Black health activism can be inclusive of disability politics, Sami Schalk, professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at a March 2 virtual event.

The event, titled “Articulating and Enacting Black Disability Politics in the National Black Women’s Health Project,” was moderated by Nadia Brown, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. 

During the event, Schalk drew from her second book project, titled “Black Disability Politics,” to discuss how issues of disability have been incorporated into Black activism. 

The women’s and gender studies program, the program in disability studies, the department of African American studies and the Gender Justice Initiative hosted the virtual event. 

The National Black Women’s Health Project, a nonprofit created to advance the health and wellness of Black women and girls, is an example of an organization that enacted Black disability politics within their Black feminist health activism, Schalk said at the event.

“From its inception, the National Black Women’s Health Project promoted an intersectional and specifically Black feminist approach to addressing health disparities and health crises for Black women with an aim to improve health across Black communities in general,” Schalk said.

The National Black Women’s Health Project was founded in 1981 and became an independent nonprofit organization in 1984. The organization officially changed its name in 2002 to the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

In its early years, the project centered around self-help groups, seeing them as a means to impact Black women and Black community health at micro and macro levels, according to Schalk.

“The self-help philosophy of the National Black Women’s Health Project, which undergirded most of their work for over a decade, can be interpreted within a Black disability political framework and multiple ways,” Schalk said. “For instance, while the self-help groups were occasionally formed around specific disabilities, or diseases such as diabetes, the groups were not disability identity-based nor segregated by disability or health status.”

Another differentiating aspect of the Black Women’s Health Project from other groups was its perception of health, according to Schalk.

“The project took a holistic and broad approach to health, which included physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being,” Schalk said. 

The organization’s emphasis on spirituality is another example of how the project’s health activism is linked to Black disability politics, according to Schalk.

“Spirituality is not a common element of disability studies or public health work typically,” Schalk said. “Disability studies scholars have engaged with religion primarily through discussions of ableism and Christian Churches’ critiques of faith, healing and challenges to the idea that disability is either a gift or a curse from God. And yet, spirituality, faith and religion are major parts of Black culture and therefore critical to interpreting Black disability politics.”

The Black Women’s Health Project also sought to promote and create culturally-based public health initiatives, according to Schalk.

“The project was critical of public health programs developed for communities by people outside of those communities,” Schalk said. “They instead promoted and created programming which met people where they were and took the community’s own desires and needs into account.”

In an effort to raise political consciousness, the organization sought to empower people through distributing health knowledge, according to Schalk. 

“The project published vital Signs articles in 1993 and 1994 which specifically detailed how black women with HIV AIDS could qualify for Social Security disability benefits,” Schalk said. “The National Black Women’s Health Project taught Black women how to advocate for themselves and their loved ones within the medical industrial complex.”