Toxic Wellness Made RFK Inevitable

Anti-Black Eugenics, the MAHA movement, and What We Can Do Now

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image: RFK during the senate confirmation hearings.

“Get off your prescription medicines and say goodbye Big Pharma.” That seemed the sole guiding principle of the Black herbalist spaces I initially found myself in.

My interest in and access to herbalism coincided near exactly with my inability to get treatment for a mysterious and long-standing ailment that revealed itself to be lupus in my early twenties.

Before that, it was “this weird thing I’m trying to get rid of with herbs.” Diagnosis was a fight I won't recount here—when it finally came, it wasn’t so much a relief as the beginning of one run of bad luck, and the beginning of another. I went from soon to die to that story about the old lady who swallowed a fly, consuming more and more untoward things to account for the initial act.

The doctors I saw didn’t give one half a fuck about the side effects of my medications. If it wasn’t a crisis, it was none of their business. Shouldn’t I simply be happy to be alive? Well, I wasn’t really. I was barely more than a teen with a leopard print cane in tow. I couldn’t do young people stuff without serious consequences. I wanted a better quality of life. This is how I started my independent study of herbalism, which was originally given to me in my home.

This was in the late aughts, and the internet was a different place. Things on the internet were not taken seriously, and there was an awareness that people there were more than likely trying to scam or otherwise dupe you. We still believed in stranger danger. We bought things in person, since most people were afraid to put their card information into the computer. We printed out webpages, road maps, and train tickets.

Like the doctors I saw, the herb folks I met shared a binary idea of what it meant to live well—opposite, in the idea that there was something inherently untrustworthy, or sinister about allopathic medicine, but the same in their belief that illness was a personal failing that could be avoided through right action. This is a primary hallmark of toxic wellness.

Now I’m a clinical + community herbalist, and it’s obvious to me just how much of the training and work is centered at this moment in toxic wellness.

Toxic wellness takes a eugenicist perspective when it comes to wellness. It ensures the revival of eradicated diseases through the creation of paranoid conspiracies about vaccines, particularly in regards to a supposed connection to both autism and lupus. They would rather have dead children than disabled children.

They believe that if a kid can’t survive their fifth bout of COVID, then they deserve what they get. They would rather drink essential oil than take an aspirin. It's a line of thinking that’s as compatible with culty religious fundamentalism as it is with a $150 per week yoga lifestyle. They’re primativists at the end of the day, who wish for the conservatism and food safety practices of a long gone time. They figure if you can’t heal with your very mind then perhaps you aren’t spiritual at all.

Though it would seem to be the sort of movement that was allergic to technology as well, with the explosion of social media over the last fifteen years, these ideas are everywhere, cloaked in totally legitimate criticism of what has come to be called “Big Pharma.” It’s a fundamentally conservative term that seems like it would have more liberal and radical purchase than it does. It’s been taken up by fash in earnest with one hand, while demonizing the health care they’ve long made inaccessible to the average person.

This is a recipe for disaster. Now we’re living that disaster, for which one of the horsemen is Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., the new head of the department of Health and Human Services.

This is a man who has had no shortage of access to any sort of medical care available. He is from one of the most prominent families in the world, at once a bumbling fool and an ascendant political scion. He believes that Black people need less medicine. He once killed a baby bear, didn’t eat it, and dumped it in a park. He is an environmental lawyer, and an author, but we would never be doomed to acquire that knowledge if he were not first a Kennedy.

He’s the leader of the MAHA movement, which is the landing zone for the spirituality/wellness pipeline to fascism.

Two weeks ago, his work culminated in an executive order named “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission.” Like much of the wellness industry, the initial claims seem legit—because they are. The order takes aim at fatty liver disease, which may be the best predictor for the development of type two diabetes. It calls for transparency in medical studies, and claims to strive for the prevention of childhood chronic illness.

MAHA isn’t merely connected to toxic wellness culture, it is toxic wellness culture at the level of national politics. Kamala Harris’ run for president exposed how even liberals have become more conservative. So has the internet. There’s an obsession with natural wellness, the sort more correlated with genetics than inner peace and acceptance of life’s ups and downs.

Ugly is the worst thing someone can be again, so TikTokers consider calling republicans ugly a flex. Among the chronically online and young, having inherently dewy and blemish free skin is the highest goal. On the surface, these things do not seem like wellness, but they both have a significant wellness component. If we must do everything, and I mean everything, we can to avoid illness, ugliness, and death—and if we accept that none of that can be done by normal means, we turn to wellness as an alternate route to get the mythological solutions we crave.

Like the way we look, our ability to be well is overdetermined by race, family history, class, and where we live, among other factors.

There’s no herb, massage, or face wash that will keep us healthy on a sick planet, or under a fucked up system that profits off our pain.

The MAHA movement traffics in eugenics, which compounds its danger for Black people. RFK has already questioned whether or not Black people need the same vaccine dose as white people, and that African organizations are inflating HIV statistics on the continent to enrich themselves. He’s compared the CDC to Nazi death camps,

Still, my question is not “what have we done 😲” but “what can we do now?” The first step as I see it is to stop this rhetoric in our own communities. There is no failure in being sick or ugly or disabled or different in any way. These are normal threads in the tapestry of human life, and should be celebrated like the rest.

For too long, even marginalized wellness practitioners and spiritualists have been able to hide their conservatism in a veneer of concern for collective heath. We should call out that concern trolling when we see it—particularly when it’s aimed at necessary medication, including vaccines.

There are many factors that went into the rise of this current permutation of fascism.

We can’t ignore the ones that stem from our own side, particularly because those are the ones we have the most power to transform.