Washington DC, March 14 — Over 40 public health workers and students attended an anti-racist gathering today. It was led by three Black workers who addressed disparities in mental health and solitary confinement for incarcerated Black and Latin workers, racism and police terror, and the upcoming arbitration hearing in June on the DC transit system’s racist background checks.
During the discussion period, people denounced capitalism and the profits it makes from prison slave labor. Others condemned the arrests in Ferguson, and called for a fight for jobs. One Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member declared that mass incarceration, generated by the war on drugs — a war on Black workers — jailed tens of thousands of young Black men to take potential militant fighters off the street.
PLP members met many new students, workers, and health professionals. Ten signed up to help on the Metro campaign against racist background checks and to join the upcoming conference on mass incarceration, mental health, and homelessness.
Earlier, on February 28, a PLP leader and a friend of the Party addressed 100 students at the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) convention session on mass incarceration and the history of racist oppression. The students responded with enthusiasm to the presentation and vigorously discussed strategies to organize against racism. Students in Maryland had organized a social justice discussion group while others organized medical student “die-ins” to oppose racist murders by cops. Local students as well as those from other states gave their contact information for anti-racist campaigns in health care. The Student National Medical Association (SNMA) chapter at George Washington University (GWU) organized a “die-in” and sponsored programs to train student activists.
For the past two years the Disparities Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) has been campaigning against Metro’s background-check policies. The organization has been fighting to get former prisoners hired and not fired. PLP members have been important in this work. The issue has become well-known in DC and now the leaders of MWPHA and the GWU School of Public Health have joined in activities to broaden the struggle.
During the upcoming National Public Health Week in April, the Dean of the School of Public Health at GWU will speak on mass incarceration. In the coming fall, MWPHA’s annual conference will focus on Incarceration, mental health and homelessness. The Public Health Student Association (PHSA) will also present a session on grass roots organizing. They have invited a PL’er to speak.
Members of AMSA, SNMA, and PHSA are planning to work together on these issues. This will be an important step towards multi-racial unity and student health activism.
Despite these encouraging developments, a sharper discussion of capitalism and the need for communist revolution must develop with the many antiracist workers and students who have participated in our work. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Communism is the way to abolish the ills of this racist society. These truths must be raised more clearly in our forums, so that we can offer the vision of a communist society to the broad masses.
PLP is launching a study group with many of these new activists to address these points. We want these new activists to join the Party, participate in May Day on May 2 in New York City, and to come to the national American Public Health Association Meetings this fall to build on these struggles with the Radical Public Health students in Chicago (see CHALLENGE, 3/11).
Fight Racism in Public Health and Medicine
The rebellions stemming from the Ferguson and Staten Island police murders have made an impact on the thinking of medical and public health organizations around the country. Take a look at these two items from the New England Journal of Medicine to get an idea of the opportunities from struggle that PL health workers can embrace:
“#BlackLivesMatter — A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities”, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500529
“Bias, Black Lives, and Academic Medicine”, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500832
PLP comrades should entwine communist politics into this anti-racist movement.