- Using disability as a symbol that oppressive violence has occurred
- Examples: Sierra Club, The Black Panther
- Alternatives

How Social Justice Movements Use Disability

The use of the term "vegetable" in the Black Panther can be replaced with more specific language to eliminate the use of ableism for emotional effect. The term vegetable is used infrequently and unnecessarily in the Black Panther. The use is unnecessary especially because the articles tend to enact with Schalk's three anti-ableist tactics.

Schalk's Concluding Comments on the Use of the Term Vegetable in the Black Panther

The Black Panther party used the phrasing "human vegetable" to emphasize the harm of psychosurgery and forced pharmaceutical treatments on Black, poor, and incarcerated people, particularly as they believed these treatments targeted activists. However, this rhetoric frames disablement as the ultimate harm of white supremacist control—superseded only by death. Consequently, it implies that people harmed by state-sponsored disabling violence are reduced to "human vegetables" and can no longer act as activists.

The Black Panther's Use of 'Human Vegetable' as a Symbol of Oppressive Violence

The initail use of vegetable in the Black Panther was in an article stating that psychosurgery would send people "back into society as vegetables." The wording was used to note how the government would save money by sending people back into society rather than paying to incarcerate them.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

While many may think that the term vegetable is derived from the medical term vegetative state, the term vegetative states was not coined to refer to a brain-damage condition until 1972 whereas the use of the term vegetable in discussions about the impacts of psychosurgery dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, before the coining of vegetative state.

Vegetable and Vegetative State

Across the twenty two articles published in the Black Panther about psychosurgery between June 1971 and October 1977 the term vegetable is used seven times. Four of these seven times refer to Lou Byers. Two of these four times were in the first article published by Lou Byers which was a reprint of an article published in the Black Thought so not written by Black Panther authors.

Use of the Term Vegetable in the Black Panther

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

Black Disability Politics

Use of Vegetable in January 1973 Article

Schalk contends that despite the limited use of the term vegetable its repeated us draws into question the Panthers' intentions and rhetoric around disability politics. 

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