LA Confidential: The Most Segregated City in the Country

I grew up on the bottom of the hill, looking at the false lights of tinsel-town, aka Hollywood. So when I read about the report of a missing, young African-American woman, Matrice Richardson, who was arrested by Malibu Police Department for failure to pay a restaurant bill (although a relative agreed to pay by phone), I was not surprised at all.

Los Angeles IS the most segregated metropolitan in the country. This is not my opinion, but is fact. Wave Newspaper reported that the diversity-spill is only a superficial claim often made by political jackasses and ignorant celebrities who only goes as far as the Hollywood Circles they break their necks to be a part of. In an article by the Wave (a community-based LA paper):

Two recent USC studies have found that Los Angeles continues to be plagued with racially isolated neighborhoods — with infinitesimally small integration in historically white communities, especially the Westside of Los Angeles, which are statistically the safest and have the highest performing public schools. (07 February 2006, by Tony Castro)

The hush-hush thing that those Hollywood types and the California tourism board are afraid for others to find out: people of color are grossly disenfranchised in funky-ass L.A.

Of course there are those who disagree with my analysis, but those people are usually the ones who live in a fantasy LA, or have migrated to Los Angeles and live in places like North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Ventura County, and all points around the scrotum sacs of the dirty the Hollywood Hills; including Bel Aire, West Hollywood, Brentwood (hi OJ) and the little pockets around the Mile High section. These people will never tell you that Los Angeles today is only about 4 percent black, and most of them live nowhere near the areas I mentioned.

These people would never, ever set foot into areas such as: Athens Hills, Crenshaw District (east of Baldwin Hills), Watts, Compton, Inglewood, Lynwood, South Los Angeles and the other smaller pockets that black people live. Why? Because they are scared that the locals such as, Gheri Curl Pookie and Gangster Jose, will gun them down. Ironically, there are such disproportionately high numbers of shootings by police officers, the probability of them getting hemmed up for a DWB would statistically happen a lot faster. More than likely, as soon as they drive into the area they fear the locals would get'em.

I remember when I was in high school in the 90s I went to some trailer park type-of-city with the other members of the student council. We were told that we were visiting our sister school. To this day, I don’t remember exactly where, but it was located about an hour and half’s drive away. I didn’t know we had one, and after that meeting, I would never forget our sister school because a group of cars filled with white boys followed our bus out of that dump throwing bottles and screaming “Nigger.”

I always liked Ice Cube’s simple analysis of Los Angeles, it is not all “surf and sun,” especially for the black and brown. And with the dismal numbers of black folk, it is becoming a nightmare.

Here is my Top Facts of Racist L.A. that I think you should know:

1. Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by Afro-Spaniards. The group of founders were blacks and mulattoes from Mexico who were mixed with African, Spanish, and Native people.

2. Los Angeles’ police department and sheriff’s office has a vibrant history of members also being members of Aryan Nation organizations and Klu Klux Klan

3. Los Angeles has the highest homeless population in the country, mostly consisting of people of color, women and children. African-Americans have the highest rate of homelessness in Los Angeles.

4. Most black Angelenos have direct roots from the American South.

5. Before the Great Migration to Los Angeles during WWI, the population of blacks was less than 25,000. The local whites thought that to be a safe and manageable number, that allowed the few blacks to own homes and live “sensible” lives unlike the Southern hostilities, but still be kept in their place.

6. Los Angeles has the second highest foster care youth population in the country, mostly black children; 80 percent of teens who are emancipated from the foster care system end up in jail, dead, or homeless.

7. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department major recruiting area is in the Midwest; places where whites have not even interacted, let alone, seen black or brown faces.

8. According to Dartmouth Geography professor, Richard Wright, Los Angeles is more so segregated by where people live, rather than where they work.

9. Current-day Watts used to be the headquarters of Los Angeles-based Klu Klux Klan.

10. Until around 1950s, a black person could not be in certain areas of Los Angeles after dark without a written pass indicating that they worked in the area.

11. African Americans, according to 2000 census data, make up only 1.93 percent of the population of Bel Air; 1.77 percent of Beverly Hills; 2.48 percent of Brentwood; 3.09 percent of West Hollywood; 1 percent of the Pacific Palisades; and do not even register a hundredth of a percent in Westwood. (taken from Wave Newspaper Article)

12. Lennox Sheriff’s have a notorious reputation for harassing, shooting, beating, killing, and framing black males.

13. Allentown, a small, black, thriving agricultural community just outside of Los Angeles was disenfranchised when local whites poisoned the well waters.

14. Blacks did not have access to most of the coastline and were designated to one section of the beach called the Inkwell, located in today’s Santa Monica.

15. Black owners of beachfront property were forced out through harassment and eventually, physical persecution by the 1950s.

16. Compton used to be fertile farmland and dairy farmland. It evolved to an area where affluent blacks resided until the late 70s when segregation eased in some areas and blacks began to move west. The 80s crack explosion, and the closing of the Firestone plant (Watts and Compton) wreaked havoc on the economy in the area.

17. African-Americans have the lowest median income in L.A. County at about $32,000 compared to $34,000 for Latinos and 54,000 for Whites.

18. 44 percent of African-American high school students in L.A. County fail to graduate within four years.

19. From 1920-1955, black performers were not allowed into major white hotels in Los Angeles. They stayed on the East side, and often performed in Jazz clubs and Juke Joints on the famous Central Avenue.

20. The Dunbar Hotel, formerly known as Hotel Somerville, was the prestigious hotel frequented by African-American performers. The hotel was built by prominent black Angelenos Jade and Vada Somerville. Today there are NO black-owned hotels in Los Angeles, or in much of the US.

African American Communities in Los Angeles County
Ten Largest Black Percent Black Communities Population of Total
1 Los Angeles (City) 401,986 10.9%
2 Long Beach 66,836 14.5%
3 Inglewood 52,260 46.4%
4 Compton 37,263 39.3%
5 Hawthorne 27,208 32.3%
6 Carson 22,485 25.1%
7 Pasadena 18,711 14.0%
8 Lancaster 18,548 15.6%
9 Westmont (Athens-unincorporated) 18,095 57.2%
10 Palmdale 16,447 14.1%

Estimated Population of all of Los Angeles County: 9,862,049 residents.

This Youtube video is a snippet of this guy named Billy Broham who reports on what is going on around Los Angeles. He had a DVD out some years ago that reported the grassroots truth about police brutality and other real ish. I had the opportunity to speak to him and this brother works with at-risk male youth. So he is very for real with his work. I hope he comes out with something else.

Black and Latino: The Unspoken Tale of Race Wars in California

One early morning in 1999, I got a message on my pager from someone who was a relative Chris Darden, the once famous member of the prosecution team in the OJ Simpson case of the mid 90s. I was told that his nephew was found unconsciousness in a dormitory cell in Pritchess Detention Center. The locals still called the prison by its former name, Wayside.

I was also told that there had been violent race riots between the Latinos and blacks for several days and the blacks, who were outnumbered by 15 to 1, were getting shanked, beaten unconscious, raped, and literally fighting for their lives, as the guards looked on. These riots would go on for months.

That call sparked about a two-month long string of stories regarding the race riots. I found out that the mostly Latino prison guards were supplying shanks and other weapons to Latino inmates in exchange for a piece of the drug money that the gangs profitted from outside of the prison walls.

There was also a program implemented a gang program called "Amer-I-Can" by former NFL hall-of-famer Jim Brown, to cease the racial rifts.

During my coverage of the riots, I spoke to dozens of black inmates and their relatives about what was going on. I began to hear that riots had already trickled down from the prisons to the county jails.

One story a relative of mine who went to jail told me that he was alerted by a fellow black inmate to get ready to rock and roll once they were in the holding tank. As soon as they were placed in the holding tank, fighting began.

In the end, we had learned that much of the reason was not race, but rather territory over drug selling and transporting. For years, the black gangs dominated in the sell of crack cocaine, but with the surge of Mexican immigrants and the flow of drugs through their home country, not only were Latinos of Southern California were more in numbers, but had a supply route that the now disorganized black gangs lost control of a long time ago.

What made the race riots racial, in my opinion, was the push by the Aaryan Brotherhood, the white supremacist group in the jails who sided with the Latino gangs. Their alliance and long-held agenda of ethnic cleansing prompted an all out war against all blacks who were locked up, be they gang affiliated or not, just like the Darden relative. Ironically, Aaryan's used a former enemy, Latinos to carry out what they could not do.

In California, the Mexican mafia forced an edict of an all-Latino alliance. And let me be clear, this is talking about Mexicans and Central Americans, not Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Columbians who have very different cultural and ethnic identifiers, especially because Boriquas, Cubanos and Columbians have significant African/black populations. However, there is discrimination in those places as well.

In all of my interviews, the prison inmates warned me over and over again, that the conflict would spill out into the streets. And it did.

For several summers there have been rumors of edicts of ethnic cleansings by Latino gang members to kill hundreds of black men during the summer. There are several communities in the harbor area of Los Angeles, where black folk, who are hard working, family-oriented people that are getting picked off by Latino gang members. In some communities, there are black residents that are scared to go outside in fear of getting killed.

In the high schools, years of race riots have changed the climates of many schools and student-teacher relationships.

I must emphasize in all of this, that this is not a one-sided issue of Latinos being the bully. For years, blacks and black gang members held contempt toward migrating Latinos whose numbers grew so rapidly that over half of the population resides in either California or Texas. This increase causes instantaneously conflict for those who are at the bottom.

In particular in the job and housing markets. Cheap Latino labor by mostly undocumented workers undercut the level of treatment for much of a black working class that was already struggling due to industries leaving cities like Compton and Watts. At the same time, slum lords rented out rundown houses and apartments to Latinos who were vulnerable to any type of abuse due to their undocumented status.

Many black people were extremely hostile to these streams of Latinos, but pointed their fingers in the wrong direction. The real culprit, Ronald Reagan, the former Governor of California and then President of the US who created a climate that allowed cheap, exploitable labor to flood into the state.

As a result, the antagony that some blacks projected onto Latinos created a clashing relationship between the two groups that have been passed onto other generations.

Another thing, many people don’t know about is the serious colorism and cultural war in Mexico itself. For years, majority of the immigrants were lighter-skinned or very fare Mexicans. However, within the last 15 years, the population has gotten darker. Those Mexicans in the rural south and in indigenous villages have started to migrate as well. These darker, and some, very dark or black skinned peoples are discriminated against in Mexico and are the subject to the worst forms of brutality. Moreso, some of these indigenous people don’t even speak Spanish, and often suffer under dominant Mexican ideology and culture.

Another thing I must add is that the conflict between Latinos and blacks is more prominent in Southern California than the north, but trust me it still exists. For much of Californias development, blacks and Latinos were inextricably linked to all civil rights causes. Communities were formed and alliances were forged. These have held tighter in the Bay Area, where activism such as the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the Chicano Movement recognized the importance of unity.

Needless to say, the race war between Latinos and blacks is very complicated, but at the heart of the issue is that you have two of most powerful groups in the state of California bickering over crumbs, while both are being locked up disproportionately, and the communities are totally neglected and underserved.

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Socio-Culturo-Politico Thursdays: Gentrification Roll Call

When I moved back to my hometown of Los Angeles in 1998 I thought I had stepped into a ghost town. In the black community there were blocks and blocks of empty commercial buildings and in the residential areas, there were abandoned, half-eaten homes. The decline increased rapidly right after the 1992 civil unrest and was at an apex at the end of that decade.

Shortly after, the famous homeless tent city in downtown Los Angeles was being bulldozed and the tenants were being forced out. There were rumors that downtown Los Angeles was about to go through a serious transformation. And it did. Today, the downtown L.A. that I knew has been replaced with gorgeous restored buildings and renovated warehouse spaces that are serving as upscale trendy lofts. You have the Staples Center and this new addition right across the street called L.A. Live, which is supposed to be a West Coast rendition of New York’s Time Square. Of course, it does not come close and is only a bunch of blinding lights and frou frou fake madness. Horrible copycats.

Now, on the surface, people might think. Isn’t that nice that L.A. is getting cleaner and fancier for its residents? Those homeless people need to get a job and get the hell on. But that is a convenient answer and one that is uninformed and filled with historical and political gaps. Gentrification happened in Los Angeles, and just like the California economy, the ones who benefited is not the common resident, and definitely were not the residents who sustained those broken sections of Los Angeles while the scarred lived in gated communities on the Westside or left the area for the desert.

According to Merriam Webster, gentrification is the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents. It is the reverse white flight that happened when blacks began moving into the cities in the early 1900s for more job opportunities. Back then white folk created suburbs, or communities outside of the city, but most of them still worked in the metropolises.

To give you a quick example of how white flight undermined cities, I will talk about education. Now, when people bitch and beef about inner city schooling without understanding the politics of it all they actually support the myth that inner cities offer poor education because the children and the communities are biologically crippled due to circumstances.

So let’s do basic suburban life 101. You have John who lives in Oxnard, but works in downtown Los Angeles. He makes a $1 million plus a year. Now John makes sure that he is out of the city before dark and is back home comfortably with his wife and children. His children go to schools that are ample in resources and parent support. John’s wife, Sue is a typical stay-at-home soccer mom who shuttles her children back-and-forth, and is very involved. This is what the American Dream offers, so I’m not hating.

Now when it comes time for taxes and John pays for his house taxes which go directly to the school district where he lives, it does not account for the money he makes in a neighborhood he has absolutely no financial or political obligation. Oh, I’m sorry, he does donate $100 to the NAACP yearly. If John worked and lived in the same area than his taxes would greatly help the local schools.

However, where John works, most of the residents are unemployed, underemployed, and undocumented workers. The schools in downtown Los Angeles barely function off of subsidized money. The little resources have been allocated by someone who probably has been working for the LA Unified School District before downtown L.A. became a mess and cannot understand why these Mexicans and Blacks never get their shit together.

One question that someone might ask is, “Why do rich people want to move to the hood?” Well, inner cities are the prime property throughout the country. Cities are the most developed, or at the very least, are the easiest to renovate. They are near the major government facilities, water & electric supplies, and have the oldest history of the city. Most cities have precious underground pathways that have been abandoned, but can be restored, and all major cities were built by a significant body of water and sacred lands of the former indigenous people that were massacred. Plus the intricately mapping of the cities made these metropolitans an architectural and geographical landmine.

For example, my parents live a 10 minute drive from the beach by the highway, 10 minutes from LAX airport, and live about a 3 – 7 minute drive to five major freeways. But where they live is South Central. The social stigma of the place draws people away, but in the back door there are people waiting to snatch the land.

Now, now dear one, L.A. is definitely not the only city that has experienced the ugliness of gentrification. There are cities like Harlem that you would not even recognize. About seven years ago I saw a Jewish couple walking a poodle at night on Lenox Avenue and 119th. Yes, gentrification is coming to a hood near you. And though it could be stopped, it will take a miracle to remove the crust of ignorance from millions.

Gentrification usually begins to occur around a section of the city where commercial and government wants to rebuild. Look for historical landmarks or buildings, usually around a mega university, a large water source, a lucrative business district, or a sports arena for football, baseball, or basketball. These areas have serious social and economic ills such as high crime and power. The property value is also ridiculously low so that investment firms will buy large numbers of plots and monopolize ownership. Once a significant portion is

So here is your gentrification roll call. These are not all the cities…please add (click on cities for links to gentrification articles)
Atlanta
Austin
Baltimore
Brooklyn
Camden
Charleston
Chicago
Cleveland
Dallas
Detroit
Harlem (NYC)
Houston
Jackson
Los Angeles
Miami
Montreal, Canada
New York City (Manhattan/Washington Heights & Lower East Side/Chinatown)
Newark
New Orleans
Oakland
Philadelphia
Portland
Richmond
Seattle
St. Louis
Trenton
Washington D.C.
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