fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Jessica Parr

The Penn Museum received the MOVE remains because Philadelphia’s Office of the Medical Examiner gave them to physical anthropologist Alan Mann for analysis. To a Black community angry and grieving over the bombing, the fact that the Philadelphia Medical Examiner turned the remains of Black children over to an institution with a troubling history involving Black remains will not be a satisfactory answer. This has become even more urgent since activists have increasingly pushed for private and third-party autopsies after police shootings. What is less clear is what happened afterwards, and why the remains were not returned for burial thereafter, or if there are survivors who were able to claim them. 

Pennsylvania’s law for the handling of unclaimed dead, which was written in 1883, allows for the remains of those individuals to be donated to science. Some coroner’s offices seek out next-of-kin or place them in a communal grave.  In the case of the child victims of the MOVE bombing, their remains stayed in the custody of Penn Museum, likely as a donation to science. If the remains were transferred to Princeton in 2001 when Mann changed institutions, the Penn Museum’s Human Remains Policy states that it generally receives remains from other institutions, and it may have followed that protocol in allowing the MOVE remains to follow Mann to Princeton.

But these policies, and adherence both to the policies and the letter of the laws in effect at the time, do not account for the dynamics of systemic racism either with respect to the specifics of the bombing, the broader discussions of anti-Black violence by police, or centuries of scientific racism. In this case, underaged children who were killed by police were used as science specimens without theirs or their families’ consents. The fact that the remains of two child victims of the bombing appear to have been lost has, understandably, provoked further anger.