Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway

Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.
 

Barnard Center for Research on Women 

The second event in BCRW’s newly inaugurated Salon Series features Karla FC Holloway, Tina Campt, Farah Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Alondra Nelson. These scholars, whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics, respond to Karla FC Holloway’s book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press, 2011), an important and groundbreaking work that examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere, calling for a new cultural bioethics that attends to the complex histories of race, gender, and class in the US. This salon took place on March 21, 2012 at Barnard College.

Alondra Nelson Discusses Body & Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination on French TV

Alondra Nelson discusses Body & Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination with the French program, La Clé des Langues.

Could the Black Panther Party Have Achieved Universal Healthcare?

from  MidweekPolitics:

 

Alondra Nelson, Columbia professor and author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, joins us to discuss the Black Panther Party's healthcare platform, and David wonders whether a history of violence prevented the Black Panther Party from being taken more seriously on healthcare.

Black Athletes and the Racial Politics of Sickle Cell

Black Athletes and the Racial Politics of Sickle Cell

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

With the Raiders losing on Sunday, the Denver Broncos backpedaled their way into the 2012 NFL playoffs.  Although guaranteeing one more week of conversations about Tim Tebow, a fact that no one should wish for, their playoff birth is dramatically impacting the Pittsburgh Steelers and more specifically their safety Ryan Clark.   On Monday, Tomlin announced that Clark would be unable to play with the team because he has a sickle-cell trait, which can cause problems in high altitude situations.  During a 2007 game in Denver, Clark became terribly ill.  Doctors had to remove his spleen and gallbladder; as a result of his organs being deprived of oxygen, Clark lost an astounding 30 pounds.

While the threat to his life is significant, and the decision to skip the game would seem to be a no-brainer, Clark had planned to play.  “I mean, everybody knows I want to play and I would have played,” Clark told ESPN. “I talked to my doctors and we actually had a plan in place for me to play. All things pointed to me going until (Tomlin) told me I can't. He said he wouldn't have let his son play and so I'm not playing either.”  It would be easy to dismiss Clark’s comments, assuming that his plans to play were never realistic or possible.  Yet, it is not hard to imagine an NFL player risking life and limb to play “on any given Sunday.” 

In an Associated Press story on San Diego Charges offensive Lineman, Kris Dielman, acknowledged a willingness to risk his health in his pursuit to win a Super Bowl title.  Dielman, who missed 10 games as a result of a concussion, had a seizure during a post-game team flight, resulting in him being rushed to the hospital.  “This was definitely a scare.  Waking up in the hospital with my wife standing over me, that was pretty scary. I don’t scare easy, but that was something different.” Neither this scare nor his 2 kids at home changed his approach to the game.  He is not alone.  Two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that half of the players (23/44) of the players they interviewed admitted that, “they would try to conceal a possible concussion rather than pull themselves out of a game.”  So it should surprise no one that Clark wants to play.  

In a sport and a culture that defines masculinity through toughness, invincibility, and competitive fire. In a world of sports that values “winning at all costs” and “a never quit attitude,” Clark’s response reflects the masculinist orientation of sports culture.  This is why Coach Mike Tomlin’s decision to hold Clark out of the game, and his unwillingness to ask his players to do anything he wouldn’t feel comfortable asking his children to do, is one worth celebrating.  It challenges the culture of masculinity and the ways in which a football culture puts victories and a particular vision of masculinity ahead of everything else.

What has also been striking in the media coverage of Clark’s situation is the absence of any discussion of sickle cell/sickle cell trait in relationship to African Americans.  There is a missed opportunity here to differentiate between the trait and disease; Clark has the trait and not the disease.  While some articles discussed the medical science related to sickle-cell and how it put him at risk in high altitude settings, with most treating his inability to play as another sports-related “injury story,” there is bigger story here as it relates to sickle cell and African Americans.  

This erasure fits with a larger history whereupon the health issues faced by people of color are rendered invisible.   Writing about the Black Panther Party and its efforts “to raise public consciousness about sickle cell anemia,”  Alondra Nelson states in Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. “The condition became a rallying cry for other representatives of the black community.”    The media missed an opportunity to highlight how this disease disproportionately impacts African Americans.  In the United States, 1 in 12 African Americans carries the sickle cell trait (1 in 500 have the disease). 

The missed opportunity reflects an overall failure to acknowledge the ways in which sickle cell disproportionately impacts African Americans.  As Imani Perry told me, “Being at higher risk, because one belongs to a particular ethnic group, has to be distinguished from the idea that the disease is actually a consequence of race, which is a social construct” notes the Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, “Some diseases are more likely to be found in particular ethnic or racial groups, but that may be a product of environmental conditions or history rather than some genetics that correlate to what we call race.” 

While race is a social construction, with zero biological imperative, this disease effects African Americans in devastating ways.  In “Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health,” Keith Wailoo argues that “history of sickle cell anemia in the United States,” is a story of “transformation from an ‘invisible’ malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering.”

Ryan Clark’s situation was an opportunity to highlight and encourage public awareness in an effort to address this inequality.  Likewise, it provided an opportunity to illustrate the ways in which race is a social and political construction while elucidating the relationship between sickle cell and African Americans.  As with the 1970s that saw not only an increased awareness regarding the impact of sickle cell on African Americans but financial support for targeted treatment of health disparities, instances like Ryan Clark highlight such opportunities. 

According to James Braxton Peterson, associate professor and director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University:

Clark's presentation of the sickle cell trait is a painful reminder of the ways in which genetic predisposition to disease (and broader distinctions in health and health care along racial lines) continue to remain absent from health care discourses. The subject has become taboo because it runs counter to post-racial fantasies of colorblindness or what I like to call - just plain old blindness. That Clark's condition is manifest on the "level" playing field of a football stadium puts into bold relief the ways in which blindness in health care - whether its the gender lag that attaches to breast cancer research resources or the racial/class lag of diseases like sickle cell anemia -- results in the same diminished care as a direct result of social ignorance and the biased distribution of health care resources.

The NFL should take a lesson from Tomlin and Clark, putting the health of the PEOPLE who play the game ahead of anything else.  Likewise, the nation should take a lesson from Tomlin and Clark, putting the health of PEOPLE ahead of anything else, addressing the issue of sickle cell with greater concern and attention. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

Alondra Nelson: The Black Panther Party and Health Care Equality @ Vanderbilt University

from Vanderbilt University

Watch video of Alondra Nelson, associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, speaking Nov. 8.

Typically associated with the revolutionary rhetoric and militant action of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party  did significant and lesser-known work pursuing equality in the health care system. Efforts included a network of free health clinics, a campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease and challenges to medical discrimination.

Nelson, the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, discusses the legacy of this advocacy as well as the relevance today in the campaign for universal health care.

The talk was sponsored by the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

Left of Black S2:E7 with Jonathan Gayles and Alondra Nelson

Left of Black S2:E7

w/ Jonathan Gayles and Alondra Nelson

October 24, 2011

Jonathan Gayles, professor of African American Studies at Georgia State University and writer, director, and producer of the film White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in American Comic Books joins host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal on Left of Black. Gayles discusses reaction to his movie, which won best documentary feature at the 2010 Urban Media Makers Film Festival and remembers the impact of the late Dwayne McDuffie founder of Milestone Media. Neal and Gayles also discuss Black Entertainment Television’s ill-fated attempt to bring the animated series Black Panther to television.

Neal is also joined by Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination Nelson reveals the historical relationship between the Black Panther Party and medicine.  Nelson reminds audiences of the real danger Civil Rights activists faced while marching and sitting-in, and how issues of healthcare were of practical concern given the threats of violence.  Nelson highlights the how the work of the Black Panther Party continues to inform community medicine movements.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for download @ iTunes U

'Left of Black' Marks the 45th Anniversary of the Founding of The Black Panther Party with Author and Professor Alondra Nelson

Left of Black Marks the 45^thAnniversary of the Founding of The Black Panther Party with Author and Professor Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discriminationjoins host Mark Anthony Neal on the October 24^th episode of Left of Black. On the episode, Nelson reveals the historical relationship between the Black Panther Party and medicine.  Nelson reminds audiences of the real danger Civil Rights activists faced while marching and sitting-in, and how issues of healthcare were of practical concern given the threats of violence.  Nelson highlights the how the work of the Black Panther Party continues to inform community medicine movements.

Neal is also joined by Jonathan Gayles, professor of African American Studies at Georgia State University and writer, director, and producer of the film White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in American Comic Books. Gayles discusses reaction to his movie, which won best documentary feature at the 2010 Urban Media Makers Film Festival and remembers the impact of the late Dwayne McDuffie founder of Milestone Media. Neal and Gayles also discuss Black Entertainment Television’s ill-fated attempt to bring the animated series Black Panther to television.

***

Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on Duke's Ustream channel: ustream.tv/dukeuniversity. Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal and featured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive. 

Left of Black is recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Follow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackMan

Follow Alondra Nelson: @Alondra

Follow Jonathan Gayles: @JonathanGayles

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Atelier@Duke: Private Bodies

Atelier@Duke: Private Bodies
February 25, 2011

Panelists at the Atelier@Duke symposium discuss "Private Bodies," the fourth of five panels at the Atelier@Duke, an event marking the 15th anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke University Libraries.

Panelists include Harriet Washington (Author, Medical Apartheid), Charmaine Royal (Duke), Alondra Nelson (Columbia), Anne Lyerly (UNC-CH), and moderator Karla Holloway (Duke).