“The Whole Damn System Is Guilty”: Urban Violence, the Principal Contradiction of Racial Capitalism, and the Production of Premature Death in Oakland, California

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1057-1074
Author(s):  
César “che” Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Historical Activity

Discourses of “urban violence” are deployed in reaction to the mobilizations advanced by working-class communities of color following extrajudicial police murders. This discourse delegitimates these mobilizations while pathologizing said communities by insisting that “urban violence,” not police murders, is a more pertinent issue. This article takes seriously the claims made during the Oscar Grant “moment”— a period of popular struggle — that “the whole damn system is guilty.” This article uses Gramscian conceptualizations of socio-historical activity, organic and conjunctural, along with public health and socio-economic measures, to counter the obfuscating discourse of “urban violence” by illustrating the structural violence that communities in Oakland endure and contest. The sum of this structural violence constitutes the principle contradiction of racial capitalism, which produces premature death for working-class communities of color in Oakland. The extrajudicial police murder of Grant in Oakland catalyzed the blossoming open of this contradiction into an intensified moment of struggle.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Material Insecurity, Racial Capitalism, and Public Health

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLUFEMI O. TAIWO ◽  
ANNE E. FEHRENBACHER ◽  
ALEXIS COOKE
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Racial Capitalism

Roundtable discussion: Organising cleaners in the context of Covid-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-163
Author(s):  
Heather Wakefield ◽  
Helen O’Connor ◽  
Marjorie Mayo ◽  
Jonathan White
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Step Change ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
The Status ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Minority Ethnic

People working as cleaners represent a substantial part of the modern British working class. Low-paid, often part-time, disproportionately female and, more recently, from black and minority ethnic and migrant communities, this workforce has historically been seen as hard to organise. Yet the Covid-19 crisis has elevated the status of cleaning as a key part of maintaining public health. In this article, trade union organisers with experience of working with cleaners discuss the possibilities of the current conjuncture for effecting a step change in both unionisation and the reconstruction of public services.

scholarly journals Taking action on violence through research, policy, and practice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilene Hyman ◽  
Mandana Vahabi ◽  
Annette Bailey ◽  
Sejal Patel ◽  
Sepali Guruge ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Violence Prevention ◽  
Community Violence ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Gender Based

Background Violence is a critical public health problem associated with compromised health and social suffering that are preventable. The Centre for Global Health and Health Equity organized a forum in 2014 to identify: (1) priority issues related to violence affecting different population groups in Canada, and (2) strategies to take action on priority issues to reduce violence-related health inequities in Canada. In this paper, we present findings from the roundtable discussions held at the Forum, offer insights on the socio-political implications of these findings, and provide recommendations for action to reduce violence through research, policy and practice. Methods Over 60 academic researchers, health and social service agency staff, community advocates and graduate students attended the daylong Forum, which included presentations on structural violence, community violence, gender-based violence, and violence against marginalized groups. Detailed notes taken at the roundtables were analyzed by the first author using a thematic analysis technique. Findings The thematic analysis identified four thematic areas: 1) structural violence perpetuates interpersonal violence - the historical, social, political and economic marginalization that contributes to personal and community violence. 2) social norms of gender-based violence—the role of dominant social norms in perpetuating the practice of violence, especially towards women, children and older adults; 3) violence prevention and mitigation programs—the need for policy and programming to address violence at the individual/interpersonal, community, and societal levels; and 4) research gaps—the need for comprehensive research evidence made up of systematic reviews, community-based intervention and evaluation of implementation research to identify effective programming to address violence. Conclusions The proceedings from the Global Health and Health Equity Forum underscored the importance of recognizing violence as a public health issue that requires immediate and meaningful communal and structural investment to break its historic cycles. Based on our thematic analysis and literature review, four recommendations are offered: (1) Support and adopt policies to prevent or reduce structural violence; (2) Adopt multi-pronged strategies to transform dominant social norms associated with violence; (3) Establish standards and ensure adequate funding for violence prevention programs and services; and (4) Fund higher level ecological research on violence prevention and mitigation.

Infectious thinking: the pathophysiology of 19th-century pedagogy

2020 ◽  
pp. medhum-2019-011827
Author(s):  
Jonathan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Training System ◽  
National Education ◽  
Modern School ◽  
System A ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 19Th Century

Systems for improving public health and organisations for providing national education were two of the great reforming achievements of 19th-century Britain. Despite the overlapping personnel and historical contemporaneity, scholars have rarely considered the two projects in tandem. This essay shows that developments in public health were at the heart of two foundational moments in the rise of 19th-century mass schooling. The originators of the monitorial system, a method of peer-educating working-class children cheaply that dominated British mass schooling at the turn of the 19th century, were deeply invested in the origin and spread of vaccination. Similarly, the first state teacher training system was conceived by a medical doctor in the 1830s, who first rose to prominence investigating cholera in Manchester earlier in the decade. Using archives of school providers, training institutions and the educational state apparatus, I show that medical prophylactic interventions of vaccination and sanitary reform helped galvanise the government into educational reform, by imagining the working class as pathological and providing templates for their palliation. By showing that the roots of the modern school system were deeply imbricated in attempts to combat smallpox and cholera, both in form and in epistemology, this paper argue that critical medical humanists should consider the role of epidemiological thinking in institutions and disciplines which seem, on first sight, removed from the clinic and the lab.

scholarly journals Swatting Flies for Health: Children and Tuberculosis in Early Twentieth-Century Montreal

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Minnett ◽  
Mary-Anne Poutanen
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Measures ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Children’S Participation ◽  
Children's Participation

Responding to an appeal by city physicians and health reformers to destroy a prodigious disease carrier, the housefly, the Montreal Daily Star launched an island-wide contest in July 1912, offering prizes to children who collected the most dead flies. Nearly a thousand children, largely from working-class families, participated in a three-week-long "Swat the Fly" competition. Engaging Montreal children in this contest underscores a popular idea at the time that the best way to improve public health and combat the ignorance of a generation was to arm a new one with knowledge. While historians recognize that children's participation in campaigns to promote public health measures was pivotal to their success, youngsters are often rendered as passive recipients of reformers' efforts. We argue the contrary: children were active agents in public health crusades both as consumers and as advocates.

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