The Black Panthers’ Struggle Against the US Politics of Health
<p>This conversation with Alondra Nelson focuses on the socio-historical descriptions of her book <em>Body and Soul </em>(University of Minnesota, 2011) that unfolds the work of the Black Panthers (late 1960s – 1970s) to resist against the highly discriminatory mechanisms of the politics of health in the United States. Following the structure of the book, we discuss the discrimination against the African American community, both in its negligence (inappropriate healthcare response to disease, prohibitive cost of care) and in its active medicalization of marginalized bodies (scientific research on convicts and women, experimental brain surgery). Against this systemic oppression, the Black Panther Party created its own clinics, as well as a politics of knowledge to counter the racialized medicalization. Health being the realms of the biological function of bodies, discriminatory healthcare (as it continues to be) corresponds to racial violence to its most intimate violence: we thus frame our conversation within a broader historical account of how racism has been exercised in the last two centuries.</p>
Host: Léopold Lambert
Guests: Alondra Nelson
Part of: The Funambulist Podcast