The White Menace

There was an unusual column in the LA Times that noted the incredible homogeneity of the Latino communities in East LA County. The column was really about the residents of East Los and their commitment to the community, and the demographic info was sort of an awkward intro. But anyway, the columnist Hector Tobar stated

After crunching some census numbers with my Times colleague Doug Smith, I found out that East Los Angeles had become the most ethnically homogeneous place in Southern California. It seemed to be the tragic underside to the happier news we reported last week -- that Southern California suburbs were more racially integrated than ever before.

In the center of Southern California, the numbers showed an opposite reality, with a bigger slice of the metropolis a de facto segregated Latino barrio than in any time in history.

After studying Census Bureau surveys from 2005 to 2007, Doug and I concluded that about 1 million people live in Los Angeles County communities that are 90% or more Latino. And more than 800,000 of them are in one contiguous area that stretches from MacArthur Park to Pico Rivera and from the fringes of downtown's Garment District to South Gate.

East Los Angeles, it turns out, had become 98% Latino. The community lost a quarter of the tiny white population it had in 2000.

The little liberal in my head told me to be outraged. After all, the numbers seemed to me to confirm a central, underlying injustice of Los Angeles -- that the separation of ethnic groups lives on in our 21st century city.

Well, how much of this is self segregation? How much of this is linguistic segregation? How much of this was a lack of goods or services targeted to departing communities, and the indifference of the shops and stores of the majority community in serving the needs of the minority communities?

It didn't take long for a response like this one to pop up.

But this week I clicked a button to read the LA Times and got slapped in the face with some bullshit about how East LA being all Latino was so sad and as the title stated “tragic,” so I decided to look online and to talk to some white people who lived in Orange County.

“So is Newport Beach pretty white,” me.
A white person, “Hell yeah.”

I discovered that Newport Beach wasn’t as white as you could get, Newport Coast was as white as you could get.

Apparently in Newport Coast there are lots of Starbucks and lots of shopping opportunities and even more if you go to Newport Beach.

And I want to know are any papers going to do any stories on the tragedy of Newport Coast and Newport Beach and Malibu and Brentwood and all of the other places that owing to the fact that they have a lot of money can play this game and make their cities look a lot more nouveau multicultural than they truly are.

Pretty typical bullshit from Browne. She managed to find one tiny incredibly rich, beachfront corner of Orange County where some 2,000 people are 75% white, and that suddenly becomes some sort of moral victory or statistical equivalence. But she was never one for facts. "Fact-checking is for people who've never been a victim of the LAPD" she once said. By that criterion, I'm glad I don't have to ever to any fact checking myself.

She goes on to complain about gentrification: new money never has any respect for the communities in place. And yet the current occupiers of whatever community don't care or mourn those that came before: Tongva, Spaniards, Californianos, Gold Rush, Americanos, Japanese, ranchers, farmers, WWII immigrants, new Mexican immigrants. Every single group felt little or no guilt about the displaced and that their possesion of the land was their manifest destiny.

I always find it funny the amount of handwringing about the tiny corners of LA that have become slightly less immigrant or less Latino, like Echo Park or Silverlake or Downtown. That it is part of some great racist conspiracy to keep others down, when, in truth, there just are more white people than there used to be, and they can't all live in Newport Beach. Yes the newcomers don't have much respect for the community in place, but, the community in place doesn't usually have the will to market to the newcomers. Thus ethnic markets spring up. And for my community, our ethnic markets are Starbucks and the Gap.

Whatever. Either we believe in integration or we don't. I'll mourn your losses if you mourn the losses of those that came before you.