On the blood of others: re-visiting how “health” happens in interdisciplinary scholarship

ABSTRACT

In much interdisciplinary scholarship, when health and well-being are conceptualized, they are often contextualized in white supremacist, racist, and capitalist frames. To reframe scholarship towards more useful possibilities, we first must confront the historical and ongoing violence brought forth by our reliance on notions of health that often come directly from colonization and slavery and have failed to provide possibilities of health for racialized folks. If capitalism can be described as ‘labour on the backs of Others’, then health is founded on the blood of Others – particularly, those who were enslaved. In naming the socio-historical legacies and their current manifestations, we name some of the interconnected oppressions that we must dismantle in our everyday work as we engage with racialized communities. Our work requires us to politicize the role of health and healing as a crucial component of the better world we are building.

Résumé

Dans la plupart des études interdisciplinaires, lorsque la santé et le bien-être sont conceptualisés, ils sont souvent contextualisés dans des cadres suprématistes blancs, racistes et capitalistes. Pour reformuler la recherche vers des possibilités plus utiles, nous devons d’abord confronter les violences historiques et continues engendrées par notre dépendance aux notions de santé qui proviennent souvent directement de la colonisation et de l’esclavage et qui n’ont pas réussi à fournir des possibilités de santé aux personnes racialisées. Si le capitalisme peut être décrit comme le « travail sur le dos des Autres », alors la santé est fondée sur le sang des autres – en particulier, ceux qui ont été réduits en esclavage. En nommant les héritages sociohistoriques et leurs manifestations actuelles, nous identifions certaines des oppressions interconnectées que nous devons démanteler dans notre travail quotidien lorsque nous interagissons avec les communautés racialisées. Notre travail exige que nous politisions le rôle de la santé et de la guérison en tant qu’élément crucial du monde meilleur que nous construisons.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• white supremacy
• health
• racial capitalism
• slavery

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Racisme
• suprématie blanche
• santé
• capitalisme racial
• esclavage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We conceptualize leisure as a transdisciplinary framework that pulls across bodies of knowledge that always already centers multiple models of health.

2. As Butler (1992, p. 15) wrote, ‘I place them in quotation marks to show that they are under contest, up for grabs, to initiate the contest, to question their traditional deployment, and call for some other. The effect of the quotation marks is to denaturalize the terms, to designate these signs as sites of political debate’.

3. Within racialized communities, there are queer, mad, trans, sick, disabled, poor, biracial, and mixed race folks and more.

4. We refer to ‘Othered’ groups or ‘Others’ as not only groups who are impacted by racism but also refer to all beings that are intentionally exploited by the dominating superstructures of cisheterosexism, white supremacy, human supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, exploitation, genocide, and climate change.

5. “Writing as ‘we’ to convey our shared experiences and referring to ‘our’ field are stylistic choices rife with political ramifications. As Sundberg (2014) explains: ‘Who constitutes this “we” is never located. Instead, the coordinates of this particular “we” are to be found in relation to the geopolitical location of the sources cited and examples given, which are all Anglo-European’. (p. 36) We use ‘we’ and ‘our’ in the absence of alternatives, while looking for alternative ways that might resist the very erasures imposed by them” (Moran & Berbary, 2021, p. 645).

6. Some folks argue slavery was never truly abolished and still exists in many forms in our current moment. Slavery continues to impact millions of people in various forms and its impacts continue to be devastating (Armstrong, 2022).

7. are the political philosophy that supposedly value representation of all peoples within dominating socio-political cultures (Roberts & Doob, 1997). So-called canada’s ‘multicultural heritage’ is written into the Constitution of 1982 in Section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Roberts & Doob, 1997). Yet in actuality, this white settler nation, while purporting the value of multiculturalism, fails in practice and continually privileges the already powerful (Roberts & Doob, 1997). It is now more than 40 years of this law and many of us continue to lived under the conditions of racism that have been unchanged since post world war 2 and has intensified from the 1990s to present (Walcott, 2019).

8. Capitalism is an extractive, political, and economic mode of production that centralizes for profit through capital accumulation, competition of markets, wage labour, ownership of property, and price systems (Held, 1980; Horkheimer, 1982). Historically, the ‘ruling’ classes (i.e. the bourgeoisie,) within the hierarchical class system controlled the means of production to form and obtain capital (Marx et al., 1998). For the ‘ruling’ class, the ownership of capital was the essential condition for existence because it not only meant economic power but it consequently meant, social, and political power. To expand, the economic power of the ruling class dictates the social culture of labourers – those who must work under capitalism – by instilling capitalist ideologies such as competition and individualism into day-to-day social interactions and value systems (Marx et al., 1998). However, Robinson scrutinized these capitalist ideologies as a Western construction rather than a universal, philosophical method that accounts for the racial aspect of capitalism. For Robinson, capitalism grows out of its direct relations to feudalism, and constructed antagonistic, racial differences from the very beginning of european civilization (Robinson, 1983). For example, the first white proletarians were Irish, Jews, and Roma who were ‘racial’ subjects at that time (Robinson, 1983). As capitalism became established, colonialism began to shape regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into racial differences (Burden Stelly, 2020). This is connected to white supremacy because those who were considered ‘racially inferior’ were those who lived more alternatively to the ideologies of whiteness. In the expansion of european colonialism between the fifteenth and nineteenth century, millions of African people were brought to the so-called americas to build productive forces, develop staple industries, and ultimately accumulate capital for the europeans. The establishment of staple industries (such as tobacco and sugar) in so-called north america was dependent on slavery, post-slavery, and the ongoing exploitation of African peoples. This resulted in the death and degradation of African peoples and their social institutions who were impacted by this trade and the underdevelopment of Africa’s economy (Robinson, 1983). Thus, the modern day political economy of racial capitalism is one that was always dependent on slavery, violence, and genocide.

9. Importantly, the slave trade was a way to recruit labour (Denvir, 2021). The Indigenous and Black folks were chosen to take on this heavy labour on the mines and plantations across the atlantic (Burden Stelly, 2020). However it was not a mutual decision between relationships but one that was intentionally extractive. It does not matter if enslavement led to racial hierarchies or if racial hierarchies led to enslavement (Denvir, 2021). They reciprocally enforce each other and function just as they were and are designed to (Denvir, 2021). This also means that while racialization is at the forefront of capitalist hierarchies of worth, not all racialized peoples are mistreated equally within the system – requiring the deep recognition that Black and Indigenous folks continue to be disproportionally disenfranchised within canadian/us contexts.

10. The focus on racial foundations of capitalism can open, as opposed to close, more nuanced linkages that capitalism has to other systems of oppression beyond racialization such as cishetereopatriarchy, ableism, and much more (Burden Stelly, 2020).

11. According to Tuhiwai Smith (2012), ‘Indigenous peoples is a relatively recent term … that internationalized the experiences, the issues, and the struggles of some of the world’s colonized peoples. The final “s” in “peoples” has been argued for quite vigorously by Indigenous activists because of the right of peoples to self-determination. It is also used as a way of recognizing that there are real differences between different Indigenous peoples. The term has enabled the collective voices of colonized people to be expressed strategically in the international area. It has also been an umbrella enabling communities and peoples to come together, transcending their own colonized contexts and experiences, in order to learn, share, plan, organize and struggle collectively for self-determination on the global and local stages. Thus the world’s Indigenous populations belong to a network of peoples. They share experiences as peoples who have been subjected to the colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and determine the shape and quality of their lives even after it has formally pulled out. As Wilmer (1993, p. 5) has put it, “Indigenous peoples represent the unfinished business of decolonization”’ (p. 7). We both recognize this network of Indigenous peoples across the globe and speak more specifically in this paper to the potential experiences of some Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island including, but not limited to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.

12. The reason these stats are here to begin with is because the system is set up to put them there in the first place.

13. Although we say racialized, we recognize that not all racialized groups are impacted by surveillance or policed equally with much of the burden falling directly on Black and Indigenous folks.

14. Leisure is something that has also been medicalized and institutionalized within and outside of the MIC. For example, the medicalized and institutionalized notions of leisure show up in the ways we police what is and what isn’t leisure. We can see this in the context of drug use. In some addiction services, medical detox is offered in an inpatient setting. These services are typically offered for folks who have a history of complicated withdrawal or for whom withdrawal without medication is dangerous (Rush & Furlong, 2019). Withdrawal from addictive substances such as opioids and alcohol can be difficult, emotionally, physically, and mentally. Sometimes folks need ‘professional’ care and support to make the withdrawal process safer (Rush & Furlong, 2019). Yet, in these settings, carceral tactics are used to keep folks who use substances isolated from the broader community. These types of detox programs don’t actually reduce harm because they use strict regulations such as no smoking, no coffee, locked units, which make it nearly impossible to go through actual healing or ‘recovery’ (Steinauer et al., 2017). Addiction care that happens this way also trades the dependency of one substance for another in the name of ‘recovery’. In actuality, this is a carceral tool to criminalize some substances (i.e. fentanyl) while commercializing others (i.e. suboxone) (Barenie & Kesselheim, 2021; Dollar, 2019). These detox programs do not actually contribute to material change for people who resort to using substances as a way to cope with issues that are typically structurally imposed on them. Who is to say that drug use is inherently unhealthy? Is it not human nature to find modes of basic survival through any and all means necessary? What if this is leisure? These types of detox programs are abstinence-based and the high recidivism in these programs serves the capitalist agenda to ensure the MIC stays in business. This is related to racial capitalism because it is the capitalist tendencies that are always already racist, that medicalize and police leisure and continue to institutionalize leisure for profit. Some of the most critical questions we must ask ourselves are epistemic: who gets the possibilities for leisure happening and who doesn’t? Who gets to control what leisure is and who doesn’t? Similar to the ways that under capitalism, labourers must ‘earn’ their living, under capitalism, labourers must also ‘earn’ their leisure and this is not how things should be.

15. Slavery abolition here refers to the institutional elimination of slavery in the united states as some would argue that enslavement continues in different ways across the globe following this period (for example, through mass incarceration).

16. The Nuremberg Code is a set of ethical research rules for human experimentation created after one of the Nuremberg trials that were held after the Second World War. The Nuremberg trials were held by the allies who were against nazi germany, for the invasions of other countries, and other crimes during the Second World War.

17. We recognize some critiques may view mutual aid as ‘letting the government off the hook’ for providing what should be basic resources to the people. We acknowledge that hearty social structures and systems should guarantee housing, healthcare, education, and food security for us all through robust public policy. We also recognize these structures are currently failing to do so and there is need to do something through mutual aid and direct action while we wait for those systems to be reclaimed, reimagined, and made accessible to all.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arany Sivasubramaniam

Arany Sivasubramaniam is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Health at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Lisbeth A. Berbary

Lisbeth A. Berbary is an associate professor in the Faculty of Health at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her work engages liberatory theory practises, creative analytic practices, qualitative and postqualitative inquiry, and progressive politics.