The Corner Society "A Tale of Two Clinics: Bringing the History of Anti-Poverty Clinics into the History of Community Mental Health Clinics"

Dr. Nic John Ramos, Assistant Professor in History, Africana Studies, and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Drexel University

A Tale of Two Clinics: Bringing the History of Anti-Poverty Clinics into the History of Community Mental Health Clinics

“A Tale of Two Clinics” brings two clinics built as a response to the 1965 Watts Uprisings – USC’s Watts Multipurpose Health Clinic and Central Community Mental Health Center – into the same frame of analysis to reveal how both clinics and the community health and deinstitutionalization movements that gave birth to them both shared the same logic of seeing “poverty” as a problem of sexuality and “culture” regardless of their “integrationist” or their “Black power” political orientations. Although observers and citizens at the time concluded that Central City’s Black-led health distribution model was more successful than USC’s white-led “integrationist” clinic because of the skin color of its clinical leaders, an investigation into the shared programmatic approaches of each clinic shows that the leaders of both clinic agreed that the goal of distributing new free health services to the poor was not to eradicate sickness or poverty per se, but to produce individuals who desired work and normative family lives independent from state assistance as signs of being “normal” and “healthy.” The belief that Central City’s Black power narratives might offer a more effective pathway to meeting this goal than prevailing civil rights narratives motivated local and federal authorities to further explore “Black capitalism” as a policy objective in other federal programs, especially as more radical forms of Black Power (such as the Black Panther Party’s) competed with civil rights and Black cultural nationalist leaders for the hearts and minds of the Black masses.

Nic John Ramos is an Assistant Professor in History, Africana Studies, and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Drexel University. He holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and earned a dual-degree in Asian American Studies and Political Science with a minor in African American Studies from the University of California at Irvine. He has previously held appointments in the Department of Africana Studies, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Race in Science and Medicine at Brown University and served as a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Race, Science, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. His talk today is a part of his larger book manuscript project, “Health as Property: Making Race, Sexuality, and Poverty Productive in Global Los Angeles, 1965-1986” which is currently under contract with the University of California Press.