Race, Health Care, Disability, and Incarceration

While I was on the airplane I met a young white woman who was in her second year of law school. During our discussion about affirmative action – where I was gently defending and she was softly opposing – she utilized many stock arguments commonly used against affirmative action in the US and in Brazil (as articulated by Joao Jorge Santos Rodrigues at the Olodum organization). However, I was most intrigued by the way she understood Brazil’s universal health care system. I noticed that many Brazilian people have a circular scar on their right upper arm and I asked her what this was. She responded that it was a vaccination. Because I have been thinking about Black people’s access to “universal” health care, I asked if everyone gets this vaccination. She responded with a quick “yes.” Is this true? While there is universal health care and a specifically Black health care policy in Brazil, I have been told by numerous organizations that Black communities, especially in the favellas, cannot access them. They suggest that this is because people in positions of power are not implementing health care policies due to institutionalized racism.

What comparisons can be made between race, public health, incarceration, and intersectional remedies in Brazil and in the US? While touring the city of Bahia, I was especially struck by how many people on the street who were asking for food were not only Black but were persons with severe disabilities. While I am aware that disabled people become homeless in the US either because of surviving on the street or as a result of being war veterans with insufficient health care, for some reason the disabilities of the Afro Brazilian men and women seemed different. They were bodily disfigurations like I had never seen. At the risk of committing further violence by describing and sensationalizing them, I will simply postulate one cause for such disability, though based in intuition rather than evidence. I feel as if these disfigurations are a result of long-term neglect and living in poverty without any access to health care. Like it is for poor communities in the US, when living without access to preventative health care, people ignore or self-medicate serious health issues. However, during different periods of affirmative action type laws in the US (like the American Disabilities Act) people have had access to health care, albeit insufficient. If this comparison is valid, how does having a disability lead to incarceration differently in Brazil? In the US, having a disability and being homeless is directly related to imprisonment. Whether it is because a homeless disabled person is unable to perform some jobs due to physical or mental disability, they do not have an address to put on applications or clean clothes for a job interview, or because they are forced into committing crimes of survival on the street, both being homeless and being disabled can lead to incarceration. How does this analysis hold up in Brazil?

Specifically, how does lack of health care and the failure to implement the Black health care plan lead to imprisonment? Tomorrow I am very excited to meet with Black women’s health organizations and to learn what issues they address and which strategies they use to combat these inequitable social conditions that, in the US, can lead to imprisonment.