MLK Hospital Closing: A Widely Shared Failure

The closing of Martin Luther King hospital is a tragedy. It is a disaster for the people whom it served and a great failure of leadership from the politicians to the ordinary people of all of Los Angeles.

This failure goes across the easily identifiable fault lines of race and geography and is global in nature. We all have a part and share in this failure. We will all bear its consequences. This is not an abstract issue of service or convenience. This is life and death. People will die because there is no hospital there to serve the chronically ill and no ER to serve the critically sick and injured.

To understand this as a failure of the African American community, as some with unseemly glee have, is to run from the larger issues that include racial animus, class hatred, xenophobia and smug feelings of white superiority.

The not deeply buried undertones of much white commentary and criticism has been that “those blacks just couldn’t run their hospital. They were lazy, thoughtless and incompetent. We built them a hospital, poured money into it and they ran it into the ground.”

Those who may want to avoid such clearly racial—and in my view racist—analysis go after the unions. They blame union rules and protection for allowing incompetent and uncaring people to keep their jobs. All the money in world could not save the hospital from its lazy and cruel nurses, orderlies and even janitors, they assert. God knows, they claim, “we did everything we could.”

Then we turn to blame the professional cadre of administrators whom we claim, as minorities themselves, favored minorities over more experienced and competent professionals who were white.

Mohammad Ali used to talk about the people “with the connections and complexion” to make things happen. This is still where the money and the power are in our community. To try to pin our shared failure on the poor, the disconnected and the dark—black and brown—is factually wrong and morally reprehensible.

Our ERs and trauma centers all over greater Los Angeles have been closing. Is this incompetence on the part of minorities? No, but we find another way of blaming them. We blame the poor for, well, being poor. We blame them for, well, not being well. “They” overran the ERs and misused our largess and abused the system by going to ERs and not their own doctors. Why? They didn’t have doctors. Blame the poor for being poor and you get to pin the tail on blacks, Hispanics and those illegal aliens. This is the trifecta of everything that is wrong in our community—according to many whites.

To roll all of this up into a perfect storm of white schadenfreude, we can go after the black political leadership. They did not force the necessary changes. From Yvonne Burke, to Diane Watson, to Maxine Waters, the black politicians failed their community. Hmmmm, racism and sexism together again? So as not to appear too sexist, let’s attack Earl Ofari Hutchinson too for…for…for what? For wanting quality medical care in a community that is both poor and majority minority? I nearly wrote, “for wanting medical care in “his” community.” I didn’t because that locution and attitude are part of the problem. It isn’t Earl’s community or Yvonne’s. It is our community too. As Joe Louis said of an opponent, “He can run but he can’t hide.” We can run from the poor but we can’t hide. Their suffering, their illnesses and their being shipped out all over the county will flush us out of our hiding and denial.

Our infrastructure of medical care in Los Angeles is broken. It was not broken by one group, and it will not be repaired by blame and denial, but compassion, effort and money. Most of all, we need a sense of the connection of all complexions and classes across the boundaries we have created. This is a shared tragedy, failure and opportunity.