“Sickle Cell Anemia and Sickle Cell Trait” is a documentary that is radical in its intention to provide Black Americans with factual and accurate information about their bodies and the sicknesses, specifically sickle cell-related conditions, that are prevalent in the Black community.  For centuries, medicinal practice has been plagued by racism, both overt and insidious, that continues to affect Blacks and other racial minorities in the present day. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, members of the medical community espoused varying fallacious beliefs about the Black body, including that Blackness was a form of leprosy that doctors needed to find a cure for and that Black slaves were healthier in climates that were most similar to their “native” environments – i.e. the heat of the plantations – as well as immune to vicious diseases endemic to hot, humid climates and thus better suited to hard labor on tropical islands than other races.  Within the last hundred years, we have seen the effects of racism in medicine play out in the use of eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, as well as exerting a present-day impact that can be seen in statistics that show that Black Americans are more likely than whites to receive insufficient or ineffective care regarding their diagnoses of a variety of diseases that include cancer and cardiovascular issues.

It’s easy to see evidence of this discrimination in canonical Black radical texts.  For example, when Angela Davis writes in Angela Davis: An Autobiography about her experiences in the American prison system, which is disproportionately filled with racial minorities, she recalls how, on multiple occasions, the “sisters” had to collectively take a stand in order to demand medical care for a fellow prisoner before she was examined – still by an incompetent, elderly, white, male doctor; Davis also recalls how her fellow prisoners had told her that multiple sisters had died from negligence on the part of the prison. Similarly referencing the societal pattern of leaving Black and Hispanic Americans primarily at risk and/or not giving them the medical information they need to make informed decisions about their lives and lifestyles, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name recalls the way that the Black and Puerto Rican employees of an electronics plant, including Lorde herself, had been deliberately not made aware of the often deadly radiation risks that came with the jobs that they were doing with no shielding.

Both authors were acknowledging the cycle of how Black and brown bodies have been sacrificed for science or to cut costs throughout history, and this film, created around the same time as Zami and An Autobiography were published, sought to push back against the campaigns of misinformation and silence that the medical community had often employed to achieve these means.  In an era where Blacks and other minorities were often victimized by misinformation, “Sickle Cell Anemia and Sickle Cell Trait” seeks to empower Black Americans with the knowledge to make informed decisions about family-planning and the passage of a potentially lethal disease.