Emergent Medicine, Emergent Economies: The Political Whiteness of Emergency Medicine in Globalizing Los Angeles

It is well known that emergency medicine as a modern medical discipline arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the federal government’s investment in research and technology to address “accidents” as a top killer of American citizens. It is less known, however, how such a turn towards addressing “accidents” coincided with the federal government’s turn away from anti-poverty programs and the normalization of working poverty and urban violence as “normal” and “expected” features of modern American life. Looking at the institutional records of King-Drew Medical Center, a Black-led Academic Medical Center built as a response to the 1965 Watts Uprisings, and founding actors in emergency medical systems such as James O. Page, this paper looks at how federal and local officials turned to take advantage of Black Los Angeles’s number of gunshot wounds and stabbing victims to produce new life-saving technologies. The paper argues that the demonstration of emergency medical technology and infrastructure through the racialized injured urban subject helped augur the infrastructure and expertise of war/military medicine for domestic use while increasing the profitability and demand for emergency medicine in white suburban enclaves. The effect not only normalized emergency medicine but also prevented citizens from making deeper demands on the government to pass gun control, legislate new anti-poverty programs, and end racial inequality. 

Nic John Ramos is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has previously held a faculty appointment in History and Africana Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has served as the Ford Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Race, Science, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania and as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Race in Science and Medicine at Brown University. His book published with the University of California's Press, Health as Property: Racial Capitalism and Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, reveals how responses to racism can be predatory, harmful, and dangerous to poor people of color. The book examines a Black-led academic medical center known as King-Drew that was built in response to the 1965 Watts Uprising. Forged by the political willingness of white voters to experiment with anti-poverty programs in poor neighborhoods of color, the health system's multiple missions represented the freedom dreams of civil rights, Black Power, welfare rights, and consumer rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s. However, during Los Angeles's rise as a global city in the 1970s and 1980s, white voters' desire to realize these dreams was curtailed by renewed narratives of health rooted in racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic ideas about poor people of color. Instead of working to combat the forces of racial and sexual capitalism underlying health inequality, a diverse group of liberal progressive leaders inverted the healthcare aims of King-Drew. Health as Property demonstrates how healthcare policy in America is both labor and real estate policy, and as such preserves health as the property of a select few.