The work of the Black Panther in fighting psychosurgery shows that their intersectional, race-centered activism was necessarily coalitional and required alliances between nondisabled Black people, non-Black disabled people, and Black disabled people. These alliances were forged by the BPP highlighting the connection between prisons and mental health facilities in a way that did not minimize either experience. 

The BPP's work is another example of how Black Disability Politics can be enacted without the need for an explicit mention of disability.

The Black Panther's Activism Around Psychosurgery as Black Disability Politics

Schalk notes that this rhetoric playing on ableist fears by activists of disablement, incapacitation, and loss of autonomy are magnified with the  use of the term vegetable to describe Byers. Schalk also notes this usage is directly in contrasts to the Black Panthers coalition work with disability organizations.

Example: Use of Vegetable in Reference to Byers

Schalk argues that by collaborating with psychiatric disability activist groups the BPP gained the nuanced context needed to cover psychiatric abuse while the BPP added the context of their race-centered approach which allowed for intersectional critiques of psychiatric abuse that were not being discussed by white disabled activists at the time.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

In the articles the Black Panther does not argue that all psychosurgery or pharmaceutical treatments were wrong, and the Black Panthers did not express a belief that Black people wouldn't be disabled and therefore wouldn't need them. Rather specific care was given to the idea the psychosurgery and forced pharmaceutical treatments were harmful because they were being done primarily in coercive and nonconsensual ways among individuals held by the state through imprisonment, mental incarceration, or veteran status.

The BPP did not discount the realness of psychiatric disability and the desire for psychiatric care.

Not Distancing Blackness from Disability

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

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