Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit

This piece is part of a larger choreopoem, to use Ntozake Shange’s term,¹ that I write as a Black queer organizer and survivor of the medical industrial complex.² The term “medical industrial complex” was first defined by Barbara Ehrenreich in 1971 and is the value of profit over people’s health and well-being. Since then, the framework has evolved to show how racist science has been used to pathologize, police, and surveil the bodies of members of marginalized communities, including people who are incarcerated, people with disabilities, LGBTQ and intersex folks, Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color. Based on an ever-growing industry of science and medicine led by profit, the medical industrial complex is responsible for the lack of ethics in the abuses used to steal and misuse DNA, create witch hunts to criminalize healers (including birth workers) outside of the medical industrial complex, and pathologize healing traditions, and practices. The health and healing justice work³ to challenge and transform the medical industrial complex has expanded in the last decade, and has been led by healers and health practitioners, organizers, and survivors who work at the intersections of the labor, Indigenous, disability, economic, gender, racial, migrant, and reproductive justice movements, to name a few.

I dedicate this excerpt to the survival and reclamation of marginalized communities’ stories – communities that include migrant, Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, queer, trans, poor, and working-class people – who historically were, and in the present day continue to be, pathologized, devalued, and institutionalized by scientific racism and eugenic experimentation as an extension of population control, policing, and state and corporate violence to maintain and expand the medical industrial complex at our expense.

I also include a trigger warning: I use oppressive language to rename the harm that has been done to our communities.

Editor’s note – you can view the trailer for a video Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit here, and the full performance here.

Octaroons

Half breeds

Quarter breeds

Colored

Imbeciles

Incurable

Hysterical

Unfit

Sinful

Insanity

Feeble minded

Dwarfism

Criminality

Idiocy

Defective

Sexual perversion

Degeneracy

This is a psalm for those of us that are unseen
behind the mis-measured tricks of
eugenic wet dreams
That colonize our minds and call us
ugly,
unfit,
incurable,
perverted and circus themed

To maintain the able bodied/white/wealthy/
Christian/male supremacist “fit” esteem

We writhe for you
Play tricks for you
To hold your manliness and godliness
between our unequal fingertips for you

To build your scientific racist regime

This is a psalm for those that
have been measured and tested on
sterilized and criminalized
seen as unfit/perverted bodies
epitomized to limbs and pelvic bones
sized up for tombs that remain in infamy
as eugenic science
instead of scientific genocide

This is a psalm for the sterilized,
the lobotomized
the mass institutionalized,
for all the world to shame

To those who were and still are just numbers on a page:

55 per cent of genetic inferiority

40 per cent sterilized

65 per cent idiocy

25 per cent sexually perverted/queer and lobotomized

12 per cent mulatto blood

50 per cent unfit

These numbers became the political margin
between what was left of Rockefeller and Carnegie physiological borders
the measurement between psychoses and white male physical prowess

Now the falsehood that eugenic science is gone
when it is alive & strong
in racial profiling & DNA databases
and unethical genetic science to
transform or end the unfit gender
the unfit sexuality
the unfit race

From the 1400s
of colonizing & sterilizing the “unfit”
to erase those who were seen as dependent and dangerous
the Indigenous folk
the enslaved Black Women
the disabled communities
the Chinese sex workers
the queer and trans
the immigrants
the list goes on and on

Now in the 20th century and beyond
they mask themselves
behind pharmaceutical companies
and state sanctioned
testing grounds
like the syphilis experiments
from Mississippi to Guatemala
Or giving out long-term sterilizing birth control
in the form of candy-fied Depo

Behind current immigration reform & deportation
the imprisonment of queer and trans
still basing colonialism
on genetic warfare
behind the archaic myths
of our pathology and criminality

We reclaim you
those discarded bodies

This is a psalm for the healing
of the souls that became
bricks and mortar for a scientific racist/genocide
and the medical industrial complex

We rise & rise

We rise & rise

We release you from your cages and outrage
from your circus-themed realities

We release you

We release you

We release you

We reclaim your blood, bone, & memory

We reclaim your blood, bone, and memory

We reclaim your magic

We reclaim your honor

We reclaim your dignity

We will remember you

We will remember you

We will remember you

1. A choreopoem is “a unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama.” Poetry Foundation, “Ntozake Shange,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ntozake-shange. [↩]
2. Barbara Ehrenreich, The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (Random House, 1971). Since then many books written on the medical industrial complex through a racial justice and Black feminist lens have focused on the intersections of misogyny, racism, and poverty. See, e.g., Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body (Pantheon Books, 1997); Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday, 2007); Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press: 2011). [↩]
3. Prentis Hemphill, “Healing Justice Is How We Can Sustain Black Lives,” Huffington Post, 7 February 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/healing-justice_b_5899e8ade4b0c1284f282ffe. [↩]