NOVEMBER 8, 4:15PM
Location TBA
Reception to follow in the Black Cultural Center Auditorium
Alondra Nelson teaches sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. She taught previously at Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Family Award for teaching excellence. Her book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination was published in Fall 2011. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Her essays, reviews and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Guardian (London). In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. A transplanted Californian, she lives in New York City.
Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination
Alondra Nelson
Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care.
The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. This legacy—and this struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.
Advance Praise for Body and Soul
In Body and Soul, Alondra Nelson combines careful research, deep political insight, and passionate commitment to tell the little-known story of the Black Panther Party’s health activism in the late 1960s. In doing so, and in showing how the problems of poverty, discrimination, and access to medical care remain hauntingly similar more than forty years later, Nelson reminds us that the struggle continues, particularly for African Americans, and that social policies have profound moral implications.
—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
This book is a revelation. Alondra Nelson uncovers two remarkable histories in Body and Soul. First, she provides the deep context for our current conversation about the health disparities that plague the African-American community and that are, as she puts it, ‘quite literally sickening.’ Second, she adds immeasurably to our knowledge of the Black Panther Party, complicating its commonplace designation as a radical, militant organization to unearth its dedication and hard work in advocating for and providing equal and quality health care for even the most underserved African Americans. Nelson is the first scholar I know of to bring these two histories into dialogue with each other, and she does so with spectacular results. This is a tremendously important book.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
