ANTI BLACK

These days we like to believe that apartheid regimes donot exist in what we would call the developed world.But shocking stories of racial hatred abound from the areasof the world that we would think of as being most developed.It is in these areas that racism becomes most foreboding,because the technology is there to implement it.The possible manufacturing of AIDS is one manifestation,and possibly the most appalling one at that, but it is not theonly one.Many African-Americans believe that Charles Drew,the black Washington physician whose pioneering workwith blood plasma saved thousands of lives, died after acar accident because he was denied entry into a whitesonlyhospital. A man whose work has benefited medicinefor all races died because of racial prejudice.While incidents such as this are shocking, the one thingthat can be said in their favor is that they make no pretenseat what they are setting out to do. What perhaps is evenmore shocking are the reports of conspiracies with the solepurpose of wiping out the black population in America.Sales of Tropical Fantasy, a soft drink produced by a firm employing large numbers of ethnic minorities, fell dramaticallyafter mysterious leaflets appeared in black areaswarning that the drink was actually a product of the KuKlux Klan and that it contained chemicals to sterilize blackmen. Similar allegations arose over the Church’s FriedChicken chain and the Snapple soft drinks. While theAIDS virus has escalated out of all possible control, itwould seem that there are other, more small-scale projectstargeting the same victims.