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<a href="http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2011/12/medical-self-defense-and-black-panther.html" eudora="autourl">
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2011/12/medical-self-defense-and-black-panther.html<br>
<br>
</a></font><font size=4><b>Medical Self Defense and the Black Panther
Party<br>
-An interview with Alondra Nelson<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3><i>By Angola 3 News<br><br>
</i>Alondra Nelson, a professor of sociology and gender studies at
Columbia University, is the author of a new book released last month,
entitled
<a href="http://uprisingradio.org/home/2011/11/14/body-and-soul-video/">
<i>Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical
Discrimination</a></i>. 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, <i>Body and
Soul</i> 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<br><br>
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." <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the
intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has
co-edited
<a href="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</a> (2001) and
<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/genetics-and-the-unsettled-past-keith-wailoo/1032040690">
<i>Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and
History</a></i> (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more,
please visit
<a href="http://alondranelson.com/">www.alondranelson.com</a>.<br><br>
<b><u>Angola 3
<a href="news:%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0" eudora="autourl">News:</a></u>
<a href="news:%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0" eudora="autourl">
</a> </b><i>In our recent
<a href="http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2011/10/we-called-ourselves-children-of-malcolm.html">
interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP</a>, 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?<br><br>
</i><b><u>Alondra
Nelson:</u></b> 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.<br><br>
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 <i>The Black Panther</i> newspaper,<i> </i>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.<br><br>
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 <i>medical </i>self-defense. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b><u>A3N:</u> </b><i>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?<br><br>
</i><b><u>AN:</u></b><i> Body and Soul</i> 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. <br><br>
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 <i>all</i>
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. <br><br>
<b><u>A3N:</u> </b><i>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?<br><br>
</i><b><u>AN:</u></b> 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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b><u>A3N:</u> </b><i>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.”<br><br>
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?<br><br>
</i><b><u>AN:</u></b> 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. <br><br>
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).<br><br>
Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to
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a dramatic, determinative effect</a>. <br><br>
<b><u>A3N:</u> </b><i>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
<a href="http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate">
the highest incarceration rate</a> and
<a href="http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poptotal">
the largest total prisoner population</a> in the world?<br><br>
</i><b><u>AN:</u></b> 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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b><u>A3N:</u> </b><i>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?”<br><br>
</i><b><u>AN:</u></b> 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 <i>very</i> <i>small</i> step in the right
direction. <br><br>
However, some journalists and pundits have noted the
<a href="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</a>.
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.” <br><br>
<b><i>--Angola 3 News is an official project of the International
Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is
<a href="http://www.angola3news.com/" eudora="autourl">
www.angola3news.com</a>, 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.<br><br>
<br>
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