A Justice-Aligned Framing of Health

“Health was a site where the stakes of injustice could be exposed and a prism through which struggles for equality could be refracted.”

- Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, Alondra Nelson.

Health can operate as a lens through which injustice becomes visible. It is also an elastic and evolving concept rather than a fixed state, which means that health adjusts and changes according to the environment a person inhabits and their experiences. Across different justice movements, the language of health has been used to articulate struggles for dignity, survival, and equality.

Understanding health in this way situates it as a political, ecological, social, and cultural phenomena impacted by systems of power, material conditions, and historical context. This way of framing health is not new, it has deep historic precedent. Socialist Dr W.E.B Dubois in the 1800’s framed poor health outcomes as being a direct consequence of the racialised Black experience. He could be seen as the godfather of the concept “determinants” of health (source).

We hope you enjoy this provocation from Centric Lab.