Body and soul: the Black Panther Party and the fight against medical discrimination

I n their recent collection of essays on the insurgent form of sociality they dub “the undercommons,” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe a temporal paradox at the heart of radical world-making. Struggles for racial, social, and economic justice entail an unwavering commitment to a future less immiserating than the present, an antagonistic thrust that pushes toward the upheaval of pernicious, often apocalyptic, structures of violence and death-dealing. But underneath this negative orientation toward the modal future—toward what must be destroyed so that collective flourishing might commence—there also lies an unambiguously optimistic impulse: the imperative to protect and affirm those already existing forms of life that function as the source of, and as a resource for, collective struggle. To clarify this double tense at play in the affective form of the undercommons, they turn to the Black Panther Party (BPP)—founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Moten and Harney would surely underscore, as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. “The Panthers’ twinned commitment to revolution and self-defense,” Moten and Harney write, “emerged from the recognition that the preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of innovation.” In other words, there is, they insist, a correspondence between destruction and preservation that forms the crucible of a Black radical tradition. In her magisterial study of the BPP’s health radicalism, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, Book Reviews 177