Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013, 291 pages, $18.95/£14.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8166-7649-1, 
$24.95/£32 hardback ISBN 978-0-8166-7648-4.

See Angela Last's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Re-reading worldliness: Hannah Arendt and the question of matter

Portrayals of the Black Panther Party have varied considerably across academic writing and popular media, Lee Daniel’s The Butler (2013) being the most recent example of the latter. From a purely instrumental perspective, discussions of the Party have been at their most productive when they resisted producing reductive caricatures of the ‘bad militant’ or the ‘good civil rights hero’. By instrumental, I mean: how can thinking about the actions of and reactions to the Black Panther Party be helpful to academics, activists and other individuals opposed to structural inequality today?

Alondra Nelson’s book Body and Soul (2013) represents a valuable resource in this respect. In describing and analysing how African American health was singled out by the Black Panther Party as a subject from which a wider contestation of systematic discrimination could be launched, she highlights tensions that continue to pose a challenge to civil rights movements. Nelson’s interest lies in the Party’s development of strategies to facilitate a shift in medical authority over and within African American communities. The book thus focuses on the varied aspects of the Party’s health activism, which ranged from the assembly of ‘activist-run no-cost or low-cost clinics’ (2013: 18) and educational outreach to the building of genetic screening programmes and legal challenges to racialised violence research. Instead of constructing a narrative around well-known Black Panther personalities, Nelson gives an insight into the everyday practices that make up the Party’s politics by detailing the efforts of activists (in the health programme these appear to be mostly women) from a diversity of professional backgrounds, from unemployed workers to lawyers. Throughout the narrative, Nelson appears to emphasise the rather mundane tasks required to mobilise people and knowledge: going round with clip boards to register neighbours’ health care concerns, fundraising for food or medical supplies, driving improvised ambulances, talking about sanitation, doing cervical smears, learning legal jargon and biomedical theory. This ‘sense of co-production as method’, as Dave Featherstone (2013) has noted in an earlier review in Society and Space Open Site, is often conspicuously absent from accounts that concentrate on the aspirations of political movements. Although centred around co-production, Body and Soul does not lose sight of the constant interchange and the manifold types of political work between small-scale practices and the advancement of a bigger idea.

As part of this emphasis on the ordinary with in the extraordinary, Nelson takes care to not only tell the success stories, but also the failures or problems: the intense efforts required to maintain resource-intensive institutions including sabotaged gear and unreliable volunteers, occasional misinterpretation of medical test results (by both BPP and ‘official’ institutions), panic and distrust around the origins or treatment of sickle cell anaemia, and tensions within the Party and African American activists in general. These ‘human’ aspects form part of Nelson’s conceptualisation of ‘social health’, through which she tries to link the embodied individual not only to the ‘medical-industrial complex’, but to the wider ‘body politic’:

‘With the phrase ‘social health’ I mean to characterise the activists’ efforts on the terrain of health and biomedicine as being oriented by an outlook on well-being that scaled from the individual, corporeal body to the body politic in such a way that therapeutic matters where inextricably articulated to social justice ones.’ (2013: 11)Here, the analysing, probing, organising bodies of the Black Panther activists become examples of an enacted or ‘embodied critique’ (2013: 32).

Alondra Nelson takes care to describe how the ‘embodied critique’ was taken by the Party to the level of the institutional body. In order to respond not only to the failure, but also to the active violence of official institutions, health clinics were formed as an alternative network that sought to cater to those ‘underserved by and overexposed to the medical system’ (2013: 21). Framed by Nelson as a typical African American response to inequality alongside integrationism and intervention in the ‘politics of knowledge’, institution building ‘refers to the establishment of parallel facilities, alternative health initiatives, and autonomous organisations to compensate for a paucity of accessible healthcare options’ (2013: 24). These institutions, so Nelson notes, drew as much on immediate historical precedents such as the ‘black hospital movement’ (2013: 8), as on the recent revolutionary examples such as Guevara’s call for an ‘institutionalisation of the revolution’ (2003 [1965]: 219) and Mao’s barefoot doctors. Considering the exposure of African Americans, especially poor African Americans, to routine experimentation and sterilisation, lack of access to health care or health education, barriers to professional bodies, in addition to the pervasive segregation and intimidation, the goal of ‘revolutionary’ outperforming state does not come across as fanciful as it may initially sound. Indeed, as Nelson writes, some of the Black Panther Party health initiatives, such as genetic screening, became increasingly seen as a model for (and embarrassment to) government institutions (2013: 144).

The book’s examples are especially thought-provoking in their emphasis on the diversity of interactions: between government and Party, lay publics and experts, individuals and bigger systems, official and alternative institutions, African American and other movements. For instance, Nelson traces how US administrations responded to the Party’s institutions and demands through partial adoption as well as violent suppression while these responses, in turn, transformed the Party’s strategies. In concrete terms, this translated into the government both increasing health provision and intimidating activists through its COINTELPRO programme in order to reassert control over its image, while the Party responded with attempts to alter their politicisation of health as well as their own, increasingly negative, image. Likewise, the interactions between expert medical volunteers and ‘amateurs’ are portrayed as a two-way encounter, where experts taught volunteers and patients about medicine, but were also taught about the theoretical and cultural foundations of the programme (e.g. through reading groups).

By examining the mechanics of ideological and representational struggle, Nelson also exposes how common, but differently enacted ideological foundations have been central to the evolution of not only the Party’s, but also of the US health programme. Human rights discourse, in particular, is discussed as central to the US government’s image as well as to the Black Panther Party’s leverage:

‘More proximate to the Black Panthers was the capacious idea of a right to health elaborated in the 1948 constitution of the World Health Organisation, underlain by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights formalised in the same year, which affirmed the ‘inherent dignity’ and ‘inalienable rights’ of all human beings’ (2013: 11).

In a similar manner, the ‘War on Poverty’ of the Johnson administration is shown to be both an object of the Party’s critique as well as an inspiration for particular practices. Again, Nelson stresses the different understanding and enactment of common concepts such as ‘community action’ (2013: 58). As she shows, such overlaps and differences necessitated a continual negotiation of boundaries, even on a basic level: what is ‘us’ and what is used against ‘us’? Does taking state funding undermine the campaign? Do lab coats worn in clinics represent a threatening or welcoming authority? How should the Party engage with evolution? This sense of managing instability is found throughout the book: the ‘interpretive flexibility’ of sickle cell anaemia (2013: 130), the shifting Party and government image, the conflicting directions of Black nationalism, the changing status of African American bodies, the double-edgedness of philanthropy. At the same time, the tenacity of issues is rendered painfully apparent. Towards the end of the book, Alondra Nelson draws clear parallels with the present, where issues such as disease research funding, vulnerability to experimentation and neglect of poor African American communities (e.g. in the aftermath of Katrina) and the biologisation of violence, poverty and disease persist. In some of these situations, the Black Panther Party’s health programmes are revealed to not only continue as an influence (some of the health clinics even still exist), but see a mirroring through new alternative institutions.

Overall, the reader gets a good sense of how the focus on health functioned as powerful lever to tackle both specific issues such as the experimentation on African Americans and wider issues such as the ‘struggle over the terms of black citizenship’ (2013: 187). In fact, through their ‘political diagnosis of illness’ (see Nelson, 2013: 119), the Black Panther Party emerges as an entity that tests the limits of what is now called ‘active citizenship’. Here, Body and Soul seems to raise questions such as: how active are citizens allowed to be when it comes to the assertion of their rights and the protection of their well-being?

Further, the political struggle between government and the Black Panther Party over the reading of disease – as a result of endemic inequality or biological inferiority/specificity – renders vividly apparent how the biologisation of social issues can operate as a means to avoid structural change. Instead of transforming the social conditions that lead to bad health provision, genetic screening programmes or slightly increased medical research funding are put in place. Parallels with the ‘more-than-drugs’ position of AIDS activists (see Briers, 2009: 156-7) or with the racialised ‘war on drugs’ (see Hart, 2013; Provine, 2007) come to mind. Here, especially Nelson’s analysis of the Party’s sickle cell campaign illustrates how the way that health is politicised matters. She joins other authors in asking: how can depoliticisation be avoided? How can issues be framed in such a way that no band-aid solutions can obliterate their original demands? Is it possible at all? In her search for answers, Nelson’s observations and discussions offer an important addition to the archive of activist strategies. While not providing the reader with a rousing ending in terms of ‘not winning the struggle, but changing the terms of the debate’, she tries to delineate these terms more clearly through a strangely refreshing dose of cynicism. By referring to current debates around issues such as resistance to US healthcare reform or demands for race-based drugs (the black body as ‘specific’ rather than universal), she demonstrates how the terms keep changing (or being changed), but not necessarily in progressive ways. Similarly, she re-emphasises that gains in health provision often come at the price of a longer perspective. However, far from immobilising, this cynicism invites increased vigilance and complication of issues that appear monolithic. Paired with the book’s feminist sensitivity to the relation between power and ordinary practices, it makes possible a reading of health as ‘politics by other means’ (Latour, 1993) that may be fraught with immense obstacles, but still remains within the reach of sufficiently determined publics. 

References

Brier J (2009) Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Feathersone D (2013) Review of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s “Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left” Society and Space Open Site.

Guevara E (1965) Socialism and Man in Cuba. In: D Deutschmann (ed) Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution. Melbourne: Ocean Books, pp. 212-228.

Hart C (2013) High Price. London: Penguin.

Latour B (1993) The Pasteurisation of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Provine DM (2007) Unequal under law: Race in the war on drugs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.