Care as a Weapon
“Who feeds you, controls you” - Thomas Sankara
Contradiction of Care Under Empire
Imagine someone who has actively participated in a genocide being your teacher or healthcare provider. Do you feel safe? While it may seem improbable that those perpetrating such grave violence could hold positions that are responsible for healing and educating future generations, this is our reality in amerika. When these uncomfortable truths are addressed, the people questioning the system are punished, silenced, chastised, and ultimately, isolated from their work. This moment feels sharper as the state guts food assistance, escalating repression and demanding our complacency in systems that manufacture our exploitation, but are conditioned to rely on for survival. The consequences of who controls care are becoming clearer.
Care and safety are not just feelings, but are structures dictated by underlying systems of power, shaped by who controls and organizes labor. As amerika’s legitimacy lessens amongst its working class and poor people, we see instruments of care and safety used as weapons to foster fear, concious complicity, and normalization of genocide—here and abroad—and oppression as a whole. Whether it be access to healthcare, education, or food, these infrastructures are controlled by empire and the increasing constriction of them today reveals the truth of how care and safety functions under empire, illuminating who has access to them and what material and ideological exchange that access is based on.
Dr. Rupa Marya and Healthcare Repression
This past year, a Palestinian medical student echoed these concerns, interviewed by Democracy Now, and has since been suspended from medical school. Why? The same can be asked about Dr. Rupa Marya, a physician and professor previously employed by UCSF, who raised the question and concern for the lack of processes to address the safety of students learning alongside individuals who have served in the israeli occupation force (IOF) during a genocide — an illegal entity responsible for the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.
With the escalated amerikan and israeli genocide happening in Palestine, we have seen and experienced heightened repression and retaliation across many different sectors and relationships regarding solidarity with Palestine, recognizing and speaking out against the absolute brutal, inhumane, and unnecessary violence that has been inflicted on the Palestinian people. In particular, the medical field has been one of the most repressed sectors. At UCSF, we have seen this repression impact many healthcare professionals who have expressed and practiced solidarity with Palestine. Nurses have been issued suspensions and fired for wearing watermelon pins. A general surgery chief resident was threatened to be expelled for simply going through the data and causes of death of martyred children in Palestine. Dr. Marya was doxxed, harassed by zionists like California State Senator Scott Weiner (who is now running to take Nancy Pelosi’s seat), and since being suspended in September 2024, she was ultimately fired May 2025, despite her abundance of support from various community members and organizations, including Jewish organizations who understand that criticizing so-called israel and its genocide is not antisemitic. Her firing is not just workplace retaliation. It indicates how the state disciplines care itself, ensuring anyone who names the violence at the core of these institutions is punished.
Care as a Weapon
Why are healthcare students and professionals being threatened and fired? Simply, because they understand and possess the medical facts that clearly disprove the common narratives of lies zionists manufacture to downplay the genocide they are committing, which are apart of a broader false narrative by white supremacists that attributes health disparities to inherent biological differences, rather than the structures built to reinforce white supremacy. These students and professionals threaten the legitimacy of the propaganda and lack of media coverage that refuses to reflect the true scale of violence occurring in Palestine. Doctors take an oath to “never do harm,” but is it not harmful to continue to normalize and uphold systems of genocide that we in amerika have a direct hand in funding and sustaining?
Dr. Marya embodies this responsibility as she is one of the few medical practitioners in amerika who centers an analysis of power and its influence on the health outcomes of marginalized communities. Western medicine has a long history of discriminating and perpetrating harm against oppressed people, so this analysis is essential for providing adequate care to communities following these lineages of violent medical injustice. Outside of the hospital, through the Deep Medicine Circle, Dr. Marya supports working with communities to grow and supply free organic food to households experiencing food insecurity.
When educators and healthcare providers like Dr. Marya are prohibited from practicing, people coming from marginalized communities are left even more vulnerable to suffering the consequences of the systems of white supremacy, racism, and disposability, embedded in our spaces of care and education.
As we now are almost a year into trump’s second term, the fear mongering through the weaponization of care has become more evident. The government shut down, and social benefits like SNAP were ceased, threatening working class and poor families around the country. Like Dr. Marya’s firing, the abrupt withdrawal of these social benefits further illuminated the lack of power we have to shape our own realities, by meeting our own material needs, let alone support Dr. Marya before she was ultimately fired by UCSF.
While benefits resumed eventually, we must ask what’s next? During this presidency, trump’s authoritarian character will serve as an instrument to use fear to re-buy people’s faith and complacency in this colonial project, for the sake of survival. The frustration and antagonism that has been built over these past few years will be redirected into obedience, versus behavior truly challenging the legitimacy of our current governance. How much will we tolerate with no returned consequences? Resistance will always be met with retaliation and repression. Are we prepared for hospitals to be filled with genocidaries? For future generations to be educated by those who have committed war crimes? For our access to food, healthcare, education, and means of survival to be constantly threatened and discontinued whenever our needs contradicts with capitalisms’ demand for profit no matter the cost in lives and health?
Our work places, our schools, our hospitals, etc are not under attack, they have been founded, designed, and plagued by the colonial and capitalist systems and practices we resist and we sometimes forget how entrenched they are in our everyday lives, usages, and interactions, dismissing our own safety and trauma. The question is not whether these institutions are under attack, but how will we dismantle them and build alternative systems of care, education, accountability, and governance. We like to think that the systems bombing and sniping children are far from us, but we are closest to them in the belly of the beast. They are literally in our schools and hospitals. This is the culture of amerika and through centuries of torture, cultural erasure, fearmongering, and false narratives of the histories and lineages of resistance we follow, we have been conditioned to accept this violent culture at the expense of our own power, liberation, and livelihoods.
We have to recognize that “who feeds you, controls you” as Thomas Sankara, former revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, once said. The same institutions that fire doctors for opposing genocide are the ones deciding who eats, who heals, who gets punished, and who is forgotten and disappeared. The resources we depend on empire for will continue to be used as weapons against us to force us into submission and normalization. Dr. Marya, and all workers punished for speaking and acting out against genocide, represent everyone tied in a certain relationship with amerika—we have no control because we don’t own our labor. So those depending on amerika for our means of survival must begin to organize ourselves in alternative systems.
Be(coming) Different
This is not an easy task at all, but from Dr. Marya’s firing and the constant weaponization of our means of survival, confronting and taking up this responsibility is the only solution for real lasting material changes. This task has existed and been passed on for generations. A task once stewarded by our ancestors that we must inherit today, for our descendants to continue and not abandon. In a time where fear of facism is prevalent, I hope this fear moves into interrogating and reorienting our commitments and discipline. It is not enough to want different; to declare our desire for different; we must be be(come) different to create difference. A lot of people are angry and curious if another world can exist. How is this anger and curiosity influencing and reflected in your commitments?
There is a need to lessen, and eventually abolish, our dependence on current institutions operating within the demands of empire. I am not advocating we abandon schools and hospitals at this exact moment, but that we at least start to realize who our enemy is and therefore know we are the ones who have to solve our own problems and begin to build with our people and neighbors. We have to start building alternatives and there is a lot of struggling, work, experimentation, and risk to be done to discover and implement the best methods of these alternatives.
We can have all these questions; all these fears; all these what ifs. Regardless of the many possibilities, they all come back to the necessity of the dissolution of the amerikan empire as we know it. This will be a violent yet love abundant task. Health and care are never neutral; they are shaped by those who wield power and the systems that deny it. To truly thrive, we must relearn and rebuild systems of care rooted in reciprocity, collective wellbeing, and made abundantly accessible.
I definitely do not have the answers, nor does one sole individual, but when we recognize we’re at war and engage in principled struggle, the change and solutions we need will arise. As these institutions have historically revealed their loyalty lies with profit and not the people, our people have always built forms of care rooted in reciprocity and collective survival. Our commitments have to move toward this direction, guided by our ancestors, in obligation to those yet born.
Resistance until Liberation!
In the Bay and interested in living, not just simply dreaming, into a new world? Tap in with People’s Programs who organizes several decolonization programs based in Oakland, California.
This is so incredibly thoughtfully written. Thank you for sharing this with the world!!