Unnatural Sciences

Artwork by Safa Hussein

White supremacy seeks to normalise that which is wholly unnatural; the deification of one group and the dehumanisation of all others. This occurs through the twin projects that seek to both construct narratives that support this and destruct others that endanger them. It is the responsibility of the race-maker to ensure the conservation and survival of their rendering of the world. The most effective way to do so is to conflate the narrative with reality; make them one and the same to prevent criticisms that would endanger them. This is how white supremacy functions. This is how its parent, colonialism, functions. It is the responsibility of those uninterested in a white supremacist hierarchy to name that which is unnatural, unreasonable, fictional, and horrific. Let us discuss the North American medical establishment.

When I look at the communities I am a part of I see the trauma and fear medicine has embedded in them. I see the avoidance, the hostility, and the suspicion as responses to the consistency in which violence has been perpetrated against them at their most vulnerable. I also see the ease with which they are told to disregard it. The message is medical violence—while regrettable—is unavoidable, so it is in our best interest to return to these doctors, nurses, hospitals, and institutions at our most vulnerable. When there is resistance to this circuitous violence it is immediately pathologized; we are blamed for this suspicion.¹ An aversion to orthodox medical practitioners is a marker of cultural ignorance. We see this in the way our institutions readily take up the issues of “hesitance” and “stigma” claiming to rescue these people of nescience with the knowledge they so desperately require. Yet the violence continues to occur. The suspicion remains.

On Vaccine Hesitancy

Let us first begin to understand the inadequacy of a term like “hesitancy” to describe these phenomena. Anti-vax sentiments and vaccine hesitancy are often conflated and disregarded as equally hysterical and malicious. Hesitancy as a broad and vague term allows for this conflation, in fact, it invites it. “Hesitancy” stops short of asking why? Why are people refusing to access healthcare? Why are we shedding light on them now? Why would folks rather risk their lives and—in the case of a global pandemic—those around them than enter into a medical space? Why racialized, migrant, and/or impoverished communities? And most importantly, why here?

The incidence of preventable infectious diseases has been rising for decades now.² They have been linked to the systematic and systemic abandonment of racialized communities across the West. The pandemic highlighted and exacerbated these issues but they were prevalent for at least a decade earlier.³ Only when economic collapse and broader danger to life are imminent are these issues brought into national awareness. It is also important to ask if the centralization of the West in global issues causes us to assume these are simply global trends and not related to the unique social and economic conditions of Euro-American medical practices.

On Medical Violence and Colonialism

Modern medical history and its progression must be understood within the context of the creation of race, colonisation, and the transatlantic slave trade.⁴ In these battles for empire, medical doctors found their purpose and opportunity as sickness reigned in the ships and ports trafficking human beings. As the experiences of Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha demonstrate, men of European descent found new opportunities to participate in the systems of enslavement by experimenting on those in bondage. In many ways, medical practitioners in North America have relied on enslaved persons to provide them with professional, political, and social relevance. Science, medicine, and experimentation in this nation-state are interconnected and they have violent origins. Medical practitioners, now revered, have and continue to experiment on colonised peoples.⁵ Carcerality and violence are embedded into every institution we come into contact with, including medicine. These histories have shaped and continue to inform modern practise. We must criticise the fact that Henrietta Lacks had her bodily matter stolen from her, cultivated, sold, and experimented on to this day. In nearly every sense, modern medicine continues to rely on the subjection of Black folk (specifically women) to provide them with professional, political, and social relevance.

The Facade of Progress

In a time where fiction threatens reason and misinformation reigns supreme, it may seem unwise to raise criticism against an institution as essential as medicine. Attacks on public healthcare, the deregulation of the medical profession, and the exacerbation of inequalities and inequities in the provision of healthcare are ushering in an era of a wild west in healthcare. Why should we continue to trouble the base foundations of medicine in this country? Would that not serve to aid in the crumbling of healthcare? To this I say; will we not forever need access to medical care? Is it not essential that we arm ourselves with the knowledge required to practise discernment, embody our agency, and create for ourselves a future of healing that does not demand our bodies and lives as sacrifices? This system that relishes in its inaccessibility, is content in perpetrating harm, and sustains parasitic social and economic structures cannot be all there is. In this age of scientific accomplishment, we have deluded ourselves into believing that Western medicine has shed its violent proclivities. We have deluded ourselves into believing it is not elitist; steeped in the imperial logic that it is divine, unimpeachable, and gracious; it convinces us that it is alone in its so-called rationality and objectivity. The narratives that fueled imperial projects and that colonised land and people alike have been preserved in North American medicine. We must recognize this.

However, let us not dismiss all the institution holds. For much of its knowledge has been seized and excised from the bodies, communities, and knowledge systems of those colonised and racialized by Europeans and their descendants. The knowledge it contains may be beneficial but like Western medical practice, it must be scrutinised. The suspicion that is so clearly denigrated and pathologized in our communities is not only legitimate, it is necessary. How can we not be suspicious when we are being neglected to death? Experimented on? When our mothers, sisters, and siblings are subjected to awful and inhumane practices simply because they have no other choice? To ask for the erasure of this suspicion without foundational transformations is to demand deference to a state that has reiterated time and time again its dedication to our erasure. It is simply idiotic. We must busy ourselves with finding the solution for the disease, not the symptom. To do that we must understand it. Rather than lazily wrapping it up as some offshoot of systemic racism or capitalism, we must ask: how does healthcare in North America actively participate in racial capitalism? What do they stand to gain? Lose? How can we work to rebuild the networks of healing the state has and continues to disrupt? How can we reimagine them?

Sources

1. See: Suspicion: Vaccines, hesitancy, and the affective politics of protection in Barbados (Nicole Charles).
2. Tankwanchi, Akhenaten Siankam, Brett Bowman, Michelle Garrison, Heidi Larson, and Charles Shey Wiysonge. "Vaccine hesitancy in migrant communities: a rapid review of latest evidence." Current Opinion in Immunology 71 (2021): 62-68.
3. “Vaccine Hesitancy in Migrant Communities”. Is it no longer acceptable when the effects are felt outside of these communities?
4. No, medicine is not impermeable to sociopolitics.
5. The most prominent being the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and those perpetrated by J. Marion Sims. Experimentation by medical practitioners have been revealed to have occurred throughout the twentieth century as in the Holmesburg Prison experiments where those imprisoned were subjects.