A01=Nic John Ramos
Author_Nic John Ramos
California
Category=JBFC
Category=JBSD
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
community disinvestment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
health justice activism
institutional racism
medical system
Public health
racial health disparities
racial inequality
structural inequity
urban studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780520404120
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Dec 2025
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Health as Property shows how responses to racism can be predatory, harmful, and dangerous to poor people of color. Nic John Ramos 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.
Nic John Ramos is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
