Drexel University's Department of History invites you to attend a seminar featuring a pre-circulated paper by Nic John Ramos, PRSS Affiliate Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Drexel University.
Date: Thursday, November 7, 2024
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: Drexel University | MacAlister Hall
3250 Chestnut St. Philadelphia, PA
Conference Room 5051A
“Profiting from Violence” traces the transformation of Emergency Medicine from its association with sub-standard emergency room care and medical backwater before the 1960s to its new association with modern labor- and capital- intensive technology and medical care by the 1980s. The chapter situates this transformation within broader shifts in U.S. politics by connecting the violence of global economic restructuring associated with Cold War military intervention abroad to the local violence found in Los Angeles’s poor Black and Brown neighborhoods. Rather than attribute higher rates of street crime, violence, and “social disorder” to these global economic shifts, the chapter argues that Los Angeles’s mostly white electorate shifted away from supporting public health and welfare services to fight poverty and violence towards enlarging emergency medicine, policing, and prisons by the 1980s to manage poverty and violence as everyday expected features of modern life.
The chapter is the sixth and final chapter of Ramos’s book manuscript in process, “Health as Property: Making Race, Sexuality, and Poverty Productive in Global Los Angeles, 1965-1986” (currently under contract with the University of California Press). It examines how civil rights and Black Power leaders challenged the widespread racial discrimination of employers, educators, and unions by seeking to uplift the health and income standards of Black citizens through new employment, training, and education opportunities in healthcare. It investigates this vision for racial and technological equality through a suite of new anti-poverty health institutions built as a response to the 1965 Watts Uprisings called King-Drew Medical Center. Instead of alleviating Black poverty, Ramos argues the health system’s hospital, clinic, mental health, and emergency medical services functioned with the remaking of Jim Crow segregation, enlarged police outfits, and more highly securitized state hospitals to help the region’s ascendent multicultural elite manage the worklessness, undocumented immigration, and working poverty resulting from post-1960s global economic shifts. His reading of archival documents reveals politicians, medical experts, and health policy makers mobilized consumerist discourses of health and moral uplift embedded in the racial and sexual liberalism of the1960s and 1970s to reform the supposed “backwards” spatialized sexuality, reproductive politics, and “culture” of LGBTQ, undocumented, and poor people of color living in inner-city neighborhoods. As an urban “safety net” for the medically indigent, these public health institutions not only renewed the policing of LGBTQ, undocumented, and poor people of color but also buffeted profitable health markets outside “medically underserved areas” from collapse.
To RSVP to this event and for links for Drexel and non-Drexel members to download the paper, use the following link: https://forms.office.com/r/VtrWY1LEK2.