Race, Medicine, and Society Notes - February 22, 2018

Race, Medicine, and Society Notes - February 22, 2018

Time frame: Aftermath of Civil War - 1920

Different racial groups not quite full citizens because of their racial categorization and matters of health

Discussion Questions:

• How do discourses of race, racialization, and health intersect and define Las Angeles at the turn of the century and Las Angeles culture?
• How does health and discourses of public health contribute to the radicalization (and chance of being considered a citizen) of certain populations?

Discursive Formation - the way discourses form, matrix of information

Discourse- allowable speech, stories that make sense

Historicize - put something in its historical context

Las Angeles was a new city at the time

• Marketed as an oasis to white workers
• High expectations of a city
• Problem for Whites: Different racial groups within the proximity such as the Chinese

- Typhoid Outbreak in the United States

- Changes in immigration (Influx of Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese)

- Labor Market

- Urbanization / Industrialization… Eastern cities had begun to become polluted from factories. Las Angeles promised a cleaner area and was advertised as an oasis

Questions at the time about immigration:

• Are new immigration groups safe (healthy from illnesses)?
• Will they steal jobs from white workers?
• Will they assimilate?
• Will they become Americanized?

Mexicans were thought to hold diseases such as Typhus Fever and Smallpox

• ‘Smallpox originated from Mexicans’

Disease played a role in defining who you are a citizen

• Led to isolation of those populations (China Town)
• Seen in the construction of Las Angeles
• People thought Mexicans would bring Fleas that would lead to Typhus, however clean hair is needed for fleas to cling to which goes against the controlled imagine as Mexicans being dirty people

Instead of admitting that railroad camps were unclean; workers were blamed and considered the be unclean

Diseases associated with particular groups

• Placed blame on people instead of controlled factors such as unsanitary living conditions

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) - Barred Chinese laborers

Chinese Restriction Bill (1885) - Exclude all Chinese from the United States

Discursive Production - Certain groups shown a certain way for the whole population

• Led to policy outcomes (policies above)

Typhoid -> racialized disease

Comparable to AIDS in the 1980s which was thought to only affect homosexuals even though they were just disproportionally affected by the virus

Cracking down on minorities gave the public health workers more power

Sudden competition for jobs scared white workers

• Labor competition

“Stereotype” = Controlling Image

Chinese fruit pedlers

• Fruit being sold by a Chinese person was thought to be dirty
• Less people bought from them (therefore the Chinese could not participate in economy = not citizen)
• Symbolic: exclusion of groups, not able to contribute to society

Racial hierarchies constructed

• Mexicans aren’t white but they also aren’t non-white

Did medical discourse hold more weight than other fears and anxieties held during the time towards immigrants?

• Sexual danger
• Economic threat