OPERATOR: Hello.
MORRIS: Yes, um, my name is Thomas L. Morris Jr., I’m at 4244 Suitland Road in the [mumble] apartment complex, apartment 201.
OPERATOR: And what’s the problem?
MORRIS: My breathing is very, very labored.
OPERATOR: How old are you?
MORRIS: Um, fifty-five.
MORRIS: Ah, I, I don’t know if I have been, but I suspect that I might have been exposed to anthrax.1
Two Black postal workers, Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen, died of inhalation anthrax on October 21, 2001. Their deaths have largely receded from public memory. Although this event was extraordinary, attending to it provides a valuable focal point for consideration of political and medical systems that routinely fail to provide adequate care to African Americans.2
These postal workers’ deaths took place in a defining moment in U.S. history, making the case a fitting one with which to open this book focused on racism and health in the twenty-first century. In both academic and broader public discussions of African American distrust of medical providers, it is conventional to hearken back to the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study of 1932–72, a U.S. Public Health Service study of the natural course of untreated syphilis that continued long after treatment that could have cured the men was discovered.3 Yet even as Tuskegee stands as a landmark breach of clinical research ethics, we need not look so far back to find poignant examples of denial of life-saving medical care. Indeed, although references to Tuskegee were a recurring theme in focus groups held with Black postal workers in D.C. after the anthrax attacks,4 distrust is not a lingering legacy but a constantly re-created present. Although my focus in this chapter is on health care in a crisis rather than on clinical research, my account is aligned with the important intervention from sociologist Ruha Benjamin about the roots of African American distrust of medical research: Benjamin “challenges the conventional focus on ‘African-American distrust’ as a set of attitudes grounded in collective memories of past abuses and projected on to current initiatives, by examining the sociality of distrust produced daily in the clinic and reinforced in broader politics of health investment.”5
In this chapter, I focus on three intertwined elements: the justifiable suspicion among African Americans that neither the state nor the medical system prioritizes their care; the reluctance to recognize Black suffering among officials, physicians, and mainstream media; and how this event—which happened so soon after September 11, 2001—already revealed as a lie the then-powerful narrative that in the post–September 11 world, Americans were “all in this together.”
In October 2001, four letters containing anthrax were mailed by an unknown perpetrator: two were mailed to journalists, and two were mailed to senators. The anthrax-containing letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle was processed at the Brentwood Postal Facility in Northeast Washington, D.C., on October 11, 2001. When it was opened by an intern four days later, on October 15, the Capitol building was immediately evacuated, and all who worked there were given the broad-spectrum antibiotic drug Cipro as a precaution and then were subject to testing before continuing on the longer course of the antibiotic if necessary. The entire Capitol building was thoroughly cleaned while evacuated.
Meanwhile, unknown to anyone at the time, anthrax contamination from that letter remained at the Brentwood Postal Facility, whose employees were told they were not at risk and should continue working. The disease was incubating in at least four postal workers. One of them, Joseph Curseen, went to the emergency room on October 16 complaining of flu-like symptoms, suspecting the cause might have been food poisoning. He was treated for dehydration and nausea and sent away without being tested for anthrax. After collapsing on October 21, he returned to the hospital and died there the next day. Another postal worker, Thomas Morris, went to a primary care doctor on October 18 complaining of flu-like symptoms and informing the doctor that he believed he had been exposed to anthrax. His doctor took a swab but diagnosed it as a flu virus and sent Morris away with advice to take Tylenol for achiness. Morris was never informed of the results of that swab. Three days later, before dawn on October 21, still more ill, he made a call to 911 and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. He died there eleven hours later.
One of the infected workers who would survive, Leroy Richmond, sought treatment on October 19 for his flu-like symptoms first from the Brentwood facility nurse, who told him he had a low-grade fever but nothing to worry about. The doctor at his health maintenance organization center likewise told him that he did not seem very sick. Continuing on to the emergency room, his case was not initially seen as major, but he insisted on staying. When the attending physician came on duty, she immediately began treating him for anthrax pending outcome of his tests. Richmond’s daughter acted as his advocate throughout the four-week treatment, double-checking his care with a physician she knew personally. The treatment was successful, and Richmond was released from the hospital on November 13.6
As of this writing in 2020, there is still no definitive answer as to who perpetrated the attacks. Writing five years after the attacks in 2006, Senator Daschle himself lamented that the investigation’s trail had “gone cold” and that the public health infrastructure remained inadequate to the task of dealing with future attacks.7 Among postal workers reflecting on that five-year anniversary, desires for forgiveness and healing remained intertwined with bitterness and a sense of ongoing vulnerability.8 The case shows no sign of closing.
But let’s return to October 2001.
MORRIS: But I am—my breathing is labored and my chest feels constricted. Um, I am getting air, but to get up and walk and what have you, I feel like I might just pass out and stuff if I stand up too long, so I’m just chillin’.
OPERATOR: OK, which post office do you work at?
MORRIS: This is the post office downtown, um, Brentwood Road, Washington, D.C., post office. [pause] There was, ah, a woman found an envelope, and I was in the vicinity. It had powder in it. They never let us know whether the thing had anthrax or not. They never, ah, treated the people who were around this particular individual and the supervisor who handled the envelope. Ah, so I don’t know if it is or not. I’m just, I haven’t been able to find out, I’ve been calling. But the symptoms that I’ve had are what was described to me in a letter they put out, almost to a tee. Except I haven’t had any vomiting, except just until a few minutes ago. I’m not bleeding, and I don’t have diarrhea. The doctor thought that it was just a virus or something, so we went with that and I was taking Tylenol for the achiness. Except the shortness of breath now, I don’t know, that’s consistent with the, with the anthrax.
OPERATOR: OK, you weren’t the one that handled the envelope, it was somebody else?
MORRIS: No, I didn’t handle it, but I was in the vicinity.
OPERATOR: OK, and do you know what they did with the envelope?
MORRIS: I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. I couldn’t even find out if the stuff was or wasn’t. I was told that it wasn’t, but I have a tendency not to believe these people.
Most media attention to these men’s deaths at the time was focused on the poignant disparity of treatment on a macrocosmic level: while anthrax’s threat to congressional workers was if anything overaddressed, the threat to postal workers was denied without investigation until men died. At Capitol Hill, even the dogs were tested and treated,9 while at the Brentwood Postal Facility, officials went on the assessment of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that postal workers were safe.10 As the Baltimore Sun put it after the postal workers’ deaths, “postal employees angrily questioned why they had been working in an anthrax hot zone when Capitol Hill was in the process of shutting down. Some wondered whether decisions favored the powerful: well-heeled congressional staff were tested but working-class mail carriers were not.”11
At the Capitol, officials erred on the side of caution, whereas postal workers were repeatedly told that there was nothing to worry about. Although it was not a single actor who made the decision to close the Capitol but not the post office—the former decision was made by the attending physician of the U.S. Capitol, while the latter decision was made by the U.S. Postal Service in consultation with the CDC—from the perspective of people at risk, such a highly visible contrast was galling.12 Several postal workers pointed out the contradiction, among them Vanessa Slaughter: “With Congress, they shut them down, had them tested, didn’t let them go back to work. But they didn’t do anything for us. We should have been tested a long time ago. Instead they just said: ‘Y’all will be all right.’”13 U.S. homeland security advisor Tom Ridge answered the concern with unambiguously class-conscious language, saying that health officials “weren’t looking at the collar of their shirts, whether it was a white-collar or a blue-collar challenge.”14
While postal workers often do in fact wear blue shirts as part of their uniforms, the focus on class in the mainstream press coverage reveals only part of the story. Ignored in that coverage is both the racial character of the Postal Service and the relative class privilege these men had vis-à-vis much of the Black community, particularly of Washington, D.C. As Wiley Hall wrote in the Washington Afro-American, “it is a little ironic to find postal employees among the ranks of the little people. I am a native of Washington. I grew up at a time when postal employees ranked among the most respected members of the community, along with doctors, teachers, undertakers, and military officers. Postal employees had a steady income with generous benefits. They owned their homes. They sent their children to college. They served as deacons in the church.”15
The Postal Service has long played an important role as an employment opportunity for African Americans. For decades, the Postal Service was the only federal employer that employed African Americans, and at the turn of the twenty-first century, it remained the largest civilian employer of African Americans.16 Frances Beal of the Black Radical Congress was among those who underscored the particular racial character of the Postal Service, particularly in Washington, D.C., in observing the response to the anthrax attacks. Racism in the private sector has historically meant that many Blacks with master’s and even doctoral degrees have turned to jobs at the Postal Service as a “fallback,” and Beal writes that “many union members are convinced that the racial composition of the workers at risk plays a part in the casual attitude of the quasi-federal postal service toward the workers’ health and safety.”17
In the Black press at the time, several writers noted their own families’ experiences in discussing the role that the post office has played in employing relatively privileged African Americans.18 At ESPN.com, Ralph Wiley wrote to this point with poignant humor referencing the movie Hollywood Shuffle, in which Black actors who refuse stereotyped roles console themselves with the mantra “There’s always work at the post office.” Wiley draws a further connection to professional sports as he plays off that line:
“There’s always work at the Post Office.” That was a line from the movie “Hollywood Shuffle.” Yeah. Dangerous work.
You can be a big enough, good enough athlete to make the NFL, be hospitalized with a chest contusion, collapsed lung, or bruised sternum, unable to draw breath without pain. Or you can learn the sorting scheme, work at the P.O., end up anthraxed, hospitalized, unable to draw breath without pain.
Wiley also underscores the connection these postal workers had with D.C.’s mayor, who was vociferously denying that any bias was involved in the response to anthrax:
The mayor of Washington is a Wally Cox act-alike named Anthony Williams, as Ivy-educated, bow-tied, and accountantly as all-get-out. Both his parents worked their entire careers at the post office. Raised eight kids doing it.
And Wiley concludes with what he himself calls “old jokes, dead jokes, stale jokes”:
“What do you call the white man in a huddle with 10 black men? Quarterback.”
“What do you call a white man ordering 10,000 black people carrying bags? Postmaster.”19
The community so overrepresented in post offices across the country is especially overrepresented in Washington, D.C., with its particularly stark racial stratification. According to one estimate, 92 percent of the employees at the Brentwood Postal Facility at the time were Black.20
The class character of the workers at the Brentwood facility cannot be divorced from their race. Much of the literature about racial disparities in health care in the post–civil rights era focuses on poverty and lack of education21 or failure among African Americans to seek care.22 But these men were not in poverty, and, complete with health insurance, they did seek care. To the extent that they were working class, they were so also in its positive sense—employed and nonpoor, relatively well educated and well compensated compared with most African Americans. Curseen even owned his own home and was active in that quintessentially middle-class type of club, the homeowners association.23 Both were natives of the District, and both had moved out to the middle-class Black community of Prince Georges County, Maryland. Curseen was a college graduate,24 and Morris was well informed enough to be alert to the signs of anthrax. But that information was not enough.
OPERATOR: And did you tell your doctor that this is what happened?
MORRIS: Huh?
OPERATOR: Did you tell the doctor?
MORRIS: Yes, I did. But he said that he didn’t think that it was that. He thought that it was probably a virus or something.
OPERATOR: I’m going to get the call into the ambulance.
[long pause; Morris breathes laboriously]
Given that the postal workers were not systematically given testing and treatment by their governmental employers, there remains another layer that I have not seen explored in the mainstream or scholarly media. Setting aside the fact that the state did not initiate testing and treatment for these men, why were their own efforts to seek it out also unsuccessful? The failures of medical health care at the level of the physicians these men sought out remains to be explored, and race is implicated in this failure as well.
Concern about misuse of antibiotics was, evidently, something officials and physicians considered particularly risky when it came to Black postal workers. Responding to criticism after Morris and Curseen died, Dr. Mitch Cohen of the CDC said, “There is a risk in prophylaxis when it is not necessary. One of our basic goals is to identify who is at risk. Previous investigations in Florida and New York did not identify that the postal workers were at risk.” However, according to the same report, “On Capitol Hill, more that 3,000 people were readily given Cipro in the two days after Daschle’s letter was opened. Some of the people lining up to get tested and receive the antibiotic said they had not been in the building where the anthrax spilled but simply wanted the medication for reassurance.”25 In the weeks that followed, the governmental medical system had given up any pretense of trying to prevent misuse of antibiotics and showered postal workers with the drugs without providing universal testing.26 D.C.’s top health official, Ivan Walks, had clearly disregarded concern for conservative use of antibiotics when he said on October 23 that “We do not need to do further testing, but we do need to treat quickly.”27
In that tumultuous fall of 2001, I was a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and I personally knew several (white) worry warts who at the height of the general anxiety about anthrax had their doctors prescribe them a bit of Cipro “just in case,” and the letters page of the New York Times included many such reports throughout October and November. As a middle-class white woman quite comfortable with and demanding of doctors (and who has even had Cipro prescribed to me in the past), I am sure that I could have acquired Cipro had I sought it out.28 At a contemporaneous “Technology and Self” luncheon organized by MIT professor Sherry Turkle to discuss pharmacology and identity (RxID) with a Pfizer middle manager, the speaker mentioned that “anyone in this room could get a prescription for Cipro if they wanted.” (There were, as is common at events of this sort at MIT, no Black people in the room.) At the time of that talk, I didn’t have the chance to ask, if these drugs are so easy for us to access, why couldn’t these postal workers get the drugs they needed in time?
Here, there is a connection to racial profiling in health care, in particular as to whether African Americans are believed by physicians—both to be really sick and to be sufficiently treatment compliant. On one hand, African Americans are often stereotyped as “drug-seeking” and differentially denied medicines for pain, among other conditions.29 On the other hand, health care providers are less likely to provide optimal treatment for African Americans on the basis of stereotypes that these patients will not be compliant anyway.30 The anthrax attack postal worker survivor, Leroy Richmond, has told his story of surviving anthrax as one of having to fight to be believed by doctors.31 Richmond credits his survival to his skepticism, and that quality does seem to be what set Richmond apart from his deceased coworkers (and friends). Curseen and Morris either could not or did not question their physicians.
OPERATOR: Do you know when?
MORRIS: It was last, what, last Saturday a week ago, last Saturday morning at work. I work for the Postal Service. I’ve been to the doctor. Ah, I went to the doctor Thursday, he took a culture, but he never got back to me with the results. I guess there was some hang-up over the weekend, I’m not sure. But in the meantime, I went through a achiness and headachiness. This started Tuesday. Now I’m having difficulty breathing, and just to move any distance, I feel like I’m going to pass out. I’m here at the house, my wife is here, I’m on the couch.
Some editorials have operated on the assumption that believing public officials is what led to the deaths of Curseen and Morris. For example, an angry editorial titled “So-Called Little People Get Left Out of Loop” in the Buffalo News read, “For the record, the two workers who believed [Postmaster General] Potter and [CDC director] Koplan were named Joseph P. Curseen, Jr. and Thomas L. Morris Jr.”32 But in fact only Curseen seems to have believed what officials told him; Morris suspected his bosses were not being honest.
However, Morris’s case shows that it is not enough to be skeptical of officials wherever they are in that chain of command—CDC, postmaster general, or postal supervisors—that decided that postal workers as a group did not need testing and treatment; a Black man seeking adequate health care needs also to be skeptical of his doctor. In his 911 call made on day 5 of his illness and just eleven hours before his death, Morris described his earlier attempts to seek treatment. As he explained to the 911 operator, Morris had believed he had been exposed to anthrax at his job, and he had told his doctor that when he sought out his care promptly upon becoming ill. However, rather than providing Morris with antibiotics pending the results of the test for anthrax, the doctor told Morris that he had the flu and sent him home with Tylenol.
In the 911 call, Morris expressed his skepticism toward his governmental employers, saying of a suspicious substance found shortly before he became ill, “I was told that it wasn’t [anthrax], but I have a tendency not to believe these people.”33 However, he may have believed his doctor for far too long. “The doctor thought that it was just a virus or something, so we went with that, and I was taking Tylenol for the achiness.” Morris sounds both more team oriented and more trusting when speaking about his relationship with his doctor than when speaking of his employers; Morris seems to have accepted the doctor’s assessment of his condition as his own. Speaking on behalf of Morris’s son, lawyer Jimmy Bell pointed out, “He informed his physician right up front that he believed that he was exposed to anthrax. He believed his doctor. You’re not going to question your physician. When he tells you what it is, that’s what it is.”34
The doctor displayed considerable incompetence, failing to get the results of the swab. But Morris still seemed deferential to him, rather than angry: “I guess there was some hang-up over the weekend.”35
The medical literature on the case omits the fact that Morris had informed his doctor of his suspicions of anthrax on his initial visit. An authorial team of several physicians, led by physicians affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association detailing the cases of Curseen and Morris, respectively:
Both patients in this report sought medical care for apparently mild, nonspecific illnesses and were sent home. Only after the news media reported cases of inhalational anthrax involving 2 postal workers from the local mail facility did these patients’ physicians consider the possibility that they could have inhalational anthrax. At that point, the patients had been ill for 7 days (patient 1) and 5 days (patient 2).36
In this rendering, the concerns of a sick patient are not something that affects the possibilities that a physician considers. And yet this dismissal is fundamental to why Morris in particular did not survive. What made Curseen and Morris vulnerable, then, was the dismissive attitude not only of the state but also of their doctors. Skepticism toward doctors is what differentiated the case of a survivor, Leroy Richmond. The New York Times never published a comprehensive article analyzing the cases of all the anthrax-affected postal workers, but it did profile Richmond, describing him as the one that “wouldn’t take no for an answer”:
“When the doctor said, ‘I hear a little wheezing, but it’s nothing to be concerned about,’ I’m thinking, ‘Well, he’s the doctor, but I just don’t believe him,’” he said. . . .
Mr. Richmond said he has since come to conclude that the difference between living and dying on those pivotal few days was whether or not you believed what you were told. The two men who died, Joseph P. Curseen Jr. and Thomas L. Morris Jr., both saw doctors and were sent home. Mr. Richmond simply would not leave.37
Crucially, Richmond also had an advocate, his daughter, Alicia Richmond Scott. Scott was a program analyst at the Department of Health and Human Services and had a physician friend frequently on the phone to give her advice about what critical levels of tests and measurements to “keep an eye on.” She also constantly questioned the nurses and interns assigned to the intensive care unit for information about her father’s case and “then used that information to go back and challenge the attending doctors.”38 Scott’s proactive participation in the care of her father not only helped prevent his case from falling through the cracks but actually contributed to the design of the successful medical treatment. Skepticism about doctors’ opinions and a strong and capable advocate, then, were both important elements of Richmond’s ability to tell his story of survival.
Thomas Morris’s son filed a $37 million suit against Kaiser Permanente alleging that the HMO’s doctor failed to provide the standard of care and that Morris faced racial bias when sent home without antibiotics. The suit was settled a year later, and the physician involved will likely never go public with any explanation.39 But we can speculate that Morris sounded perhaps as paranoid to his doctor as he did on his 911 call. How can a doctor tell a paranoid Black man who believes that the government is lying to him from a rational Black man who believes that the government is lying to him?
MORRIS, mumbling: I’m trying to put my pants on. So what do I need for, just my, my health care is Kaiser. So just bring my card and my . . .
OPERATOR: Yes. You’re gonna need your . . . did the doctor give you any kind of medication or anything?
MORRIS: No, he just told me to take Tylenol for the achiness.
Kaiser Permanente, having been the one sued by the Morris family, issued prompt denials that its physician acted inappropriately in failing to quickly assess test results and provide treatment in light of Morris’s concerns. The HMO did not address Morris’s statements to his doctor but only the statements made by the officials of the CDC and the Postal Service, arguing that Kaiser had “meticulously followed the guidance they had at the time.”40 Kaiser spokeswoman Susan Whyte Simon maintained that “what we did was proportionate to his symptoms and what we knew about anthrax and who was at risk at the time. We think we did the right things.”41
Moreover, Kaiser officials emphasized the actions of the HMO with regard to all of the victims, rather than just the case of Morris. Again quoting spokesperson Simon:
We will defend their allegations quite vigorously and with great passion. We are proud of the care delivered by Kaiser Permanente physicians and the information that our medical staff has provided to advance medical knowledge in treating anthrax. Our physicians were in the vanguard of diagnosing and treating anthrax.42
Kaiser’s claim to have delivered effective treatment for anthrax is not completely groundless—although it failed to treat those who died, other postal workers on its health plan fared better. Leroy Richmond, as we have seen, fought his way to adequate care and survived. One other victim, unnamed, was also insured by Kaiser and survived.43 This line of argument is an interesting insight into the logic of managed care and its discontents. According to this logic, denial of adequate care to an individual is not something that can be considered independent of the care that others receive. The survival of Richmond and another anthrax victim can be used as evidence to deny that Morris received inadequate treatment. By Kaiser’s logic, a 66 percent survival rate of anthrax and some success at minimizing unnecessary antibiotics prescriptions should be good enough.
Many have argued that the U.S.-specific health insurance paradigm known as “managed care” has its own moral logic that is distinct from that of medicine. According to medical anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, in both biomedicine and psychotherapy, “the patient is an end in himself. The patient is the sole person, more or less, on whom the doctor’s care is focused, and the moral compass of the doctor’s attention settles directly on the patient and the patient’s immediate environment.”44 Not complicating the matter with a recognition of the old paternalism’s dual nature (both condescending and caring), Luhrmann argues that this dyad becomes a triad under managed care:
When the doctor enters the managed care system, that is no longer the case. The patient’s care is managed relative to the needs of the group of which the patient is a part. A third party intervenes between the doctor and the patient, and the doctor must convince that third party of the patient’s needs.45
Although Luhrmann here seems to idealize the old-fashioned practice of medicine, which was never so pure and certainly has never really extended fully to African Americans, the change in the logic is still important: it changes the justification for maltreatment. The shifting paternalist dyad justified maltreatment of African Americans by not recognizing their full humanity—as when slaves were experimented upon and when Blacks were denied care at Tuskegee46—and by excluding them from care by segregation and economics. Thus, African Americans have never been full beneficiaries of the paternalist dyad. Yet the managed care triad is no less hazardous for this marginalized group.
In a model in which there is a limited good to be distributed, managed care operates by trying to minimize all medical treatments, including the number of prescriptions. Especially in a crisis, the decision of whom to treat is not based on the needs of individual patients. Since not all individuals can be feasibly tested and treated, a certain number of individuals will be systematically shortchanged by managed care. In a structurally racist society, those shortchanged individuals will disproportionately be Black.47 The reversion to this default reinforces the long-standing confluence of the refusal to recognize Black suffering and the acquiescence to white patients’ demands for time, treatment, and reassurance from medical practitioners.
Moreover, the shorter time spent by doctors with individual patients encourages use of snap judgments about who is likely to be telling the truth about their condition and who is likely to be treatment compliant. Those pressures are enacted through racial profiling in health care. At the time of these events in the fall semester of 2001, I was in a class on the social studies of biomedicine at Harvard Medical School, where Professor Evelynn Hammonds spoke about the need to resist racial profiling in health care. Several of the doctors-to-be took offense at her call. They insisted that they would always take a full medical history and that they would never assume based on race that a particular individual was likely to be misinformed or unmotivated to follow through with treatment. However, Hammonds called the class’s attention to the fact that this issue is larger than individual doctors’ attitudes: the “medical history” itself is part of the racialized practice of health care, with race appearing as a blank to fill in or a box to check right up top, and without continually heightened vigilance, these future physicians are unlikely to be able to break out of the common framework that uses that categorization to make a range of other judgments.
Asserting that they would have required absurdly specific knowledge to justify testing and treatment of postal workers, CDC director Koplan said simply, “We had had no cases of inhalation anthrax in a mail-sorting facility. There was no reason to think this was a possibility.”48 Except for common sense, perhaps not. Neither had they reason to believe that an entire building on Capitol Hill needed to be evacuated, nor that dogs needed to be tested and treated, nor that workers who had not been in the building at the time needed to be tested and treated. Nonetheless, they took these extensive measures. When it came to the Capitol, they erred on the side of caution. When it came to Black postal workers, they erred on the side of carelessness.
The CDC’s expert knowledge about the spread of anthrax spores excluded obviously relevant local knowledges, such as that of postal workers:
In his truck, Clarence Raynor usually listens to WTOP as he ferries mail from Brentwood to neighborhood post offices and back, and on the afternoon of Oct. 15, the all-news station told him that a letter that might have anthrax spores had arrived in the Hart offices of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). Raynor, though a postal worker for only four years, knew the arteries of delivery in the city, and he knew that the Daschle letter must have passed through Brentwood. “If he’s contaminated,” Raynor thought, meaning Daschle, “we’re contaminated.”
Not that Raynor, 48, is an expert in how bacteria can penetrate or float. But he knew what sorting machines do to a piece of mail. “It is shaken, bounced around, pulled at, tugged at, beat up. . . . It is not just sitting still.” And he knew how the machines were cleaned, how dust and scraps were blown. “They do it with pressurized air. It’s like an air hose at a service station.”49
Had the CDC solicited the knowledge of postal workers, it would have been able to make better recommendations on testing and treatment.50
Newsday was characteristically blunt in response to official denials of responsibility: postal workers “do not want to hear from the president of the United States, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, the postmaster general, or the district’s mayor or any other talking head with a wagging tongue, that everyone moved to protect them as quickly as they know how. Experience tells them this is laughable or a bald lie, take your pick.”51
Here, we begin to see ruptures in “United We Stand.” And officials responded predictably by wrapping themselves in the American flag. According to Postmaster General John E. “Jack” Potter, “this is not a situation where Americans should be pointing fingers at anyone else other than the terrorists.” On a similar note, President Bush’s spokesperson Ari Fleisher said of Curseen and Morris, “The president believes that the cause of death was not the treatment made by the federal government or the local officials, or anybody else, that the cause of death was the attack that was made on our nation as a result of people mailing anthrax through the mail.”52 Never mind that there is no evidence that the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks was foreign, or that it is hardly comforting that despite the terrorists’ targeting of powerful white men (Daschle in this case), Black men were the ones who died.53
Addressing the question of whether more concern should have been given to the potential risk to those who were exposed to the anthrax-containing letter before it was opened, Surgeon General David Satcher, in hindsight, said there should have been; he was the only official who said in so many words “we were wrong.”54 Satcher’s job was mostly a symbolic one, and he lacked any executive power over the case,55 but as one of the most prominent Black officials in the federal government, his was a welcome lone voice of conscience.
Perhaps the most zealous in trying to deny mistreatment in the name of unity was (also Black) Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams:
It would be another victory for the terrorists if in one aftermath of all this that you’ve got one group of public servants—postal employees, who are doing their job—pointing fingers at another group of public servants—the people at the Centers for Disease Control, who are just humbly trying to do their job. The last thing I think that they would want to do is try to discriminate between groups providing treatment.56
Although Williams is correct that notions of a racist conspiracy among CDC employees would be unfounded, conscious malevolence is not really what critics were alleging. On the contrary, the routine and thoughtless nature of the disparities makes them more appalling, not less. Trying to brush deadly inequality under the rug of American worker unity leads to my final concern, what Amy Alexander has termed the “whitewashing of terror.” Again from Mayor Williams:
These attacks in our country are indiscriminate. They really know no income lines, they know no class lines, they know no racial lines, they know no denomination lines. Whoever these people are, are attacking people irrespective of where they’re from or what they believe.57
On a certain level, Mayor Williams’s protestations are completely true. The various terrorists involved in both the September 11 attacks and the anthrax crisis certainly did not have a particular desire to kill African Americans, working class or otherwise. (In all likelihood, the anthrax terrorist didn’t want to kill anyone—hence the clear warnings accompanying the anthrax of what it was and how to medicate those exposed.) On the contrary, well-heeled white men were apparently the main targets of both rounds of terrorism and the suffering of others a secondary effect. But Williams is sidestepping the legitimate concerns of D.C.’s Black postal workers, which have less to do with conspiracies by terrorists or by governments than with the way in which a supposedly united America continues both to render African Americans’ suffering invisible and to protect African Americans less.
Amy Alexander, who wrote “Bleaching the Disaster” a week before these postal workers became ill, coined the phrase “whitewashing of terror” to describe what she noticed in the dediversification of images of terror victims and heroes.58 She argues that in the immediate coverage of September 11, television and print images were being put out so fast that they looked just as New York does—profoundly multicultural. But as time went on and editing increased, the picture of New York started to look more and more like what Erna Smith has called “Woody Allen’s New York”: all white. (The notable exception was the New York Times, which published all the victims’ pictures and biographical sketches.)
Although the television images could not help but reveal the postal workers’ race, the newspapers need not do so. Typically, they did not.59 The newspaper references that came up on LexisNexis for “black AND postal worker” were from Canada and Britain. Those newspapers had quotes from postal workers that were completely unlike what the American press had reported, for example, from the London Daily Telegraph:
“I think it’s racial,” said Gail Saxton, 48, who sorted post in the express mail room alongside Leroy Richmond, one of the two victims recovering in hospital. “I hate to say it, but it’s a fact. We lost two members of the postal family and that wasn’t necessary.” Last week, she said, she had been forced to buy her own gloves and face mask because her managers refused to supply them. “They did us a raw deal. They closed Capitol Hill down completely. But all they were telling us was ‘You gotta get out the mail.’ There was no concern for people like us. It’s terrible, but it’s been going on for years. It’s nothing new. Yeah, I’m an American. I feel glad to be one. But we know that as African-Americans we are treated as second-class citizens.”60
This worker’s words contrast starkly with the many postal workers’ quotes included in the U.S. press and with the editorials written, which talked about “the little people” getting mistreated without identifying them as nonwhite.61 It is possible that the more far-flung newspaper editorialists did not even know that “the little people” in question were Black, since none of the dominant print news sources—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the wire services—had identified them as such. If they did know, the columnists could have been appropriating the suffering of these men as their own (as fellow Americans and fellow little people), or they could have been doing just what the national news sources were: making conscious decisions not to emphasize race despite how the event was being experienced on the ground.
Being local to the disaster, the Washington Post could not avoid at least mentioning concerns about racism in its conciliatory summing up of the events: “complaints were rising that officials had acted less swiftly to defend the blue-collar, often minority workers of the Postal Service than they had the white-collar, mainly white world of Capitol Hill. A close examination of the events of that week suggests that Brentwood workers were not victims of such a double standard.”62 The Post does not mention the race of those minority workers, nor that of the victims. The phrase “often minority” serves as a gross understatement. No pictures accompany the article.
In contrast with the mainstream press, the Black press in D.C. and elsewhere (while woefully short on giving voice to the postal workers) was very clear in its implication of race in the disparity:
The double standards of life in America are hard to overlook, especially when one group historically becomes the victims. Television exposed the reality that the Senate Office Buildings, where most of the employees are white, received a quick response to the potentially deadly anthrax threat. On the other hand, employees who initially handled the mail sent to Sen. Daschle’s office, from a location often referred to as “the Plantation” and who are predominantly black, were overlooked, an oversight that may have contributed to the death of two postal employees and the infection of several others.63
Amy Alexander, who had raised concerns about the whitewashing of terror, also wrote about the refusal to see these victims as Black. She takes issue with Postmaster General John E. “Jack” Potter’s statement that “this is not a situation where Americans should be pointing fingers at anyone else other than the terrorists”:
His comments were a clear effort to diffuse black postal workers’ complaints that they had been shafted. But for me they simply raise new fears that all the psychic energy we are now expending on the war effort, and all the material sacrifices we are being called on to make, will be particularly burdensome for people who have for centuries given their all with little help or return from our government.64
Alexander is also concerned that one result of the lack of adequate treatment for postal workers will be that it “will feed into longstanding fears held by many blacks that the government’s health services systems might abuse (through neglect or action) African Americans.” For my part, I believe that those fears are grounded and necessary. Increased skepticism would not be a negative outcome if it could allow more people to get care like that Leroy Richmond received.
The Journal of the American Medical Association, which often does mention the race of patients, did not in these cases: they are described as “a 47-year-old male postal worker who worked in the mail sorting area of the Brentwood facility” and “a 55-year-old male postal worker who worked as a distribution clerk in the mail sorting area of the Brentwood facility and who had hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and remote history of sarcoidosis.”65 We might simply attribute the absence of race here by noting that race is not relevant to the diagnosis—but it is not clear how gender or exact age is, either. It would be perfectly routine to include “black” between the age and the gender. Although not much can be said definitively about the absence of a descriptor, it might well have something to do with the history of medical interest in comparative racial pathology, which has sought answers that are based in biology rather than in politics.66 The routine inclusion of race in medical histories neither historically nor today generally seeks what progressives might want it to, which is to indict inadequate care.67
The resistance in the media to recognizing the differential impact of anthrax on a Black population comes in part, I think, from an allegiance to the particular narrative developed by President George W. Bush and others that pronounced the events of September 11 as an attack on civilization or on the values of freedom itself. Recognizing our own civilization as imperfect at such a moment led to being criticized for undermining that thing for which we were fighting.
Anthropologist Veena Das provides valuable insights into the aspects of America that must be obscured to maintain unquestioned faith in an uncomplicatedly just and democratic America. “What these statements conjure is the idea of the United States . . . as embodying these values—not contingently, not as a horizon in relation to struggles within its borders against, say, slavery, racism, or the destruction of native American populations, but as if a teleology has particularly privileged it to embody these values.”68 To maintain this fiction of a unified America “as the privileged site of universal values,” Das points out that along the way, “representations of the American nation manage to obscure from view the experiences of those within its body politics who were never safe even before September 11.”69
OPERATOR: If there’s anything, if your condition starts to worsen, have your wife give us a call back, OK?
MORRIS: All right.
OPERATOR: All right then.
MORRIS: Thank you.
Wishful thinking about government and medical response to terror is dangerous. Trust was fatal for Morris and Curseen, and skepticism saved Richmond. As Jill Nelson writes:
we want to believe that as American citizens, we are all in this together, as equals. We want to believe that the government knows what it is doing. We do not want to believe the worst, even though we have experienced it before: That race and class, fame and fortune would inform the response to this crisis. . . . But it’s way past time we as Americans realized that wishing doesn’t make it so.70
Indeed, Black men, including these postal workers, have never been safe in the United States. Underscoring the ways in which the medical and political systems fail them may disrupt the fantasy of a perfect America, but that disruption is necessary if the protection that purports to be provided is to be truly extended to all.