Catharine Coleborne on Sami Schalk’s *Black Disability Politics*

Written during the COVID pandemic, Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics is designed as a scholarly intervention into present communities affected by disability. Inflected by the experiences of black people during the pandemic in the United States in 2020-21, the book offers a critical appraisal of past episodes in American health history including the role of civil rights activists in the Black Panther Party and their responses to psychiatric treatment and incarceration, as well as experiences of HIV AIDS and the shaping of the National Black Women’s Health Project in the early 1980s.

This context for the production of the book helps to situate its political meanings: spanning the field of critical disability studies, intersectional analysis, and the politics of ‘rights’, the book interrogates the potential and conditions for social change. Schalk’s purpose here is to highlight the way that social change acts as a pivot for the meanings of disability politics for black identities, but also to show how black struggles for justice now inform health and disability rights.

Schalk’s research included interviews with black people living with disability who are both cultural workers, and activists, as explained in the book’s introduction.[1] By listing the names of those participants up front, explaining their identities and roles, Schalk is bold about her methodology and framing of the personal identity politics central to this study. Her narrative also moves between histories and the present which allows her to capture temporal shifts and the question of ‘change’ as a subject itself. I found this a powerful approach – it reminded me of the way research projects can become agents of change while documenting change, especially common in research about forms of activism with roots in the twentieth-century past. While not precisely ‘action research’, this work shares aspects of this type of scholarship and also creates a new form for the investigation of historical change and future action.

In the selected case studies, Schalk asks how change happens. In the 1970s the Black Panther Party in the United States fought for justice and black civil rights, but also became an ally to the disability community, despite flaws in their use of terminology and concepts of disability, as Schalk goes on to show in the first of two ‘praxis interludes’. Schalk examines the way psychiatry and its institutions, and also prisons, became sites of abuse and violence towards black people, raising questions about the safety of black people who were confined or incarcerated. Evidence of the Black Panther Party’s advocacy for people who were affected by psychiatric abuse saw them collaborate with other organisations such as the Network Against Psychiatric Assault. Here, Schalk uses archival records and Black Panther Party publications. These different strands of primary source material help to bring a range of aspects of the activities of the Panthers to light, also reminding readers of the intersections between the many ‘rights’ being articulated in the period. This is, of course, another aim of Schalk’s narrative: to show that past appraisals of health and disability, of black rights and disability, have largely been compartmentalised rather than considered as part of the same history.

Schalk includes the ‘praxis interludes’ to connect readers with the impact of both action and scholarship, and scholarship in action. These interventions serve to remind readers of the social underpinning of the scholarship but also of the impact that thinking through these problems can have for those wanting to challenge the status quo. Praxis Interlude One concerns ‘Anti-Ableist Approaches to Fighting Disabling Violence’. This comes at an important juncture in the book between case studies and invites readers and users of the book to interrogate historical uses of problematic language to describe disability which inscribe violence.

Schalk’s next case studies focused on women’s health and HIV AIDS bring another analytical domain into the frame: gender and sexuality. These themes illustrate the impact of late twentieth-century theorisation: postcolonial and feminist analyses offer the potential for rich exchanges about blackness. The content of the book is, as Schalk notes, ‘intersectional but race centred’.[3] Following from these positions, the second praxis interlude invites readers and users of this book to engage with a deeper understanding of ‘disability identity’. As well as drawing on her interviews with participants throughout the book, Schalk writes about her personal encounters with (and discovery of) her own identity in the book’s opening, commenting that she comes to embrace, announce and own her identity as disabled through doing the work, also refusing to ‘other’ disabled people in her narrative.

I like the way Schalk engages readers and takes us through momentous periods in the 1970s and 1980s, showing the urgency and impact of the political change on the ground. It was not until the late 1980s that societies fully grasped the effect of stigma in the wake of the AIDS crisis. In terms of the politics of gender, sexuality and identity, the combined impact of exclusion and silencing of communities affected by illness, disease and disability in the context of the array of conservative governments leading Western nations was writ large in the United States. The possibilities signalled by the National Black Women’s Health Project as part of the National Women’s Health Project in the early 1980s were glimmers of hope set against the backdrop of a system moving even further away from equity and access to healthcare.

By using evidence that both stretches across the historical period and is also derived from present praxis, Schalk creates a new and innovative methodological framework for the scholarship of disability and identity. There is much to learn about black disability politics through the accounts of the work of the Panthers and other groups, key publications and the activist interactions described in this book. Schalk hopes that this will also form a handbook for thinking about black disability in action.

[1] Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics (Duke University Press, Durham: 2022), 19-20.

[2] These are located at different points in the book; see Schalk, Black Disability Politics, 69-80; 129-39.

[3] Schalk, Black Disability Politics, 12.