Issue 16: South Asians and the Politics of Health (12/16/2003)
In our struggles for peace, workers’ rights, racial justice, queer and gender rights, we often overlook basic issues of health and access to affordable and effective health care. Although these issues are often deemed less important or vital than others, they are integral aspects of these movements.
This lack of attention to our health may arise partly because of a curious gulf between practitioners and policy-makers—those “in the know” – and the rest of us. Many of us can understand ways that health policies have shaped the trajectories of colonialism and immigration, but we have a block in formulating stances on contemporary issues of public health, which continue to inscribe power relations. Crude understandings of culture and identity only serve to inhibit our understandings of these issues, as they delegate specific roles for people based on their gender, age, or educational history.
As you will find in this forum, health issues are relevant to each one of us. The range of politics around the issue of health includes struggles to achieve justice against corporate crimes against communities; the barriers that our communities erect for communicating our own health issues; politics of NGO’s and pharmaceutical companies and their impact on AIDS and HIV in South Asia; relationships between violence, masculinity and mental health in religious fundamentalist violence in South Asia; and the absence of data on South Asian American communities and the resulting impacts on public health policies for these communities. As activists and members of our communities, we all need to “be in the know” about issues of health and health care. We hope this forum contributes to the fodder for a renewed focus on these issues among South Asian diaspora activists.
p>In our struggles for peace, workers’ rights, racial justice, queer and gender rights, we often overlook basic issues of health and access to affordable and effective health care. Although these issues are often deemed less important or vital than others, they are integral aspects of these movements.
This lack of attention to our health may arise partly because of a curious gulf between practitioners and policy-makers—those “in the know” – and the rest of us. Many of us can understand ways that health policies have shaped the trajectories of colonialism and immigration, but we have a block in formulating stances on contemporary issues of public health, which continue to inscribe power relations. Crude understandings of culture and identity only serve to inhibit our understandings of these issues, as they delegate specific roles for people based on their gender, age, or educational history.
As you will find in this forum, health issues are relevant to each one of us. The range of politics around the issue of health includes struggles to achieve justice against corporate crimes against communities; the barriers that our communities erect for communicating our own health issues; politics of NGO’s and pharmaceutical companies and their impact on AIDS and HIV in South Asia; relationships between violence, masculinity and mental health in religious fundamentalist violence in South Asia; and the absence of data on South Asian American communities and the resulting impacts on public health policies for these communities. As activists and members of our communities, we all need to “be in the know” about issues of health and health care. We hope this forum contributes to the fodder for a renewed focus on these issues among South Asian diaspora activists.