Public Health and Colonialism

The exploitation of black people and appropriation of human rights by reason of public health boasts bold imperialistic and colonial ideology. During the colonization of the Philippines, the US used the lack of hygiene of the Filipino people as an excuse to assert control over the population under the guise of civilizing the population, in the process of furthering their own political goals. The practice of public defecation was touted as the reason for Americans to take control of public health in the Philippines. Filipinos were treated as lesser humans, allowing Americans a self-imposed power granted on account of their comparative civility. 

Rather than helping improve their infrastructure and education, Americans used intrusive methods in studying the feces of the Filipino people, an act that was deeply offensive and dehumanizing. In Excremental Colonialism, Warwick Anderson states that “the work meant invasion of the accepted rights of the home and of the individual on a scale perhaps unprecedented for any community” (Anderson 108). This description shows how the colonizers were able to entrench a power dynamic and hierarchy by degrading the people’s sense of personhood and treating them like specimens rather than individuals with equal rights and agency as themselves. 

It is well known that Thomas Jefferson used this reasoning to justify the separation of whites and blacks and the discrimination between the two groups. Not only was this racist ideology, but it was also hidden under a veil of scientific reasoning that made his argument present as logical. Using the pretext of the ‘scientific’ differences he noted between races as a natural historian, he argued that it was logical for black people to be treated differently and as an inferior race. As the governor of Virginia during an era of slavery, it makes sense that Jefferson would use this logic in order to propagate the idea that white people had the right to control the slaves. It draws parallels to the present case because, ultimately, consent is a medium through which people express control over their own bodies. By stripping people of this right, western scientists are wielding control over the African population.