Scholar Sami Schalk On Black Disability Politics from the Black Panthers to the 2020 Uprising

Madison BookBeat

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Sami Schalk about her book, Black Disability Politics (2022, Duke University Press).

Across six tightly-argued chapters and two praxis-focused interludes, Black Disability Politics explores how Black cultural workers have engaged disability as a social and political issue differently than the mainstream, white-dominated disability rights movement. In doing so, Schalk argues that because Black disability politics take on different qualities, the work has been overlooked or misrecognized within disability studies and Black studies alike. Using archival work on the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, as well as interviews with eleven contemporary Black disabled cultural works, the book offers a framework for both identifying and enacting Black disability politics for scholars and activists.

“We cannot understand Black disability politics,” Schalk writes in the Introduction, “without engaging histories of anti-Black violence, scientific and medical racism, health disparities, health activism and environmental racism. We also cannot understand Black disability politics without exploring how Black people have conceptualized not only disability, illness, and disease but also health, wellness, and healing within our own communities” (9-10).

Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She has published on literature, film, and material culture in a variety of peer-reviewed humanities journals.

You can find out more about her at samischalk.com and follow her @DrSamiSchalk.

Cover photo courtesy of Duke University Press.