Los Angeles -- a City

Los Angeles -- a City Segregated by Privilege? Or by Racism?

The City of Los Angeles has been -- and probably will always be -- a place of interest, controversy, and even fascination for the rest of the country. The reasons are numerous, but the film industry in Hollywood is certainly one of the most potent aspects of Los Angeles that draws attention. Meanwhile the key question approached in this paper relates to the question: Is Los Angeles a segregated city because of white money, power and privilege -- or is it segregated due to racial discrimination? The answer depends on who is asking and who is answering of course, and what resources and data are being used. Thesis: The resources used in this paper lead to the conclusion that Los Angeles is divided up into various distinct, quasi-segregated communities -- and cultural spheres -- principally the result of money (mostly white), political power, privilege, and diverse demographics seeking identity -- albeit racism rears its ugly head on a daily basis.

Is the view of a bigoted Los Angeles (from the silver screen) correct?

Can moviegoers believe what they see about Los Angeles in the film "Crash"? For all practical purposes, bottom line, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences chose "Crash" as the "Best Picture" over other highly rated films (like "Brokeback Mountain" and "Capote") because the Academy was willing to anoint a realistic urban clash of racial conflict and community chaos as the most pertinent reflection of the city. What does "Crash" tell Americans about the Los Angeles culture? Though it was certainly an exaggerated film in many respects, "Crash" offers evidence of the cultural tension and racial friction in the city.

For those that have been to Los Angeles recently, who perhaps have visited in the "South-Central" community, or Korea Town, or "East LA" -- life isn't really as bad, and people aren't as rude, hateful and unbendingly racist, as one would believe by taking the film literally.

And while this movie was an eye-popping, jaw-dropping jolt of hideously racist individuals living out various ethnocentric biases and ideologies, it is in broad brushstrokes a gross overstatement of urban reality. But it was also a true depiction of bigotry that exists when so many cultures clash -- and ultimately crash. For example, when the Iranian man in the film and his daughter are purchasing a gun in a gun shop, they have a bit of dialogue in Arabic, which irritates the white redneck gun shop owner. He reaches the end of his patience and blurts out, "Yo, Osama," which is about as unfair and rude as a white man could be in addressing a man of Middle Eastern extraction. He continues his rage by shouting that America didn't fly 747s into "your mud huts," a scandalously objectionable bit of racism from a white man's lips. (Now that bin Laden in gone, one wonders what racial epitaphs white bigots will hurl at Middle Eastern people in any city, not just Los Angeles.)

A brief history of racial bias in Los Angeles

Author Gerald Horne writes that when Los Angeles was first settled as a town in 1781, 26 of the 94 original settlers "are said to have had some African ancestry" (Horne, 1997, p. 24). In the 19th century most of the violence in Los Angeles "was aimed at the Mexican, Indian, and Asian populations" because the black population was "negligible," Horne explains. However, the African-American community in Los Angeles has grown exponentially, and the result has been what Horne calls "compounded racism," that is not only were African-Americans in Los Angeles subjected to bigotry from whites, but they also had to "confront Mexican, Japanese, and other cultures that were… biased against darker peoples" (Horne, p. 25).

The ethnic bias in Los Angeles extended well beyond ill feelings against black people; indeed, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and the U.S. declaration of war against Japan, hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps. "The black minority did not distinguish itself in protest," Horne explains on page 32. The black community in fact was "a beneficiary of the process" as Los Angeles' Little Tokyo "was emptied and became 'Bronzeville,' Horne points out on page 32. Iconic author / poet Maya Angelou, who witnessed the removal of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps, said that African-Americans in Los Angeles showed "indifference to the Japanese removal & #8230; since they [Japanese] didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered" (Horne, p. 32). Angelou emphasized that "No member of my family and none of the family friends ever mentioned the absent Japanese…" (Horne, p. 32).

Racial / cultural issues in Los Angeles -- a recent overview

"Inhabitants of Los Angeles are increasingly living in 'fortress cities' brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror'," according to author Stacey Abbot, whose sentence contains quotes from one of the most prominent social commentators and historians of Los Angeles, Mike Davis (Stacy, 2007, p. 187). All cities are made up of different neighborhoods, and distinct districts that "contribute to the overall definition of the city," Stacy explains. But Los Angeles is home to what Stacy calls "satellite sprawl," which is reinforced by the fact that the residents are far more dependent on autos and freeways than on public transportation. This, in turn, has led to "distinct neighborhoods being much more separate and fragmented than in other cities," Stacy continues.

The author's reference to the sprawl in Los Angeles -- and the distinct neighborhoods that have been carved out vis-a-vis freeways and urban planning priorities -- would seem on the surface to back up the thesis of this paper that it is not racism that created these distinct communities sprawling from the Pacific Ocean to the vast California desert east of the megalopolis -- but there's more. The isolation and "cultural fragmentation" in greater Los Angeles has been "exacerbated by an increase in racial tension within the city," Stacy asserts (p. 187). Within the cultural dynamics of the city there has been a "turning away from European influence" and a turning "toward the Pacific Rim," Stacy continues, and the influx of millions of Vietnamese and other Asians has led to "increased" intolerance between cultures (p. 187).

In the 2004 book Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California (authored by Jennifer R. Wolch, et al.) an essay approaches the notion that the regional water policies in Southern California have favored suburban sprawl "at the expense of the central city" (read that to mean the South Central communities of mostly African-Americans and Latinos) (Erie, et al., 2004, p. 45). In the period between 1928 to 2004 Southern California grew from "fewer than 2 million to more than 18 million residents," Erie explains in Chapter 1 (p. 45). The city of Los Angeles itself has grown from 1 million to 3.8 million in that same time frame. Moreover, when the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) began acquiring large amounts of water from the Colorado River and elsewhere, they "immediately established policies that were favorable to newly developing areas rather than the city [of Los Angeles] itself," Erie continues. Again, favorable resources are provided for suburbia while the inner city suffers.

Racial and cultural lines have indeed been drawn in Los Angeles

Author Donald Worster weighs in on the cultural divisions and ethic corridors of Los Angeles in his book Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Worster presents a map called "The Untitled Ethnic Map of Los Angeles" that was drawn as a parody of the "Thomas Guide" by Manuel Ocampo. Neighborhoods are marked with crude boxes and ugly titles, like "Nips," "Chinks," "Beaners," "Niggers," "Arabs," "Wet Backs," "Dykes," "Fags," "Kikes," and "Gugus" (Worster, 1992). Swastikas are liberally presented throughout the map, and clearly it is an outrageously exaggerated parody but it is also it takes meaningful swipe at the multicultural city that tries to keep from exploding in segregated Los Angeles. Worster references Mike Davis's book Ecology of Fear (which was unavailable for this paper); paraphrasing David, Worster writes that Los Angeles cannot live up to the myth of "a land of sunshine and oranges with a backyard for all" (Worster, p. 242). Los Angeles is actually a place of "pervasive natural perils and apocalyptic natural disasters," Worster continues, paraphrasing Davis.

Los Angeles is beset by "criminally negligent overdevelopment, and sociocultural dysfunction rooted in pandemic racism and ethnic mistrust of the Other," Worster explains. The author quotes Davis: "No other city seems to excite such dark rapture" (p. 242). Worster pans the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau's glossy pamphlet that portrays Los Angeles as a place of cooperative diversity and "cultural itineraries" made up of Latinos, Jews, Africans Americans, gays and Asians. In fact, Worster writes (242), "Los Angeles is one of the most segregated cities in the world. It is not a classic "melting pot," but rather, greater Los Angeles has been regularly urbanized… into a myriad of shifting enclaves based on race, nationality, and ethnic identity."

Moreover, population groups "…pull up roots and seemingly go out of their way to avoid one another…" throughout Southern California, Worster writes (242). An example of the concept of "pulling up roots" is the community of Watts, which in the 1960s, Worster continues, was "an almost entirely black populace" but by the mid-1990s is "predominately Mexican-American" (p. 243). And Little Tokyo, positioned just south of Los Angeles' City Hall, is now home to a "dwindling population of Japanese-Americans" who have scant interaction with the colonies of artists "who began reclaiming and inhabiting factory and loft buildings" in Little Tokyo. Armenians that once dominated the eastern fringes of Hollywood have "relocated to suburban Glendale" and South Koreans have "settled in the Mid-Wilshire district" which has caused the "displacement of a sizable community of Central Americans," Worster explains. This movement of cultures and ethnicities around the sprawling great Los Angeles region is different than the traditional "white flight" from inner city to suburbia, Worster explains. Rather, this movement tends to prove "Mike Davis's theory of racial hysteria," the author asserts: "…everybody seems to want to move away from everybody else" (p. 243).

Civil Rights Commission hearings -- Los Angeles riots of 1992

Following the high-visibility trial in which three Los Angeles police officers -- who had been videotaped viciously beating Rodney King, an African-American -- were found not guilty, South Central Los Angeles sustained enormous damage due to widespread rioting. The carnage was not just due to the beating visited upon King, but there was a simmering rage in the black community over the institutional and overt racism they had endured through the years. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a hearing in June, 1993; the Chairman of the Commission, Arthur A. Fletcher introduced Michael Carney, Chairman of the California State Advisory Committee, who said that the jobless rate for "Black and Latino males aged 18 to 35" in South Central Los Angeles "is almost 50%" (Berry, 2000, p. 33). With that many unemployed minorities, many of then frustrated and angry at the white majority, and with large numbers of Latino and African-American youths dropping out of high school, the violence was not that hard to predict or explain.