[News] Medical Self Defense and the Black Panther Party

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2011/12/medical-self-defense-and-black-panther.html

Medical Self Defense and the Black Panther Party
-An interview with Alondra Nelson

By Angola 3 News

Alondra Nelson, a professor of sociology and 
gender studies at Columbia University, is the 
author of a new book released last month, 
entitled 
<http://uprisingradio.org/home/2011/11/14/body-and-soul-video/>Body 
and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight 
Against Medical Discrimination. By documenting 
the multifaceted health activism of the Black 
Panther Party (BPP) and critically assessing the 
BPP’s strategy and tactics in a respectful and 
appreciative manner, Body and Soul presents an 
analysis that is rare and badly needed in US 
colleges and universities today. In this 
interview, Nelson discusses how the Panthers’ 
legacy can both inspire and provide important 
strategic lessons for today’s new generation of political activists

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s 
focus on health care was both practical and 
ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP 
provided free community health care services, 
including preventative education. Simultaneously, 
the BPP railed against the medical-industrial 
complex, declaring that health care was “a right 
and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the 
minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in 
the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession 
within this capitalist society
is composed 
generally of people working for their own benefit 
and advancement rather than the humane aspects of 
medical care.” A newsletter published by the 
Southern California chapter argued that “poor 
people in general and black people in particular 
are not given the best care available. Our people 
are treated like animals, experimented on and 
made to wait long hours in waiting rooms."

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become 
a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the 
BPP revised point six of the founding 
ten-point-platform, adding a demand for 
“completely free healthcare for all black and 
oppressed people
We believe that the government 
must provide, free of charge, for the people, 
health facilities which will not only treat our 
illnesses, most of which have come about as a 
result of our oppression, but which will also 
develop preventative medical programs to 
guarantee our future survival. We believe that 
mass health education and research programs must 
be developed to give Black and oppressed people 
access to advanced scientific and medical 
information, so we may provide ourselves with 
proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 
declaration that “of all forms of inequality, 
injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and 
inhumane,” one chapter provides an important 
historical context for the BPP’s health activism 
by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical 
civil rights movement,” that began long before 
the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly 
hazardous risks posed by segregated medical 
facilities, professions, societies, and schools; 
deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; 
medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, 
activism challenges to medical discrimination 
have been an important focal point for African 
American protest efforts and organizations. The 
Panthers were heirs to health activism that 
directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly 
work is on “the intersections of science, 
technology, medicine and inequality.” She has 
co-edited 
<http://www.amazon.com/TechniColor-Race-Technology-Everyday-Life/dp/0814736041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300719170&sr=8-1>Technicolor: 
Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and 
<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/genetics-and-the-unsettled-past-keith-wailoo/1032040690>Genetics 
and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, 
Race, and History (scheduled to be released in 
March, 2012). To learn more, please visit 
<http://alondranelson.com/>www.alondranelson.com.

Angola 3 News:         In our recent 
<http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2011/10/we-called-ourselves-children-of-malcolm.html>interview 
with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, 
one theme explored was how, with rare exception, 
the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. 
However, it seems that the even the radical and 
anti-capitalist media has generally underreported 
the health activism that is the focus if your 
book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to 
their better-known stances against white 
supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson:        Yes, it’s true. The Black 
Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported 
across the ideological spectrum. Their critics 
obviously did not want to cast them in a positive 
light. And, as your question suggests, even the 
Party’s supporters said little about this 
important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think its 
plausible to say that many on the Right and some 
of us on the Left--in very different ways and for 
completely opposite reasons--were captivated by a 
vision of the Party that did not include its 
health politics. Depictions of African Americans 
working in their neighborhoods, wearing white 
medical coats, was unspectacular compared to 
images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the 
Panthers remains so incomplete because their 
health activism—from their political writing 
about medical issues in The Black Panther 
newspaper, to their practice of DIY 
healthcare—exemplified the anti-racist, 
anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. 
In fact, the reality of health inequality brought 
the BPP’s political perspective into sharper 
relief because it offered stark and specific 
examples of how economic and racial oppression 
literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black 
Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that 
reflected that protecting communities from police 
brutality was a primary motivation for the 
group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of 
power whether it was at the hands of police 
officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to 
think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and 
Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. 
Terry Kupers, and others established that 
chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like 
all of the BPP’s health activism, this work 
extended beyond the clinic, including in this 
case, confronting police brutality. (Branch 
shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from 
her personal archive where the formation of BPP 
health programs and prisoners’ protection from 
medical discrimination were seamlessly 
discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for and 
provided health care for incarcerated persons; 
some of these men and women needed medical 
attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N:   How does the story of the BPP’s health 
activism, as presented in your book, contribute 
to and challenge the traditional presentations of 
the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN:     Body and Soul offers an account of the 
BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of 
the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party 
can only ever be a positive force or a negative 
element. Paying attention to the Party’s health 
activism calls into question the inaccurate 
stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we 
thought we already knew about the BPP, like the 
fact that the Panthers were avid followers of 
Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required 
reading for all members. Through the prism of 
health, one can see very clearly the influence of 
Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in 
Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical 
discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously 
the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as 
well as political thinkers. We can appreciate 
that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” 
lay health worker program, made available to the 
Party not only broad revolutionary principles, 
but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N:   What do you think were the most successful 
tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health 
activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons 
from the BPP’s health activism do you think are 
most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN:     In addition to setting up their own 
clinics, they used legal approaches not 
dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their 
opposition to problematic biomedical research. 
The Party leadership realized early on that 
“policing the police” would not be the only 
method they used in their effort to topple racism 
and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s 
activists is that they should be more loyal to 
the desired outcome than to the tactic. The 
sit-in came to be associated with the southern 
civil rights movement just as the mic check is 
now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these 
groups also used other tactics: marching, 
occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are 
dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly 
changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was 
what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the 
“politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, 
the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific 
ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted 
scientific theories about the causes of sickle 
cell anemia, for example, by placing the 
prevalence of the disease in the context of the 
history of the transatlantic slave trade, the 
medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers use of this tactic—the politics of 
knowledge—should remind today’s activists that 
“framing” matters. It is important to be able to 
translate political arguments—health-related ones 
and other ones—into language, into stories 
really, that resonate with the broader public. 
The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream 
philanthropies would ultimately coopt the issue 
of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key 
role in raising awareness about the disease and 
in situating it in a powerful political language 
that could mobilize communities.

A3N:   Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s 
free medical clinics and the campaign to educate 
the Black community about and test for Sickle 
Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s 
involvement with a diverse coalition that 
successfully organized against the formation of 
the Center for the Study and Reduction of 
Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt 
that the Center’s “biologization of violence” 
line of research would ultimately “craft a 
narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” 
that would serve to “make already marginalized 
populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool 
of social control,” and “effect the further 
criminalization of social groups—black males, the 
incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for 
increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a 
“notable triumph,” you note further that it “was 
somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his 
allies, as blocking resources to the center as an 
entity would not prevent individual researchers 
from pursuing other sources of support for their 
investigations.” With this in mind, how has 
biologization of violence research progressed 
since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN:     Attempts to attribute the causes of 
violence to biology (and closely related to this, 
criminality) are a very old story. In the late 
19th century, the influential Italian 
criminologist Lombroso, claimed that new methods 
(e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social 
Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas 
persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush 
presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services set-up a “violence 
initiative” to explore the biological models of 
social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may 
recall that around the same time another Bush 
official, referencing studies on violence among 
non-human primates, said that disproportionately 
black and brown “inner cities” were like 
“jungles.” (The initiative and controversial 
commentary around it would recall to the heated 
debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to 
form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s 
that may have had an especially harmful impact on 
black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to 
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dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N:   What role has biologization of violence 
research played in justifying the mass 
incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, 
increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 
2.4 million today, giving the US 
<http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate>the 
highest incarceration rate and 
<http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poptotal>the 
largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN:     To the extent that the longstanding 
efforts that I have just described have kept in 
circulation the fallacy that there is a 
definitive link between human biology and 
violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a 
justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the 
biologization of violence come to the fore: If 
violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” 
then one can justify policies that lock people 
away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate 
predisposition to violence contributes to the 
decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N:   Since the 1970s, has the US come any 
closer to realizing the BPP’s public health 
goals?  If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were 
alive today, what do you think he would say about 
President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN:     The revised ten-point platform was 
prescient in capturing one side of the recent 
debates about widening health inequality in the 
U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture 
a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party 
would have appreciated the historic nature of 
what President Obama accomplished—a feat that 
many administrations before his had variously 
tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps 
Newton would have even observed that the 
Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted 
the 
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/28/5483>similarity 
between President Obama’s historic Affordable 
Care Act and the national insurance plan that 
former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. 
Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and 
the way this administration and its agents worked 
to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that 
Newton would have been in strong support of 
recent healthcare reform legislation. There would 
have certainly been opposition to the fact that 
President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance 
companies because the Panthers demanded, 
“healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

--Angola 3 News is an official project of the 
International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our 
website is www.angola3news.com, where we provide 
the latest news about the Angola 3. Additionally 
we are also creating our own media projects, 
which spotlight the issues central to the story 
of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, 
prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as 
torture, and more. Our articles and videos have 
been published by Alternet, Truthout, 
Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Indymedia, and many others.



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