Abstract
In Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, Alondra Nelson intervenes in popular accounts of the black power era, in general, and the Black Panther Party, in particular, by situating Panther health politics within the ongoing struggle to establish health as a human right. In this way, Body and Soul excavates a buried legacy that is deeply relevant today. Among the most important gridlines animating the text is the idea that poor black communities were (and are) situated at a deadly intersection of medical abandonment and overexposure—in Nelson’s words a “dialectic of neglect and surveillance” (p. 164). As such, the Party, while skeptical of mainstream medicine, was not “antimedicine.” Rather, they formed a “calculated politics of health and race” that connects to another tension: whereas the movement ventured close to racial essentialism in its advocacy for sickle cell disease, it rejected any suggestion that African Americans were biologically inferior.
Three additional themes are central to the text—anticolonial approaches to health, intraracial gender domination, and competing forms of citizenship, which I will address briefly in turn. Nelson connects the theoretical underpinnings of the Party’s health activism to the anticolonial writings of Mao Tsetung, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon. This is especially provocative when we consider how the “re-education” model developed by the Panthers, in which they required medical professionals who partnered with them to read anticolonial work, compares to “cultural competency” training found in medical schools today. The latter is often characterized by a kind of cultural determinism in which health-care providers are taught to understand the purported specificity of nonwhite cultural values and behaviors, and where the cultural particularity and power of medical professionals are hardly ever interrogated.
With respect to intraracial gender politics, Body and Soul traces the Party’s shift from “self-defense to self-determination” and increased investment in social programs, in which women took on expanded responsibility for institution building. Nelson explains that “Just as in the black protest tradition in the American South in which the ‘men led but women organized’, these institution-building activities often had a gendered division of labor” (p. 27; emphasis added). However, for women who did not conform to these roles, this traditional sociological framing of oppressive relationships potentially conceals the everyday brutality of gender oppression within social justice movements. For example, former Panther Elaine Brown’s memoir A Taste of Power (1993) describes the moment when Huey Newton appoints her chairperson of the Party and her trepidation because of the deep-seated sexism among those who she expected would vigorously oppose her leadership: “If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of black people …. The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as by being black and poor” (pp. 357, 367).
In the face of such “obliteration,” the conventional sociological framework of “gendered division of labor” appears inadequate. Sociologist Stephen Steinberg’s critique of the language of “race relations” as a euphemism for racial domination offers a productive parallel: “the impact of this nomenclature is to normalize and naturalize racial oppression, to pretend it is consensual, and to conceal its violent underpinnings and periodic atrocities …. A popular adage holds: ‘Don’t piss on me and call it rain.’” Applied to the sociologist, it might read: “Don’t deny me my rights, my livelihood, and my dignity, and call it ‘race relations’” (pp. 39-40), to which we should add, or call it “gender roles.” In this way, Nelson’s analysis lays bare the ever-present paradox in many social justice movements—simultaneously challenging hegemonic forms of patriarchy (in this case, medical patriarchy) while leaving gender domination in tact within the movement.
A third theme is the tension between social citizenship based on civic belonging and biological citizenship based on bodily illness and genetic characteristics. To the extent that current health justice advocates continue to wrestle with the trade-off between short-term forms of biomedical redress and long-term socioeconomic transformations, the text raises an especially poignant question—“what are the transaction costs of biological citizenship?” (p. 163; emphasis added). Here, the Panthers’ experience is cautionary: “marginalized communities were left with an anemic if sometimes efficacious form of biological inclusion in the place of racial equality, social justice, and economic citizenship” (p. 184).
In conclusion, Body and Soul sets a standard for social excavation. When one considers how incredibly hard it is for any living matter to “to leave a tangible record of [its] presence on the Earth ensuring that the fossil record is inherently skewed” (Judson 2008), the import of this text is ever more apparent. In expanding and deepening the grid of intelligibility through which we understand the Black Panther Party, Nelson reveals how central they are to any vision of health as a human right.