This was the world in which Black people lived with tuberculosis in the U.S.—one where they were told by the medical establishment that their illness was caused by weaknesses and susceptibilities inherent to their race, or else by freedom and citizenship itself. And so even after we understood that TB was an infection, we continued to blame it on the sufferer, but with a radically racialized and stigmatic lens that caused more harm to the ill than even previous forms of stigma.
