Darcy Richie: Facing our history in the name of progress

We can make revisions to history and paint a picture more pleasant to reflect on. We can blink twice and rub our eyes to wash away reflections of our past, hoping to push them far away so they no longer linger in our peripheral vision. Or we can recognize and accept the history we are presented with.

Acres of Skin is a newly released book that brings this lesson back into our periphery. The book attempts to expose experiments performed on hundreds of prisoners' bodies, eyes and faces at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. "All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time," reads the memorable line describing Albert M. Kligman's entrance into the prison and his initial impression of the prisoners standing in front of him.

Albert M. Kligman, in his capacity as Penn's director of dermatology in the '60s, worked in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and the prison for almost 15 years to "test on" prisoners.

A 2003 Philadelphia Inquirer article entitled "Ex-inmates protest skin doctor's award" explains that almost 300 former inmates have come forward in a lawsuit that includes Kligman, the city of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania for alleged tests that utilized "infectious agents, radioactive isotopes, dioxin and psychotropic drugs in exchange for nominal payments."

Some accounts claim that the prisoners were occasionally compensated with a dollar or two, while many others argue that in most cases, there was no compensation. The indisputable facts no longer seem to matter when former prisoners presented the evidence of testing. This evidence rested on their scarred faces, disfigured and immobilized limbs and blistered skin. Last year, Kligman refused to appear at a City Council hearing on the medical experiments. The council is now suing to compel him to testify.

Clearly, this history endures, as history always will. We are reminded of these events as we would be reminded of a traumatic nightmare. My history as a Penn student is riddled with the experiences of these men, and to the extent that I attempt to follow the model of my university and equate lack of acknowledgment with lack of existence, I accept the history it has painted.

As my country has not yet accepted that we all live off the profits of slaves, my university has not yet accepted that some of its academic honor in the medical world rested on the back of its sponsorship of these tests. As I am just another student, I wouldn't have the power our president would have to acknowledge, apologize and reshape our institutional memory. As she has not yet accepted this power, the fight for acknowledgment and memory probably needs to get louder, stronger and more prominent.

"Isms" make us believe that if we say nothing, we are in some way painting over history, pretending that we played no personal role: Maybe, if we are very quiet, we can pretend that slavery is just something that happened, not a part of who we are. No, there are no memorials erected in Washington, D.C., or national holidays, jobs or dollar amounts that can once and for all repay for the continued remnants of slavery, but acknowledgment is a powerful thing. Acres of Skin seems eerily similar as we wait for administrative acknowledgment.

We are afraid of failure, afraid of our past and afraid that others might see us as weak if we acknowledge the painful roles we have played. I can't buy the whole "Can't we just forget about it?"belief because all I hear is "I want to forget about it." Honestly, I feel so far removed from the experiences of these men that there is very little that isn't driving me to sing that same tune. But time does not make me feel removed from all histories that I share, and I continue to play a role in my own silence.

I know there are several people with their fingers crossed hoping that their silence will cut off those annoying buzzings in their ear and shut up the voices in their head. But in the end, hopefully, the efforts of a few will remind us that we all share the same history, whether or not we acknowledge parts of it. These efforts will remind everyone that history does not have a selective memory.

Darcy Richie is a senior urban studies major from Birmingham, Mich. Strange Fruit appears on Wednesdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.