Steve’s Newsletter 2 (2)

Steve’s Newsletter 2 (2)

Apples to Apples

On February 6, 2026, Donald Trump shared a video on his Truth Social account that included an AI-generated clip of Michelle and Barack Obama’s faces placed onto the bodies of dancing monkeys. Claiming that the video had been accidentally posted by an unnamed aide, the video stayed up for 12 hours, was viewed/shared countless times by followers, and closed out the Friday news cycle with everyone talking about Trump.

African Americans have long been held up to be less human than their white counterparts. (This is the case for all populations colonized/enslaved by Western Europeans, but I’m trying to keep this piece focused on U.S. history.) Entire books have been written on the subject, but this is Facebook. I’m going to track one tiny part of that history.

For better or worse, the origin of modern medicine is largely in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution. During the early 1800s, several scientists and physicians devoted themselves to the development of a spirometer as a way of studying the lung health of factory workers and coal miners. The life expectancy for people exposed to coal dust, textile fibers, and other fine particles was remarkably low. Either out of goodwill or a desire to increase the bottom line of companies, it was a concern.

From around 1840–1860, the technology of the spirometer rapidly advanced and thousands of subjects were studied to create health baselines rooted in height, weight, sex, age, and current disease. Then an American slaveholder named Samuel Cartwright took measurements of enslaved children and free white children and came to the conclusion that, as a group, white lungs were superior to Black lungs. (This was part of a wave of pseudoscience in the 1800s that led to a host of beliefs, such as higher pain tolerance and lower intelligence, for the supposedly subhuman African.)

An excerpt from his treatise, which, among other things, described the desire for freedom as a mental illness, is below:

“The result is that the expansibility (sic) of the lungs is considerably less in the black than the white race of similar size, age, and habit. A white boy expelled from his lungs a larger volume of air than a negro half a head taller and three inches larger around the chest. The deficiency in the negro may be safely estimated at 20 percent, according to a number of observations I have made at different times.”

—Samuel Cartwright, Cotton Is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments

Anyone with even a modicum of scientific understanding would see a problem with the results of the “study.” The sample sizes are not comparable, and therefore the results are distorted. Not much was known about nutrition at the time, but suffice it to say that white children on the plantation would have had better access to key vitamins and minerals that promoted lung development. Likewise, enslaved people would have been packed into smaller, poorly ventilated, and less insulated homes with dirt floors. Particulate exposure from smoke, dust, and animal feces would have significantly reduced lung capacity.

Unfortunately, medicine continued to proliferate these ideas about Black versus white lungs until very recently. Continuing to ignore environmental factors such as lower-quality housing, urban air quality, and food access, modern spirometers actually included a race adjustment. This means that when your doctor measures your lung capacity, your race determines how seriously they consider your results. When I say “until very recently,” I mean within the last 10 years. The oldest paper I can find that even considers the flawed race correction on spirometers is from 2015. That paper has been cited 177 times in papers written mostly in the last five years.

With a baseline that is significantly lower, African Americans are not given treatment for pulmonary issues and are denied disability claims for work-related exposures. This is a massive contributor to the disparities in quality of life and life expectancy between Whites and Blacks. (Whites live longer on average.)

The problem won’t get better anytime soon, even with new information. Have you ever been to a doctor and been frustrated because you wanted to talk about a disease/injury/condition they had never heard of? That’s because it takes an average of 17 years for doctors to change their methods when faced with new evidence. That’s in the best of circumstances. However, the average age of physicians is increasing due to doctors staying longer in the field and financial barriers to the entry of new physicians. As the profession continues to be dominated by conservative, white men, there is little impetus to change.

This means that while doctors get around to updating their equipment and methods based on information in papers that has come out only recently, African Americans will continue to die for years to come based on “research” done by a slaveholder in the 1800s to justify the belief that a group of people were subhuman. For that reason and more, when Trump shares an image portraying a Black person as a monkey, he is making a mockery of a history that is literally sending African Americans to an early grave.

Creative Update

One of my creative goals for the year is to reformat and republish my first several books. Though the vast majority of my reviews are positive, a consistent refrain is that things are formatted poorly. That’s a fair criticism. In my early days as an independent author, I didn’t quite understand how to do things better. Learning as I go, I finally nailed down the best practices in my last two books. It’s a slow-going process and so far I have reformatted I Suck at Everything and Let’s Form a Committee. Below is an excerpt of I Suck at Everything for your amusement. There is a link for purchase at the end if you are so inclined.

Blairian Journalism

This was written sometime in the Summer of 2004. The reporter Jayson Blair was caught fabricating stories and was fired from his job with the New York Times. Though fake news seems quaint now in the era of AI and alternative facts, I enjoyed playing around with the idea of writing about what might have happened at a concert I didn’t actually go to way back in college. Some of the humor seems fairly immature 16 years later, but the general theme of the writing still stands out to me as a fun read. I’ve made no significant edits to what it was at the time other than a couple of missing hyphens.

I knew there would be a cover at the club, but my ATM balance was $0.37. I had to get in to see this band. My ex-girlfriend had raved over Orange Island’s musical feats for months, but I’d never listened. That was her main reason for leaving me. Regardless of any relationship flashbacks, I was still outside the Common Grounds on West University wanting to see the band.
They were a 30-minute set and would be on in five minutes. I always figure that 30 minutes is the perfect time for a small-time band. Anything longer would be obnoxious, and anything shorter than that would be like musical blue balls.
With my realization that I had no money to pay the cover charge went my dreams of becoming a rock columnist for Rolling Stone.
But wait! What if I write about not going to the concert? Jayson Blair never bothered to report anything at the New York Times. He just made stuff up. A few moments of doubt occupied my brain. Has journalism really sunk to that level that we can just make stuff up? Will historians look back and mark this as the beginning of the era of Blairian journalism?
Yes.
I rushed back to the Common Grounds and waited outside the door so that I could interview the band about the riveting performance I hadn’t seen. My mind wandered, and I thought about the concert I wasn’t watching.
Lead guitarist Brendan Dickhaut plugged his cheap electric guitar in, and the blare of feedback filled the room. A guy next to me at the bar winced painfully. The feedback was no way to nurse his dehydration as he nursed a glass of water. He was wearing a wife-beater tank top and cutoff shorts. He seemed strangely out of place at the Common Grounds.
Dave Gorman walked to the mike as the feedback subsided, strategically flexing his tattooed biceps, showing off and aggravating the feminine itch of the crowd.
Some English major geek who had seen Orange Island before shouted out “yeah!” The man in the tank top swore under his breath. He walked further back in the building away from the impending sound. He was wearing dark glasses.
Two heavily tattooed, heavily pierced, scantily clad women, obviously of the bisexual persuasion, chatted with the young drummer Chuck Young as he tapped out a tentative beat and glanced nervously at bassist Colin James. He smiled back at the girls while pretending to be shy, one of the secrets of getting laid.
The band began to play precisely at 11:45, with no tacky 1-2-3-4 count-off. The room was immediately filled with the sound produced by this small, five-person band that was almost eerily telepathic in its ability to play in sync.
The second song was a little bit softer than the first but pure rock at its finest. One of the heavily tattooed, heavily pierced, scantily clad, bisexually persuaded women stepped on stage. She pulled off the shirt she wore and revealed her black bra.
The stage was small, barely big enough for the five band members to fit, let alone the girl. A small door was behind them, and if the crowd got too rough, this would be the escape route. The bouncer gently pulled the girl from the stage. She hugged him, high on ecstasy.
The crowd slowly got more and more into the music as they rounded the fourth song. The two heavily tattooed, heavily pierced, scantily clad, bisexually persuaded women wearing black bras began swaying to the music. Thongs protruded from the backs of their shorts. The drummer and the bassist were perfectly merged in musical fusion, as a drummer and bassist should be.
The vocalist gesticulated wildly during the fifth song. Sweat poured from his brow and from his tattooed biceps. Every girl in the crowd was now in love with him, moist between the legs, and wondering how to make this man the father of their first illegitimate child.
Song six was over. They didn’t need the escape route because of an angry crowd but to get away as girls rushed the stage, trying to touch them. The two heavily tattooed, heavily pierced, scantily clad, bisexually persuaded, swaying women wearing black bras and thongs just smiled as their eyes glazed over, staring at the unbridled magnificence of the band.
I thought to myself, forty years from now I’ll place my first grandson on my knee to tell him how things used to be, and I would speak of this moment: the heavily tattooed, heavily pierced, scantily clad, bisexually persuaded, swaying, glaze-eyed women, and rock music still echoing off the walls of my skull. I would tell my grandson of this night that would launch Orange Island on their way to being known as the greatest band in the history of rock.
But I wasn’t there.