The Tiny Place of Resistance

Growing a Liberation Medicine

The so-called ethics and professional standards of Western medicine belie a supremacist ideology in the practice of medicine, upheld by the elements of power that lead to poorer health outcomes for women, queer, poor, Indigenous, Black and other marginalized people in our society. These ethics do not uphold the dignity of all beings, including the dignity of our own selves. The standards by which professionalism in medicine are articulated are biased in practice. For several years I was called to the office repeatedly and characterized as “unprofessional” for advocating for Black patients who were not getting the best care at UCSF. This pattern, which occurred until I named it, demonstrated to me that to be “professional” in medicine was to see Black patients’ lives as less than my own, an orientation which chafed at the heart of my own moral being.

As a Punjabi first-generation daughter of immigrants in the US, I was raised with my ancestral Sikh and Hindu values and ethical principles. The values of my family enshrine a respect for life and a duty to serve my community that far exceed the fake veneer we see in medicine. My religion and ethics require me to stand up against violence toward vulnerable and marginalized people and beings. In the cosmology of my ancestors, we are all Creator. A harm to one is a harm to all. No one is safe until we are all safe. These are principles at the heart of our prayers and so deeply engrained in my understanding of what it means to be human that I cannot separate my practice from my values.

UCSF’s vile repression and framing of me as “antisemitic” to try to shame and silence me and destroy my long-earned reputation as an advocate for human rights while I took a principled stance against Israel’s genocide in Palestine is not only a violation of my freedom of speech. It is a violation of my freedom of religious expression.

I cannot and will not be silent as Israel kills healthcare workers and destroys hospitals to accelerate the annihilation of the Palestinian people. I cannot be silent as I see children shot, starved and frozen to death. Every fiber of my being rages against this. I am a mother. And since having my own children, I cannot look at another human being without seeing an entire web of relationships surrounding them. We are all someone’s child.

I cannot be silent as Israel starves millions of people to death. My religion requires we feed our communities. We ensure everyone eats. We are required to share abundance, not hoard it. My people are anti-colonial resistance fighters. Colonists always use food as a weapon. Israel is a settler colony. The most compelling argument for this statement is not simply that this is how its founders and current government describe the entity. But this is how Israel behaves. Any attempts to confuse people on this matter is another form of mass gaslighting that we must learn to recognize to counter its manipulative effects. I appreciate Marie LePen’s direct approach, which is to name how proud France should be of their racist colonial past. When UCSF invited pro-Israel spokesperson Elan Carr to talk to the medical community about bigotry, he also announced that people should be proud to be Zionist—as Zionists are actively committing genocide. This statement spoke more directly to the professional values as lived in practice at UCSF. It is helpful to know where people stand morally.

I cannot be silent as medical students cower in fear of everything they have built being taken away because those in power endorse and enable genocide at every possible opportunity that they could make a moral choice. The students resist genocide as a matter of principle and are forced to show their resistance outside their spaces of learning and care, because medical institutions are deeply aligned with the genocide in Gaza. Their donors will not allow medical students to speak their truths so the students are relegated to small symbolic gestures—a bake sale, a pin and maybe even if they are lucky, a class on colonialism. But these gestures will do nothing to challenge power and stop the crushing violence of the genocide. The Deans who harass and keep the students muzzled know this. The powers that be in medical schools are denying the basic humanity of the students, which is fundamental to how medical schools operate. This is an abusive, unethical and arguably illegal dynamic.

Western medical institutions are abusive to marginalized people—patients and practitioners alike—because they are colonial institutions. They are part of how this land was colonized and settled and how the health apartheid we currently see was put in motion. To change these dynamics, we must first clearly see them, and see how so many of us have accepted the abuse.

We need a practice of medicine that is centered on care, justice and love for our communities and one another—not as buzzwords, but in how the architecture of power is set up, so that never again can a racist set of people silence us as mass killing is happening. Physicians should speak in one voice when life is desecrated on a mass scale as it is right now in Gaza—we are protectors of life. Genocide is human pathology. Doctors have always been part of genocides, and that is no different today. This pattern will continue until we identify and excise the sickness at the heart of Western medicine and build a system of Liberation Medicine from the composted remains of this one.

This is a Revolution in the very core of medicine. Too many physicians have accepted the sickness through the indoctrination of our training. But if you sit quietly and reflect you will see it—when did you fail to speak up as a patient was mistreated or abused? When did you stay silent as a student was debased or degraded? Why were you quiet?

When did you come to see your life as more precious than another’s? It’s not. But the way we act in medicine belies this uncomfortable truth. How can you tell if your doctor values their life over another’s? Ask them where they stand on the genocide in Gaza. Ask them why they’re silent. If they are not speaking up, it is because deep inside, they feel their lives—or worse, their careers—are more valuable than the lives of their colleagues who are being killed, tortured and raped to death by Israel.

If you believe your life is more valuable than another’s you have bought into the first and most important colonial lie—the Myth of Separation. It allows colonists to enact the most brutal horrors on other people and the entire Web of Life. Recognize this lie inside you. They sold it to you as “science” in the 6th grade when they made you dissect a preserved frog. They sold it to you as “food” when they packaged animal parts onto styrofoam trays and divorced you from the sacred act of taking a life for the purpose of nourishing yourself and your family. This is all normalizing the Myth of Separation, to allow you to deny the sacredness of another life. See it. Resist it. Excise it and dig into the ancestral values of your own people before they bought the colonizer’s lies—as an act of survival no doubt, but one that has given up far too much ground.

The Web of Life is sacred. Children are sacred. Healers are sacred. Patients are sacred. All of life is sacred. Remember how to honor and protect the sacred. The instructions are encoded in your ancestry. The future of humanity on planet earth depends upon this.

The images we have seen of doctors, nurses and patients lined up in scrubs ready to be transported to detention centers to be tortured or killed—these images are the future for all of us if we do not stand up and speak out against this brutality. Israel’s normalization of destroying hospitals and murdering healthcare workers empowered by the deafening silence of Western medical institutions will become how all wars are conducted in the future. Israel’s approach kills people much more efficiently if those tasked with saving lives are disposed of first. But the doctors in Gaza have not abandoned their people. Given the choice to leave, many have stayed.

Because, as Palestinian American medical student Umaymah Mohammad rightly pointed out, these Palestinian doctors know that their lives are no more valuable than their patients’. These physicians are pointing the way to the future of medicine, a medicine based in love, service and care. That is a medicine the colonizer can never understand, because it is based in ethics and principles that come from our Indigenous roots, from the space inside us that was never conquered, that lays quiet and waiting.

Each one of us has this place that is unconquered and unknowable to the colonizer. This place is a seed. Every human group was colonized by this brutal worldview, including Europeans who tried snuff out the earliest resistors: the “witches,” the women who resisted the remaking of the world into the colonial capitalist architecture of power. They were burned at the stake, but that space they refused to let go of is the seed that was transmitted. And some seeds require fire to germinate. “Terrorist,” “savage,” “witch,” “Heathen,” “Hamas supporter”—all of these words have different iterations but the same intention to degrade and deny our righteous insurgent insistence on Another Way. The colonizers cannot touch this seed, because they cannot see it. Their spirit sickness, which centers greed and power over other beings, prevents them from even knowing it.

A seed contains the entire blueprint for a forest. It has infinite generations of life inside it. Breathe into it, sit with it, remember it and live from it. Every day of action coming from this place will build a path to a better world. Seeds get their power to germinate in the darkest of winter, in times just like these. Remember it. Speak its name. Nurture it. Water it with the tears that must flow for what we see dying in Gaza. And watch it grow.

To conclude, I offer a song—an interpretation of Bob Marley's “Heathen,” from my last album, Growing Upward. May we grow from this tiny place.