MAGA negro's Stoopid Comparison: Vaccines = Slavery
S. E. Anderson
Florida’s Black surgeon general vows to end vaccine mandates in the state, and he made a deeply offensive comparison while doing so.
By Wayne Washington
theroot,com
September 4, 2025
MIAMI, FLORIDA – MAY 17: Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks during a press conference at the University of Miami Health System Don Soffer Clinical Research Center on May 17, 2022 in Miami, Florida. During the press event Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state of Florida would be providing $100 million for Florida’s cancer research centers, after he signs the state budget into law. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The horror and stain of American chattel slavery deserves every bit of the powerline wariness afforded to the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. But slavery references are not afforded that same wariness.
That much was obvious on Wednesday (Sept. 3), when Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, compared the requirement of getting a vaccine to slavery as he called to end the state’s mandated vaccine requirements. The line generated much applause from the largely white audience Ladapo was addressing.
Clap, clap, clap. Here we have a Black man saying getting a potentially life-saving vaccine is akin to being owned, raped on a whim, sold on a lark, beaten just ‘cause.
Except slavery isn’t an applause line.
How many claps would there be if Ladapo had said getting a shot to prevent polio or chickenpox was like the Holocaust? Precisely zero. Even now, he’d be getting verbally flayed. He’d be castigated for an appalling lack of context, an egregious ignorance of scale.
And those doing the castigating would be absolutely correct. Sentient beings in 2025 could not and would not compare getting a life-saving shot to the systemic rounding up and murder of people because of their religion.
Ladapo’s flippant slavery comparison, however, was not greeted with the scalding contempt it deserved. Some of that is because he is Black. Hey, look, if a Black guy is saying getting a vaccine is as bad as slavery, it must be really bad, right?
The surgeon general knows well that his race gives him special value to the white political figures who elevated him and celebrate him. He is their “get-out-of-racism-jail-free” card, their “I’ve-got-Black-friends” example.
But the problem goes deeper than one Black man’s low price. It goes to the heart of why racism remains such a festering problem in America: the utter failure to appreciate the gravity of slavery itself.
For hundreds of years, Black Americans were not authorized to learn to read and write. To own property. To keep, nurture and raise their children. To profit from their labor.
Those profits went to white Americans, who used them to buy land and houses, to start businesses, to create generational wealth that, yes, endures to this day.
It’s a fuzzy, warm blanket for some white Americans to believe that white advantage in America ended when slavery did. But it’s not truth.
Truth is that hundreds of years of slavery locked Black Americans in the batter’s box while their white American countrymen had the freedom to round third and head for home. Just consider a funeral. Many white Americans wonder who’ll inherit what; Black Americans fight over the bill.
That sad and stark reality isn’t because of some inherent difference in Black and white people. It’s because one group in this country has a substantial leg up on the other. It’s because one group has so much clout that even a Black man is induced to reduce one of humankind’s greatest sins to a trial so terrible doctors can only overcome it with the offer of a lollipop. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
--------------------------------------------