The horror of this, but thank you for your research and connections. I missed the obvious as I wasn’t paying too much attention to—what can i call it now for the sake of of discussion—crackerpox. It’s so obvious once you address why they called it what they did. At a minimum of course they are pointing to Africa as the source and to black people as being the source where this “dirty” disease came from. Does it really matter where crackerpox came from? I had thought it came from Europe and heard only of cases from there but didn’t track the story. And the name. Surely some one, some person, named it and we do need to find out who. My bet is a white person.
But it gets to a brand new depth of depravity when you reveal the historical aspect, like the zoos. It was frightening to read all that instant insanity, institutional hatred backed by corporate sponsors and governments. This whole “human zoo” from what I just looked at came from the time between the Civil War and the Second World War. It was a time when American “scientists” made up the theory of “eugenics”. They then brought this theory to Europe in the very early 1900s. The Rockefeller institution and Carnegie Mellon Foundation financially backed the spread of it to Europe where they encourage the study of it, in Sweden, Belgium, a few other countries, including Germany. It was those grants directly that finance Josef Mengele, who wrote reports he sent back to America on measurements of Jews from various autopsies and other experiments working under Verschuer who was the grant recipient at the Institute for “Racial Hygiene.” Mengele was the SS officer known as the Angel of Death who escaped to Argentina and was never caught. His intellectual advisor never escaped, apparently had no need to. He delivered his reports to the American institution in California from the eugenics institute, renamed after the war the “human “Genetics” institute, though it was same laboratory. Baron von Verschauer (you can’t make this stuff people, all facts) backed forced sterilization, a practice the advanced Americans actually practiced in America thanks to eugenics studies they funded.
The Supreme Court didn’t stop it, but the opposite, approved the eugenics movement by allowing forced sterilization to occur due to letting stand the Sterilization Act of 1924 that started with the famous Carrie Buck case in Virginia, where systemic slavery started in earnest in 1619,. Not just symbolism but history. The Nazis literally learned this stuff from the Americans, who had a jumpstart on these practices thanks to decades of “advanced studies.” The human zoos didn’t crop up from nowhere, but from debunked science and corporate backers in the US. I know many people might object that the horror of Nazi Germany’s holocaust was aided chiefly by US scientific ideas of white race superiority, but it’s all documented with a plethora of sources in “War Against the Weak” by Edwin Black.
So yes, pseudo science still invades the naming of diseases and relates them to some racist origin, much stemming from American funding of this eugenics ideas in Europe and perpetuate through the human zoos. It has to be renamed, you are right. The practice needs to called out as I believe unintentional “evil” (or intentional) is still in the political system, more so here than Germany. They at least had a dark reckoning with the atrocities they committed. We never had. Our long racist past is still pounding at the doors, kicking them in the hall of power, Congress, and planting its confederate flag right there in the middle, poisoning our present.