Healthcare as Praxis: Mao, Guevera, Fanon, and the Black Panther Party
The importance of health in anti-racist politics
A particularly interesting -yet oft forgotten- facet of radical politics is the importance that health and healthcare is afforded; the identification of the revolutionary potential of the free and fair distribution of healthcare, and the translation of the polyvalence of ‘health’ into concrete political ideology and practice.
Central to this are Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Frantz Fanon. These theorists have been instrumental in the development of radical politics, but less often associated with the politics of health, despite the latter two being trained physicians.
Their revolutionary view on healthcare will be explored in the context of the revolutionary praxis of the Black Panther Party (henceforth referred to as the BPP, or ‘the Party’), who created concrete and practical implementations of these theories through social programs.
Andrea Nelson has explored this subject in depth in her text ‘Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination’, stating:
These theorists provided the ideological foundation for the Party’s health activism… [supplying] the Panthers with a storehouse of health political ideology, [providing] an ideological bridge between social revolution and ‘revolutionary medicine’.
Health – or the lack of – has always been an indicator of inequality, racial and otherwise. Martin Luther King Jr. emphasised the importance of this when he stated that ‘of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane’ at a speech given to the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966.
This article will provide a focus on health in the creation and implementation of anti-racist political ideology, specifically employing the Black Panther Party’s health-based activism as a case study.
The Black Panther Party and health
The Black Panther Party is known for its community service programs, including The Free Food Program, the Children’s Breakfast Program and The Drug/Alcohol Abuse Awareness Program and yet, their work on health and healthcare equality is less documented.
In the interests of providing a concise yet comprehensive view of the BPP’s focus on health, we will proceed chronologically.
In 1968, the Party headquarters mandated that all chapters inaugurate ‘Serve the People’ programs, providing services such as food and clothing. By 1970, they expanded to pay specific and explicit attention to medical issues and the provision of healthcare, with the establishment of People’s Free Medical Clinics as a chapter-wide requirement. In 1972 came the most important shift yet, with the Party’s ten-point program being revised to demand “completely free healthcare for all Black and oppressed people.”
Just six years after its founding, the BPP had amended its core principles to include health-based activism, including the community control of healthcare facilities; successfully articulating the repressive potential of medical authority and realised the revolutionary possibilities embodied in the free and fair dispensing of healthcare services.
This was a response to the decidedly unequal culture in the medical practice towards African Americans at the time. Party volunteer Marie Branch expressed:
“We were battling a lot of things. . . . [doctors] told women that if they removed part of the uterus, they could still have a baby. . . . We were fighting the partial hysterectomy myth and sterilisation attempts.”
This demonstrates the need for the BPP’s focus on health, and yet this focus did not arise from need alone. In fact, it was consistent with the ideologies that the party was founded upon -and continued to draw upon- specifically, the ideas of Mao, Guevara and Fanon.
Mao, Guevara, and Fanon: The role of health in anti-colonialism
It is widely recognised that Mao, Guevera, and Fanon provided an ideological blueprint for the BPP’s revolutionary praxis. This has been stated by scholars time and time again, further reinforced by Huey P Newton’s autobiography, where he writes:
‘We pored over these books to see how their experiences might help us to understand our plight. We read the work of Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, Mao Zedong’s four volumes, and Guevera’s Guerilla Warfare.’
Their ideas were formative in the Party’s very roots: its adoption of a vanguardist organisational structure, and famously, in its espousal of guerrilla tactics and revolutionary violence. Even its community service programs were rooted in their political ideations. And yet, to reiterate:
‘The ideas of these theorists provided the ideological foundation for the Party’s health activism… [providing] an ideological bridge between social revolution and ‘revolutionary medicine.’
Mao, Guevara and Fanon all highlighted health as an important facet of any political ideology that sought liberation.
Disclaimer: While these thinkers could be considered anti-colonial more than anti-racist in nature, ‘anti-colonial’ and ‘anti-racist’ will be used interchangeably in this article. The reasons for this could be expanded upon, but it will suffice to quote BPP’s Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver: “It is because of the fact that Black people in the United States are also colonised that Fanon’s analysis is so relevant to us.”
We will now provide a brief summary of each of these theorists’ political ideologies with regards to health and anti-colonialism, in order to contextualise the third and final section: the BPP’s implementation of these ideologies as revolutionary praxis.
Guevara became a leader in the Cuban revolution just two years after completing medical school and insisted that health workers had a vital role to play in revolutionary struggles.
He called himself a ‘fighter-doctor’ and a ‘revolutionary doctor,’ and in his famous speech On Revolutionary Medicine, reminisced how, as a young man, he sought to ‘become a famous scientist or make a significant contribution to medical science … to discover something which would be used to help humanity.’ He emphasised the importance of ‘the integration of the physician or any other medical worker, into the revolutionary movement, establishing health work as a bedrock of social transformation, which would be integrated into the BPP as the core of social health perspective.
Fanon’s influence on the BPP has been vastly detailed, with Cleaver noting that ‘Not until we reach Fanon do we find a major Marxist-Leninist theoretician who was primarily concerned about the problems of Black people, wherever they may be found.’ However, it was not Wretched of the Earth, but the text A Dying Colonialism which provided the groundwork for their healthcare implementations.
The chapter Medicine and Colonialism details racialised medical oppression in colonial Algeria, inspiring the Panthers’ critique of the US medical-industrial system as an instrument of social control.
Fanon clarifies that healthcare is necessarily and inextricably linked to other systems of control within a colonial context. He called doctors explicit ‘agents of colonialism’ who administered ‘torture disguised as medicine’, aptly titled ‘subversive warfare.’ This medical warfare included administering medication to induce confessions from Algerian prisoners and deploying categories of medical pathology to mark the colonial subject. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon writes, “It was confirmed that the Algerian was a born criminal. A theory was elaborated and scientific proofs were found to support it” further emphasising the way science was moulded by the colonial state in order to justify and entrench oppression.
The BPP’s apprehension of state-sponsored medical facilities was starkly reminiscent of Fanon’s colonial-era observations, and they employed Fanonian health policies, eschewing said facilities in favour of a community-based set up, where there was no fear of -as a June 1970 newsletter stated — ‘[being] treated like animals, [and] experimented on.’
Finally, Mao emphasised the importance of ‘the masses’ as the source of political and epistemological authority, exemplified by the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) ‘barefoot doctors’ initiative. This initiative encouraged the de-professionalisation of medicine, with urban physicians trading places with rural peasantry. The former divided their time between medical practice and agricultural labour, and the latter learnt traditional healing practices such as acupuncture.
BPP members visited China in the early 1970s and came back with these same ‘barefoot doctor’ techniques. In fact, a member of the BPP explains that “That’s where we got the idea for the mobile unit”, referring to the use of vans to bring healthcare into the community — a practice that is used internationally today. Similarly, Hilliard stated that the Party’s aim was to cultivate ‘revolutionary medicine’ by ‘do[ing] away with the bourgeoisie concept of medicine and ‘[bringing] it down to the community.’
Health as a political ideology: In practice
Drawing upon the ideologies of these theorists was but the first step in the BPP’s emphasis on revolutionary healthcare. The subsequent creation of social programs to implement these ideas serves as a demonstration of the importance of praxis, both generally, and in the case of health-based anti-racism. While examples have been discussed throughout, there is a need for an overarching case study, and this can be found in the Party’s response to sickle cell anaemia.
Science and medicine constructed sickle cell anaemia as an “African American disease”, even though mounting evidence has since demonstrated that this is categorically untrue. Nevertheless, this characterisation was key in the Party’s response to what they called ‘the deliberate and pernicious neglect of African American citizens by the healthcare state’ . In fact, as Nelson states, sickle cell anaemia proved a particularly effective vehicle for Party political ideology. As a condition of the blood, [it] ‘evoked consanguinity and racial kinship.’
Their campaign was a large-scale initiative consisting of two interdependent stages: health education, through the use of pamphlets, newspapers and television, and free genetic screening programs, carried out in a way to ensure accessibility to all: in private homes, clinics, parks and community events.
For the former, not only did these pamphlets turn medical jargon into colloquial language, they also transformed this language into political analysis, framing the disease as ‘the culmination of racial slavery, contemporary racism and the inadequacies of profit-driven healthcare.’ Here, the Party employed scientific language for ideological gain, using the language of evolutionary theory to argue that this disease was the result of slavery and colonialism, further emphasising the link between health and race.
In this way, the Party was able to implement the ideas of Mao, Fanon and Guevera in order to combat a threat to their community, democratising healthcare both in practice and in language.
Conclusion
To conclude this exploration of health and healthcare as an anti-racist tool, we will examine a quote that is believed to encompass the importance of the Black Panther Party’s implementation of the ideas of Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevera and Frantz Fanon regarding the revolutionary potential of the free and fair distribution of healthcare.
In a 1970 issue of the Party’s newsletter, a member of the Party lamented that:
“A poor man has no medical or legal rights. He is a colonised man.”
This idea: that health is the domain of the privileged, is one that has been perpetuated and realised through history time and time again. Science and medicine, as demonstrated above, have been purposed as a tool for oppression by the state, and increasingly, by private actors. This particular injustice is, as Martin Luther King Jr. stated ‘the most shocking and inhumane,’ and the implementation of healthcare services by the Black Panthers, drawing upon a rich revolutionary history, was nothing less than crucial in their fight against racism.
