond? This conference will be a significant moment in which to engage in the above-mentioned third type of remembering that scholars call: prophetic memory. We will enter into this educational event as a type of living metaphor. Our purpose will not be to engender shame or guilt. Rather we will maturely enter into the realities of the past so as to re-imagine a deeper sense of human care in ourselves today, and thereby build a future never again marred by a holocaust of any kind. This conference will be a rich moment in time to prevent the worst by promoting the best of who we are and what we can do to protect the dignity and respect that is fundamental to being human.
 
This conference is free and open to the public.
 
For more information or to register, please visit http://angleproof.com/conference/smithsonian/index.php?c_id=21.